258. Song No. 3,893: “Gobbledigook,” Sigur Rós
Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, 2008

(The Safe Search settings I unknowingly had on went absolutely ballistic over the threat this album cover presents to my delicate eyes.)

There are some songs I need to listen to a few times while writing about them or read about a little more to better pin down exactly what I want to say here; there are songs where I just sit down and start typing and then suddenly have a post by the time I come up for air.

Say hi to a lovely example of the latter, the opening track to and one of my favorite songs from my absolute favorite Sigur Rós album. (And that’s really the central thesis here: I love this song and I love the album it introduces. I don’t even care that either are wholly unintelligible to me without the intervention of Google Translate because they both just sound so good that they transcend the need for a common language—which I find hilariously apt from both an album originally intended for English lyrical accompaniment and a band that has its own proprietary tongue, Hopelandic, which they have collectively described as “a form of gibberish vocals that fits to the music,” signifying a band unafraid to use vocalized placeholders as stand-ins for universal human emotions that…. well, transcend the need for a common language.)

This Icelandic outfit was my gateway drug to both post-rock and Nordic bands, and they’ll always have a special place in my heart for that alone. It took a while to get there, for sure, but Með suð í eyrum… was what clinched it, and also had the always-delightful benefit of retroactively imbuing the catalog preceding it with the appeal it always deserved but needed to be nurtured for just a little while longer.

Falling for this band through this album was the beginning of a musical sea change for me and a revelation (post-rock, I fucking love you). Most of all, though, it taught me how loving an album that speaks to you musically while being thoroughly impenetrable lyrically is a whole new, sublimely satisfying listening experience that everyone deserves to give themselves over to. It’s fun as hell, sure, but the riches on the other side (of which discovering a whole new genre to love is merely one) are the kind of overkill that absolutely double as immersive self-care.

A great first track is the warm welcome befitting a great album, and “Gobbledigook” is another stellar example of how to do it right. It introduces so much of what this album feels like, which is a lot of variations on the exuberance of holistic freedom and the peace that comes with knowing what it looks like to find your happiness. This is an irresistibly ethereal and charmingly buoyant tune that announces itself simply on the merit of its appeal alone, like it knows it’s got something worth paying attention to and doesn’t have to sell itself too hard to find the audience that’ll love it. And when even Pitchfork can’t find a snarky thing to say about a song, you know it came here ready to charm the pants off anyone blessed enough to hear it.