Rather than douse the celluloid with a wild amount of analysis or critique or sociology or what have you, however, Magnússon, a noted painter outside of his film work, approaches his subject in much the same fashion as a 15th century artist might have gone about crafting a fresco mural depicting maybe the destruction of Gomorrah, or the life of King David. He incorporates most everyone anyone might deem half-ways relevant, and works hard on establishing a mood (one of self-sustaining community and artistic freedom and cultural isolation), but Screaming Masterpiece serves better as a gorgeous-looking (and sounding) primer to further examination than as an exhaustive, comprehensive stand-alone investigation.

It's more concerned with evoking the feel of the music, the feel of the country, than going into anything in any real depth.

That said, it does at least attempt to answer, to varying degrees of success, a handful of core questions the lay-folk might well have rattling about the skulls soon as anyone might mention that Iceland is near to bowing with the weight of the musical gorgeousity erupting from therein.

It wants to tell us Who The Hell These People Are.

It wants to let us hear What The Hell These People Sound Like.

It wants to at least suggest a couple reasons for Why The Hell Those Sounds Sound As They Do.

For to settle the first concern, being Who The Hell These Folk Are, Anyroad, Screaming Masterpiece gathers about its jodhpurs a pleasingly diverse bunch of artistes and ensembles and assorted scenesters, some of whom share Sigur Rós' fondness for the ethereal, cerulean soundscapes, others who prefer to grasp at the coat-tails of less obviously "Icelandic" inspirations, be they Public Enemy or Nirvana or Sham 69 or whoever.

With regards What The Hell They Might Sound Like, the answer is that they sound like you would expect a bunch of folks who share nowt but a postcode in common to sound like; fairly different from each other.

The likes of Slowblow and Bang Gang, for example, sound like the waves lipping and lapping at the beaches, their semi-orchestral music by turns tranquil and tumultuous, raging and serene, whilst Ghostigital, by way of contrast, bring to mind some sort of amalgamation of The Fall and Atari Teenage Riot, all sneering yelps and stuttering, speed-fried rhythms. The Apparat Organ Quartet, meanwhile, busy themselves with fashioning pump-organ electronica, as crazed a melding as testicles and thistles, or religion and politics, and yet oh so very gorgeous to the hearing-holes. Then there are folks like acoustic nomad Mugison, a fella who rehearses his folk-pop ditties in an old church somewhere in Súdavik, an area on the west coast of the country all but abandoned since an avalanche in 1995.

Hearing this music, one almost gets to mouthing a further question, being Why The Hell Are The Icelandic All So Amazing When It Comes To The Tunes And What Have You, but it soon becomes apparent that, actually, they're not. Just in case you might doubt such a pronouncement, Screaming Masterpiece offers us footage of several fairly fucking diabolical traditional rock band types for to shatter any illusion you might have had about how a man probably can't play a damn chord in any of those 23 counties without giving rise to some hitherto unimaginable symphony of ineffable wonderment.