Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm sorry. Did I rate it 1 star? I meant 5. Curious to see on what grounds something so directly and obviously beautiful as this CD could be disliked, I scanned all the negative reviews here to date. Aside from the one respectable negative reviewer--from Iceland--who simply and honestly declared that he "just doesn't get it," I noticed a rather amusing pattern. Intriguingly, there is the nearly universal employment of the word "pretentious" somewhere in the review. This is coupled with the nearly universal pretentiousness of the negative reviews (endless namedropping, amateurish "rock-reviewer" posing, and even some music "biz" kibbitzing, as if they were addressing a stockholder's meeting). The earliest negative review is the paradigm: Devon Reed manages to use the adjective "pretentious"--without irony--in a review that not only contains a quote from Pauline Kael, but attempts to coin the idiotic word "overwhelmingness." I can think of few more pretentious exercises than to dress up one's gut dislike for a work of art with bloated prose about "influences" and solemn pronouncements on the state of contemporary music. The verdict seems clear: if you are a pretentious--that's right, pretentious--would-be rock critic who has spent years cultivating a refined musical dyspepsia as a replacement for ears, and whose tastes serve as a pseudointellectual identity badge entitling you to whine about people who find beauty where you don't, then stay away from Sigur Ros. You know who you are, and you paradoxically risk a dangerous blood-pressure spike whenever you listen to anything deliberately tranquil. However, if you are just about any other stripe of human, there's a good chance you'll be pleasantly hypnotized by this simply beautiful CD.