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The band specialise in music that is about as sunny as an Arctic winter - vast tundras of sound, dark with melancholy and loneliness. But then along comes a song that changes everything.
It is so ambitious and successful a piece of music that it threatens to overwhelm the surrounding tracks, making what came before seem frivolous and what follows, almost inconsequential. From innocuous beginnings - Jónsi Birgisson's fragile voice, a lone piano - "Ára Bátur" swells into an epic, swallowing a whole choir and the London Sinfonietta.
The fifth studio album from Iceland's supremely inventive dreamscapists is their poppiest outing to date. The brisk opener, "Gobbledigook", all jumped-up drums and manic vocals, sets the tone: its poppy energy crackles on through much of this collection.
No matter: for this one uplifting, goosebump-raising moment, it is worth buying the whole album. A happy album from Sigur Rós sounds like an unlikely concept.
So their fifth album comes as a surprise.
Sigur Ros continues to be amazing. This new, more acoustic, style is fresh and uplifting. Really a great CD.
what the hell. it is also a little too soft for my taste. amazon.com kept putting this band in my recommended section, so i bought it. i need to have an idea what the heck they are saying, without having to learn some obscure new language. i mean, the band has some neat arrangements, obviously they have talent, but the foreign language and too soft tone makes it hard for me to say i really love it. then i wondered if i was going insane or whether the dude's english was just really bad. he was speaking icelandic.
Possibly, if Sigur Ros had intended to take over the world, they might have translated their album title into its English version: "With a buzz in our ears we play endlessly". What Sigur Ros have lost in the ringing of fairy bells, they may just gain in the ringing of cash registers. Produced by the renowned Flood (U2, Depeche Mode, Smashing Pumpkins) and assisted by a string quartet and brass section, the album was recorded in its entirety this year: impressive speed, reflected in the joyous, unfettered arrangements and the sheer plasticity of the music.
To the horror of some of their adoring fans, the CD actually contains a few melodies which one might tentatively describe as pop tunes. Above all, these songs feel celebratory -- with a gleeful, stomping beat, soaring strings and deliciously rhyming couplets. Their fifth album starts in buoyant, wide-eyed pop mode, moves through some twinkling, delicate passages, revisits their usual slow-build post-rock prettiness and reaches an ambitious climax with "Ara Batur", an epic, orchestral requiem recorded with the London Sinfonietta and the London Oratory Boy's Choir, before ebbing away.
It is all pleasing to the ears and immaculately constructed. I'm loving it. More a development than a departure, the album blends a lighter, more dynamic approach with out-there creative impulses.
The songs are sung in Icelandic, rather than the band's invented language of Hopelandic, and one song, "All Alright", is even performed in English, albeit via the singer Jonsi's gossamer falsetto.
Good Day. They sang in English.And if the tune "Góðan daginn" is about spanking then it really is silly. If i spoke Iclandic this may sound better, but since I don't it just sounds silly. They really sound like The Samples, remember The Samples, they made all their good music in the early 90s.
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