Sigur Ros: Med sud I eyrum vid spilum endalaust : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Sigur Rós' fifth album is the Icelandic band's most worldly, varied and — considering the usual ice-floe speed of their rock — impetuous. Co-produced with Flood (Depeche Mode, U2), the record was made quickly — mostly in New York and London, with a trip to Havana for some vocals — and it opens with the closest this group will ever come to boogie-woogie: "Gobbledigook," a cheerful tumble of acoustic guitar and drum-circle percussion. The album also features singer-guitarist Jónsi Birgisson's first venture into English-language whisper and falsetto, the closing piano-and-brass suspense of "All Alright." But what happens between those two songs is the real leap forward. Having mastered a uniform majesty on 2002's ( ) and 2005's Takk . . . , the band achieves a new unity in variety here, winding from near-glam romp and fireside-folk warmth to slow-climb grandeur with an attention to the repeated payoff in a sturdy hook and hum-along chorus. Sigur Rós titled an early spook-rock epic "Popplagid" — Icelandic for "The Pop Song." Now they are actually writing them.