Boogying to Las Ketchup in our hip-scraping jeans and ironic trilbies back in 2002, we knew so little of what horrors were to come. Listening to Odin’s Raven Magic from Icelandic atmosphere-weavers Sigur Rós, you can’t help but feel they had some prior warning.
The new album is actually an old one, created in 2002, based on a 13th-century Norse poem and composed largely around a rugged stone marimba created by a sculptor on a farm just outside Reykjavík.
Full of portentous strings and deathly chants, it tells the story of a great banquet held by the Norse gods amid ominous signs that the world is ending.
It has become something of a holy grail for fans. The 70-minute score was performed just a few times after it was written and this recording, from Paris’s La Grande Halle de la Villette, has been due for release for the past 18 years. Fans have had to make do with snatches of the doomy soundscape on YouTube.
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As it happens, mid-pandemic, just as the days shrink to their shortest, is the ideal time for this album. Largely orchestral, with Steindór Andersen’s booming baritone, relief comes from the tinkling marimba, skeletal and jaunty amid the unsettling wash of noise.
Sigur Rós singer Jonsi’s distinctive voice enters the squall just twice, as things reach their narrative worst. Occasionally digital sounds glitch into the score, bringing you back to something more approaching the present than the ancient, chanting past.
There is something a bit Christmassy about the music, in the medieval, blood-on-the-snow, winter-solstice sense. To tell the tale of a world condemned by the actions of the 1 per cent while we battle climate change, civil rights violations and a deadly global virus is incredibly timely.
It offers a vague glimmer of hope but the overwhelming message is: things are bad. Not exactly cheery, but if its goal is to warn us of worse to come, then mission accomplished. A bit of notice would have been nice.
