Sigur Rós - Takk..
Release Sept. 13, 2005
on Geffen Records
Listening to the latest album from Iceland’s enigmatic Sigur Rós can be like drowning in the same sounds that ultimately save your life. Perhaps then it is fitting that the group’s recording studio is a converted swimming pool.
As the songs build, break and fall perfectly into place, the music is at once accessible and experimental, simple and complex, sinking and floating. From the depression of a piano key to an explosion of orchestrated sound, it all comes together and flows gracefully.
The band’s ethereal sound is perhaps best characterized by the bowed guitar and otherworldly falsetto of front-man Jónsi Birgisson, though this record seems to emphasize the cascading piano more than before. Some may find the band’s songs formulaic by now. Others remain intrigued. I’m with the latter.
This album is sung mostly in Icelandic instead of the made-up language of Hopelandic that marked the band’s previous work, but Takk.. ironically sounds like the band’s warmest and most hopeful record yet.
In a brief article that preceded the new album’s release, Birgisson describes some of his lyrics:
There’s one called ‘Glosoli’, and [the central character] wakes up and everything is dark outside and he can’t see any light. He thinks that the sun is gone and somebody has taken it from the sky, so he makes a journey to look for the sun. He finds it in the end.