Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1427 in Digital Music Album
• Released on: 2008-06-24
• Running time: 0 seconds

Customer Reviews

A lighter, exuberant and more dynamic set. I'm loving it
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.
To the horror of some of their adoring fans, the CD actually contains a few melodies which one might tentatively describe as pop tunes.
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.
Above all, these songs feel celebratory -- with a gleeful, stomping beat, soaring strings and deliciously rhyming couplets.
It is all pleasing to the ears and immaculately constructed.
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.
What Sigur Ros have lost in the ringing of fairy bells, they may just gain in the ringing of cash registers.
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".
I'm loving it.

Deliciously pop.
The fifth studio album from Iceland's supremely inventive dreamscapists is their poppiest outing to date.
A happy album from Sigur Rós sounds like an unlikely concept.
The band specialise in music that is about as sunny as an Arctic winter - vast tundras of sound, dark with melancholy and loneliness. So their fifth album comes as a surprise.
The brisk opener, "Gobbledigook", all jumped-up drums and manic vocals, sets the tone: its poppy energy crackles on through much of this collection.
But then along comes a song that changes everything. 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.
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.
No matter: for this one uplifting, goosebump-raising moment, it is worth buying the whole album.

A tad underdevloped
3 1/2

Starting off briskly, the majestic quartet's up-tempo pop dabblings seem to have not hindered the new album at all, which includes something for everyone. Though they revisit their trademark sonic buildups and offer humble acoustic contrast, a certain balance just does not seem to have been struck in the track sequencing, tapering off in the final stretch, and often sounding like a collection of quite good b-sides instead of their latest release.