With Regards The Setting Of Scenes Prior To The Reviewing Of Screaming Masterpiece

Says a friend of mine to the local pharmacist of an evening a couple years back; "Tell me this, now… Can you perchance supply to me this fine noontide a toxin might feasibly instill within these cells, bones, nerve-endings and such, a sensation akin to that which Mother Mary must've felt when her belly got to swelling with the vapors of The Lord?"

The fellow chewed the lips a time, clucked the tongue, and then; "I have exactly the article for that."

From inside the old suit-jacket he had on, itself emblazoned with any number of Sufjan Stevens pins and Daniel Johnston badges, he produced a compact disc upon which was scrawled, in blue marker, the words Sigur Rós - Reykjavik 2001.

"What's this" asks the punter. "OxyContin?"

"None o' that" quoth the merchant, "None of that at all. What it is, is the music of the glaciers, the sound of the Northern Lights glistening on the waters of Lake Langisjór, the symphonies of the Njarðvík night, the..."

"This is Icelandic music you're givin' me?" the lad interrupts, jerking the head back a touch, cocking an eyebrow. "The felchin' Christ do I want with this?"

"What don't you want with it?" rebuts the merchant. "Iceland, boyo. It's where it's at."

"Since when?"

"Since… like, fuckin', ever. The vocals like they're comin' at you from across the river of Hades, the samples, the beats, the…"

"Beats?" the punter scoffs. "I care less for them than a willy-john cares for the sheen o' the Marble Arch. Samples? I couldn't give a fisted arse I never hear another in all my days."

"Suit yourself, son" the seller shrugs, turning away. "But I tell you this; I put that on for no more than ten minutes and I swear on Noah's ankles it was a month afore I could see again."

The lad bites his bottom lip, his eyes all twitching with contemplation. "Alright" he says eventually. "Alright then, give me the damn disc, and let me see if it's all that, right enough."

He took the disc.

No one saw or heard tell of him until early last December, when he showed up on the banks of the River Bann, bruised of body and famished of stomach and bollock-naked save for a length of sea-otter hide he'd wrapped about his skull like a turban.

Now;

Whilst altogether right amusing and beguiling in its own right, this particular anecdote serves also to illustrate here and now the shift occurred in the world of the musicologically minded sometime around 2002, when ( ), the fourth record by the aforementioned Sigur Rós, got to capturing the imagination of anyone who'd ever spent half an hour on Pitchfork Media pretending to have heard Devendra Banhart years before they did.