The epic, eerie music of Sigur Ros carries the listener to strange and fathomless places.
Chris Martin – that odd man living inside your radio – insisted on playing their last album while wife Gwyneth Paltrow gave birth to the couple’s first child. The actress Gillian Anderson (the film star who doesn’t want to be famous) uses the record as a yoga soundtrack.
Declaring himself sick of the singer-songwriter tag, David Gray has taken to name-checking the Icelandic four piece. To underline his devotion, Gray put a picture of an iceberg – possibly an Icelandic one – on the front of his new record.
These are precisely the sort of overly-earnest endorsements nowadays synonmyous with a band that has released one LP bereft of song titles and whose lead singer has a penchant for warbling into his guitar pick-up in a made-up language.
By such standards, Takk, their major label debut, comes across almost as conventional. There are proper songs! With names, and lyrics – conveyed in Icelandic yet recognizably of this universe. Have Sigur Ros gone normal on us?
Set alongside their last long player – the one without a name – Takk is certainly an approachable proposition. Restored are the sweet melodies and nursery rhyme choruses of their breakout record, 2001’s Agaetis Byrjun.
At the same time, however, it is more extreme and brutalized than their earlier work. Takk finds Sigur Ros indulging their fondness of volume, plying screaming power-chords and sweeping drifts of feedback.
As the riffs crash and wail, a protean swell of noise, the music reaches past your conscious-self and touches something deeper.
Like far-off galaxies and snow-flakes, Takk is beautiful yet utterly inscrutable. Stop asking questions. Just let Sigur Ros carry you away.