Jonsi & Alex – “Riceboy Sleeps” 2XLP – XL Records [Album As Art #85]

“Stokkseyri,” by Riceboy Sleeps (eventually renamed Jonsi & Alex)MP3/download

To paraphrase Rick James: Vinyl is a helluva drug.

Over the last 2 or 3 months I’ve made many-a purchase to satisfy my never-ending wax addiction, and, to be honest, few have hit home in any significant way. It’s like I’m an addict looking for that one HOT smack-hit that just isn’t there, one that, maybe, exists only in my dreams (?).

I finally realized that I did, indeed, hit the BIG-time at least once in that span, by dint of Jonsi & Alex‘s (“Jonsi” is Jon from Sigur Ros, “Alex” is Alex Somers, from, well, very little, and is reportedly, to put it crudely as possible, “banging” Jonsi) Riceboy Sleeps album (gatefold 2XLP), a twisting, turning, spiral staircase made of clouds that is going to make me gush like an active volcano and render me misty as a just-dumped tweenager.

Riceboy Sleeps is soooooo lovely though; I wish I could teach its majestic pleasure to kids part-time; hell, full-time. I can’t emphasize enough how empowering it is to have music this subtly, yet achingly, beautiful in my life. All I have to do is spin the brick-thick vinyl around, and the magic happens …

A few memories pop up at random:

• There was this dream I had constantly — or maybe I had it just once, but it was so vivid it repainted the walls of my brain — wherein a Japanese couple were scaling the outside walls of an apartment building I was living in with my parents (in the dream only), using a futuristic machine that, I’m pretty sure, employed suction cups to suspend its bubble-domed cab. I got a very sad, deeply sad, vibe from the couple as they moved from room to room, asking folks if they had seen the couple’s newly born baby anywhere. They finally came to our room and asked us with their calm, sad faces so filled with worry I can’t shake the fictional couple from my mind. Riceboy Sleeps, particularly Side C, evokes that dream because of, as a given, its dream-like qualities — it glides on soft waves of drone, like dust in the desert — but also because of its highly palpable emotional depth. Jon Thor Birgisson (“Jonsi”), performing with Sigur Ros, was the type of singer who could make onlookers weep — quite literally, I’m afraid — and now he seems to have harnessed that powerful emotional connection to his art in a whole new realm (with help from Alex, of course). I’m not sure I’ve heard ambient drone audio with this music emotional edge to it, ever. I’ll have to think about that though; don’t quote me on that just yet …
• The time-honored classic Agaetis Byrjun comes to mind, simply because it’s the only Sigur Ros album that reaches the heights of Riceboy (I would grant that ( ) is right up there too though, maybe not scraping the floor-clouds of heaven quite so effortlessly.).
• Hearing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir constantly filling my childhood home with admittedly pretty choir fodder; there are some ghostly vocal groups loop-de-looping all over this thing …
• Mogwai have always floated in the Sigur Ros axis, but the Riceboy Sleeps project is a much stronger correlation between the two groups; the gentle moments of Rock Action are smeared a bit here, to fluttering effect.

Don’t take this record for granted, even with another Birgisson solo-ish joint lurking on the record racks. Get this one first, as, from what I can gather, it’s tough to find; if it isn’t tough to find, then Find it before it becomes so.