Review Summary: And he asked himself; Does something epic really need to happen?
So imagine you and your boyfriend wake up and find yourselves in a house with two rooms; one room is filled with everything you could possibly imagine including old children's pianos, frosty, noisy landscape environments, a sink running with water, an orchestra, instruments, whatever. And in the next room, you have hi-tech recording equipment. You could choose any item from the first room and bring it into the second room and manipulate it and record it. This is pretty much, in a nutshell, what happened to Jonsi and Alex.
Riceboy Sleeps is yet another ambient album, that seems to build upon Brian Eno's ambient works(think Music for Airports). While it certainly doesn't retain the same reaction I personally got from the keywork and tape loops of Ambient 1, it builds upon the minimalist textures with brilliant soundscapery. The melody in each song is usually just in one droning key. While that may sound frustratingly boring, it actually works out. What makes the record so alive and so sonic, is that you have sounds and textures floating at you from every angle, which often makes you forget the lack of real melody or structure in the songs. Each track features a layer of sounds, including sustained synth chords, nature-filled sounds, static or cracking noises bouncing off each other, from headphone to headphone. Many tracks such as Danell In The Sea and Boy 1904 feature the distant singing of choirs, that are often soaked in reverb and drowned in an array of liquidy sounds.
While the emotive strings on Happiness may sound promising to Sigur Ros and post-rock fans alike, people who were hoping for the big-bang conclusions found in Mogwai or Godspeed You! Black Emperor albums will not be satisfied. You know that awesome part in Untitled 1, where Jonsi gets more high-pitched than you thought he could and everything gets all tense and big? There are, for the most part, no moments like that featured on Riceboy Sleeps, although Jonsi does sing at the beautiful conclusion of Indian Summer. But once one gets past that sort of mind state, you realize that this is actually quite a beautiful record that can manage to recreate the same feel created by the epic movements of post-rock, into a sparse, unstructured ambient record.
Riceboy Sleeps is better in some environments than others. While I could listen to Kid A at any time, walking, biking, sleeping, talking, this album seems to be more fitting when you're more sprawled out and in a relaxed, lazy sort of mood. Like any good ambient record, it has the effect of washing around you and you sort of get cool, environmental images in your head, and this certainly hasn't been hindered by the field recordings present on this album. When listening to Sleeping Giant, the melodic, repetitious drones are put into context by the ever-changing static noises and sounds being twisted by Jonsi and Alex. When you're in that trance that ambient music is so good at placing upon listeners, each sound and texture is relevant.
So while Riceboy Sleeps can get a bit boring at times and certainly isn't an album to be listened to in its entirety(or atleast without falling sleep), it further extends the genius and the musical prowess of these two Icelandic lovers.
