Just as I was beginning to write this, something startled me of old age (if 23 counts as ‘old age’) from a tweet from someone I follow.
Did you know it’ll be seventeen years next month that Radiohead released OK Computer? That was what scared me slightly. But did you know it’ll be Kid A‘s fifteenth anniversary in October next year? And what about Discovery? Did you know Daft Punk‘s sophomore album turned 13 last month?
So – with the exception of OK Computer – what do Kid A and Discovery have in common? In general, nothing. Well, except the fact that both Radiohead and Daft Punk were repped at the time by EMI-owned labels (Daft Punk with Virgin, Radiohead with Parlophone).
Personally speaking, they’re two of my favourite albums ever out of a list of three. The third just so happens to celebrate its fifth anniversary in July. I’ve been banging on a little bit (and by ‘little bit’, I mean big time) to anyone who would listen about Sigur Rós frontman Jonsi and partner Alex Sommers’ Riceboy Sleeps for a little over four years now.
I’ve previously written about how I fell in love with ‘Stokkseyri‘ as my favourite song ever. How I have associated that song with being in Cologne, Germany and losing my passport there (or just crying on trains). But the album’s opener, ‘Happiness‘, also kind of has an association with Cologne for me. It kind of springs to mind the following year wandering around the main foyer of the city’s convention center a day or two before a show I was attending for work began when it came up on my music on my iPhone doing a quick message before the madness that ensued. It was the quiet before the storm yet. And ‘Happiness‘, heavily reliant on a kind of orchestral feel, seemed suited for that quiet moment.
I have a varied music taste, but even I didn’t think I would envision one of my top three favourite albums ever being a non-vocal, heavily instrumental, ambient LP. But yet, that’s exactly what happened. As stupidly hyperbolic as this sounds (and i apologise as such), Riceboy Sleeps is what music is probably like if we died and was playing whilst we made our way to the pearly gates (in fact, I’m pretty sure when I die, I want to go out to ‘Stokkseyri‘). That is driven home two-thirds into the album with ‘Stokkseyri‘, ‘Boy 1904‘ (which uses the last known recording of a castrato singer) and ‘All The Big Trees‘.
I have an ulterior motive for writing this. Five years on from its release, I don’t think the album has gotten the attention it properly deserves, even if one half of the duo just so happens to be the frontman for Sigur Rós that you’d think it’d would have gotten it by now. And from a personal standpoint, I want to highlight it more. If one person, just one person, comes away from this article, listens to the album and comes away from it as wowed as I was, it’d be worth it.
As I end writing this, news broke overnight that has more or less made my year to the extent that if there weren’t two people sleeping in the room next to me, I would have literally screamed with utter delight: new Jonsi & Alex material is on the way, albeit not with a new album (yet). The pair are working on the score for new TV show Manhattan, but even then, that’s good enough for me until we get a proper followup to Riceboy Sleeps.
Here’s my advice to you for today: put on Riceboy Sleeps. I’ve even embedded it below for you from Spotify to save you looking for it. i promise you, it’ll be worth an hour of your time. At the risk of sounding like a really broken record one more time, it really is one of my favourite albums ever and it deserves a lot more attention. So give it a chance. I promise you, you won’t regret it or your money back.
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