Playing On The Road

I fell in love with Sigur Rós around the time of their third album (). I was totally caught up in the swell of mystery surrounding it - an unnamed album, full of unnamed songs, by a band from some strange country who play their guitars with cello bows. A few months later I found myself in Prato, Italy, sitting in an open air amphitheater watching my first Sigur Rós concert - to this day, that concert remains the most memorable, most affecting musical experience I've ever had. On the same trip I bought my copy of the band's breakthrough album Ágætis Byrjun, and listened to it through laptop speakers in my hotel room. To say I was 'into' this band would have been putting it lightly. When Takk... arrived in 2005 I was overseas again, this time going through a whole different set of emotions. Scotland hadn't turned out to be all that I had hoped, and the melancholy tones of Takk... echoed exactly what I was feeling. It clicked.

Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
Sigur Rós
XL, 2008
3.5 stars

And so, three years on, we come to Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (in English, With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly). The band told us to expect something "more understandable to the public" than past offerings, but nobody would have expected opening track Gobbledigook, a track best described as Sigur Rós impersonating Animal Collective (and well). Gobbledigook sets the bar high for the rest of the album, and the following track Inní mér syngur vitleysingur carries its pace through another poppy, percussion-driven number reminiscent of Takk...'s more uplifting moments. From then on, Með suð plays like a career retrospective, picking up on sounds and styles from the band's last three albums (Góðan daginn is an Ágætis Byrjun-ish slow-cooker, Straumnes is a ()-ish atmospheric instrumental and Með suð í eyrum sounds like a Takk... outtake) and adding the odd acoustic number, such as the lovely Illgresi. Overall it's a solid, if somewhat uneven album, let down by a couple of moments of self-indulgence - namely, the pointless first four-and-a-half minutes of Festival, and the over-the-top orchestration on the otherwise lack-lustre Ára bátur. The most interesting moments come in the album's first ten minutes, but from then on, unfortunately, it's a slow fade in momentum. Then again, I'm no longer travelling - who knows, were I living elsewhere, and in other circumstances, this album too may have hit a nerve.

Artwork: B
Nudie run! Fun.

Published in mX, Thursday July 3, 2008