Devoid of liner notes, the booklet comprises ghostly blank pages, encouraging fans to fill the whitewashed contents with their own lyrics and interpretations. This exercise shows firsthand how trivial and distracting these labels are, when the focus should be on the elegantly arranged, cinematic songs, and the experience of listening to them.
Its funereal pace and bleak yet beautiful tone conveys that sense of fatal permanence. Her interpretation in the song's music video features school children donning eerie gas masks so that they can frolic in a blood-red landscape savaged by nuclear fallout. The whole scene framed by polluted snow, ashen trees, and poisoned air.
Despite being stripped of decipherable words, it communicates a bounty of feelings; lyrics without meaning, but not purpose, nuance, or emotion. The beauty of their concept is that there are no wrong answers, only what we feel and fill it up with. The first six minutes are in an ascending, exultant major-key. The final six, a cataclysmic minor key as apocalyptic as the front-end is sublime, with volcanic squalls of guitar, distressing wails, and tectonic plate-shifting rhythms.
In a state of fevered sleep, I once had a vivid dream soundtracked by this song, of a planet-sized meteor slouching its way to Earth. As people of every colour, creed and nation gathered to face their fiery oblivion, they saw the oncoming comet, too, was populated. In expressing what words cannot. How the right melody or arrangement can enunciate sensations too ephemeral for English or Icelandic or any language to render.
Thursday 6 June pm. Share Facebook Twitter Mail Whatsapp. In the case of this band, ignorance can make for musical bliss. Audio Player failed to load. Play Space to play or pause, M to mute, left and right arrows to seek, up and down arrows for volume.
Image: Katherine Brickman. Fri 12 Nov Thu 11 Nov I can only assume that, since you've taken the time to visit Guardian. I became a musician because music was source of pure joy when I was growing up, and the first thing I turned to when I felt misunderstood and lonely. Does this mean that, to the majority of people, music is just not that important? It's true that music has to compete with many other forms of entertainment, more than ever before.
Still, figures released this week by the Entertainment Retailers Association show that the recession has hit music less than other forms of entertainment retail. Volume-wise ie, in units , music sales including music DVDs went down by 0. But music sales statistics don't necessarily say how much music matters to people — the value is also in how we listen.
In Piers Morgan's recent interview with Simon Cowell, the music mogul admitted he would never sit down and just listen to an album, giving it his undivided attention. He just couldn't see the attraction in it. He obviously would not follow the instructions on Gil Scott-Heron's latest album turn off your mobile phone, don't listen on a portable player or in the car, get rid of all distractions and listen all the way through.
In a recent Panorama special on the Digital Economy Bill, the parents of teenagers who downloaded music illegally shrugged their shoulders, saying: "Well, it's just music, isn't it. In the last few years, many "experts" have been saying that the music industry note, by that I don't mean just the record industry should make up the loss of revenue from recorded music by making money from merchandising, branding and synchs advertising, games etc.
Music manager Chris Morrison , who's involved with Music Matters, disagrees. The Music Matters initiative is trying to highlight that music has a value in itself. Why do you want to have it if it doesn't hold any value to you? Some believe that because music is much more available than ever before, like water from a tap, it has become disposable. Many people who have tens of thousands of tracks on their hard drives barely listen to a fraction of them.
When I was growing up I'd save money to buy an album. That gave music value in itself, and I'd listen to the same record for months, years even.
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