Jónsi - Shiver

October 2, 2020 - Krunk

Jón Þór Birgisson is an artist who needs a lot of space. Having built a prolific and visible career out of an experimental praxis, he’s something of an enigma to me, an oxymoron here in the American audience, which favors digestibility, marketability, franchisability in its musical iconography. When I saw Jónsi in concert almost a decade ago, everyone in the audience was wearing feathers and glitter (except me who was 19, new to the phrase “avante-garde” outside of a classical music education, and severely underdressed). When Jónsi collaborates with a fine artist to release an EP of whalesong, we don’t really know how to respond to it. It’s not something you can sing along to on your car radio. And the Hopelandic gibberish language of Sigur Rós is not something anyone can make a fashion line out of, though the band’s beautiful work has been featured in film scores before. Like other Icelandic musicians, Jónsi remains on the fringe but in the spotlight in the US, lifted up by the advocates for the arts, the NPR loyalists, the artists-for-art’s-sake, and held up further by popular culture’s fascination with Iceland as a mysteriously wondrous destination for Instagram travel bloggers, some sort of escapist dream vision of Faerie we look to from the corporate dystopia of social media. 

Shiver is only his second solo studio album, released what feels like a gargantuan ten years after his first solo album Go. Much has changed in our world since then. I’ve gone through six boyfriends, and Jónsi has broken up with his longtime partner and collaborator Alex Sommers. Shiver was produced by electronica prolifica maverick A.G. Cook, and it features Robyn and Elizabeth Fraser from the Cocteau Twins as well as contributions from Mary Lattimore and Juliana Barwick. These are all people I follow and admire, and reading the album’s credits felt like a recipe for a great body of work. 

On first listen, though, I didn’t like what I heard. To be fair, I was a bit preoccupied with some detailed photo editing at the time. But there is a lot going on in this album. It has a grating, manic energy, and the track composition sits just on the edge of unravelling beyond recognition. A collection of experimental electro-pop ballads and anthems, the songs are supported by rigid industrial rebar instead of a more flexible elastic pink bubblegum. Jónsi and Cook have crafted a light musical mode using heavy sound and instrumentation, resulting in a flying machine that’s struggling to lift off the runway. What I love about Jónsi’s voice and songwriting is how ethereally he floats above the swells beneath him, and on Shiver it feels like his voice is bound to the terrestrial plane by a giant rubber band. 

After sitting with it a bit longer, giving the music the undivided attention it deserved, I softened a little and started to unpack what was going on. What follows are the conclusions I came to.

Working with A.G. Cook was a bit of a risk for Jónsi, and I don’t think it paid off this time. While I admire the work of both artists separately, together their stylistic approaches on this album felt at odds with each other, like a tug-of-war game. I had trouble settling into the sound. Cook’s production is thick and loud, the instruments are jarring, sharp edges, and Jónsi’s voice is soft and distant or heavily distorted. The melodies he sings are still the beautiful, simple platitudes we’re accustomed to, but they are thrown into an industrial wasteland that’s a great space for an underground dance club but not for sincerity or self reflection. Two strong presences, two prolific artists, put themselves in an enclosed space together, and the result is more of a parasitic relationship than a mutualistic one.

My opinion about the first track ‘Exhale’ remains constant with my review of it earlier this year when it was released as a single. It’s a swelling meditation that tells me what I want to hear, a mantra designed to save my ego from the Horrific Real.

The album’s namesake ‘Shiver’ is faceted as though Jónsi is a broken crystal glass someone’s trying to ring around the rim. The song’s syntax is very loose, and sounds get played once then put down never to be heard again, like a child in a room filled with instruments. The elements are just too far apart to come together, and Jónsi’s voice is cut up too much to trust it. Like a dream you wake up from knowing what you learned there was brilliant, all you can remember are polluted echoes of greatness.

I like the simplicity of the track ‘Cannibal.’ Minor and major keys create just enough contrast to clearly see the detail, and the instrumentation is pared down so we can maintain that detailed vision. Elizabeth Fraser’s voice is kind of like a Jiminy Cricket to Jónsi as he explores a dark emotional space, an acting other there in conversation with him while he gnaws away at his love for someone, eating it for sustenance. 

‘Wildeye’ feels like a song you’d hear from inside of a car engine—energetic, angry, tumultuous, but the elements never really seem to align properly for me to buy into the anguish. It’s mood reminds me of Moses Sumney’s ‘Virile,’ but it’s thinner and lacking the expansive breadth of Sumney’s emotional landscape. 

‘Sumarið sem aldrei kom’ is a beautifully tragic hymn and my favorite track on the album because, like ‘Cannibal,’ it’s simplicity works. Jónsi’s voice is front and center and (almost) the track’s only instrument. There is still plenty of darkness in the woods of this song, which seems to be the concept of Shiver, to show a darker nature to the optimism of Go-era Jónsi. 

‘Kórall’ feels very cute and organic, like an AI’s original story about a year in the life of bugs who live in a music box and spontaneously break out into dance sometimes and eventually get eaten by a pod of singing whales. ‘Salt Licorice’ is a pop anthem featuring Robyn, with lyrics that seem to rip up Scandinavian stereotypes as an expression of unrequited emotion, but it’s blown-out blasting bass and abrasive glitchy techno textures are too distracting for me to really enjoy the glittering pop carousel ride. 

‘Hold’ is a bubbly waiting room for ‘Swill,’ which is perhaps the one example of loud noises successfully supporting a track on this album. It’s a fatalistic pop-rock anthem, but without a rock band and with production priorities that over-exaggerate the style enough to elevate it above Top-40 engineering. It’s definitely too abrasive for mainstream radio, but it’s cohesive enough to be a highlight on this album. 

The album ends with two songs that feel designed to wind down the energy. ‘Grenade’ is like a Broadway ballad that’s been cut up and pieced back together again, with it’s high drama and trite, theatrical wartime symbolism. ‘Beautiful Boy’ is the final whisper, haunting like a ghost singing in an abandoned hallway. An ending track, soft and forgettable. 

All in all, Shiver is not my favorite of Jónsi’s. It feels unfocused and like it was kicked around too much by its intentions. This new machine he is building is not designed to fly on the wings of our emotions like much of his previous work. He’s programmed it simply to move from grief to health as efficiently as possible while still leaving behind a sonic boom and a candid residue. Maybe this strange energy is exactly what that machine is supposed to outgas. Listeners find themselves trapped in a giant hourglass full of scrap metal shards, shrapnel flying around them like a windstorm, with Jónsi’s beautiful voice lost in the turbulence. It’s a dark place where you can’t help but know painfully how time is passing and how angry that can make you. This is something Jónsi seems to speak to openly in ‘Swill’ when he sings, “I’m getting older, life hits me against the wall … as I drown, you will own my soul and everything that comes along with that,” while the megalomaniac metallic scraping sounds carry the chorus to home base. ☔