Singur Ros () (Fat Cat)
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Sigur Ros’ previous album, Agaetis Byrjun, was voted as the best Icelandic album of last century. It topped many magazine writers’ polls in its year of release, and went on to win numerous awards.
To say that their new album, enigmatically non-titled ( ), is much anticipated is to grossly underestimate the huge impact and importance that Sigur Ros possess, despite their comparative youth as a band. When we move eagerly to track 1 (all 8 songs are untitled), and the warmth of the organ ushers in a dream-like, ethereal vocal, we feel for the first time that Sigur Ros are back. Those simple melodies, hushed and mutedly eschewed in a non-language somewhere between Icelandic and the language of dreams (a meaningless dialect named “Hopelandic” by vocalist Jonsi), floating as they do above a textured accompaniment of chiming guitars, tender strings, and elegiac pianos and keyboards. ( ) is an album split into the two halves formed by the eponymous parenthesis. The first half almost feels like a post-script to Agaetis Byrjun: the songs are quiet, sweeping, tender and moving, and provide an easy transition; from the soft keyboards of track 1, to the restrained guitar and strings of track 2 and the sombre and haunting piano of track 3. Track 4, which marks the close of the first half of the album, is a new version of a composition formerly known as The Nothing Song, which was recently heard at the end of the film Vanilla Sky. This is clearly the album’s highpoint, and marks perhaps the best song that Sigur Ros have ever written, as the quietly insistent vocal melody rises on a bed of gentle xylophone and high-pitched vocal samples. For the uninitiated, Radiohead at their most charmingly and innocently melodic provide a (very) loose reference point.
The second half of the album, meanwhile, harks back to a slightly rawer and less polished Sigur Ros with longer tracks that build into tumultuous passages of visceral crescendo, akin to bands such as Godspeed You Black Emperor!, or Explosions In The Sky. ( ) is evocative of Icelandic composer Hilmar Orn Hilmarsson’s assertion that “(Iceland) never really made the transition to the modern world”, forged as it seemingly is on those non-linear thoughts snatched in the half breath between waking and sleeping, between the old world, this world and the next. In all, it must perhaps be said that ( ) is slightly less well rounded, and seemingly less inspired than Agaetis Byrjun - particularly the latter half - perhaps due to the fact that the band have been playing these songs live for the best part of 3 years now; yet it is at the same time as perfect a follow-up, and as great an album as could have been wished for; If Agaetis Byrjun was full of the beauty of innocence, then ( ) feels like the aesthetic of the more faltering happiness that comes of age.
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