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So it finally arrives - for many (count me in - stand by for critical cliché
#1) one of the most eagerly awaited albums of the year - Sigur Rós'
fourth album, and their first since signing to EMI after the release of the
brackets album in 2002.
So - carefully set aside the artwork for future pondering, insert the pristine,
enigmatically-stamped disc, press play, and ...
Track 1: Takk... (Thanks) the curtains part - a two-minute long, shimmering,
shining shiver of expectation, sooo Sigur Rós, you're holding your
breath, it's a bit like Christmas, and here, now, at last, it begins ...
... ssshhh ...
... and, straight away, you feel something's slightly wrong ...
Not wrong wrong - not evil wrong - not as in Some Cities
or X&Y wrong - but just 'slightly' wrong, as if you'd asked for
champagne and got chilled frizzante.
And this feeling - it just won't go away.
Track 2: Glósóli (Glowsun) doesn't shift it, even though
this is an almost quintessential SR song - so SR it's almost self-parody -
the tinkly stuff, the clattery stuff, the e-bowed guitar stuff, that wonderful
angelic voice of Jónsi stuff (who's singing, this time, incidentally,
in his native Icelandic rather than in the made-up Hopelandic of the previous
albums, for all the difference that makes to non-Icelanders). What is it?
What's missing?
The following three tracks don't shift it, delightful as they are - a playful
regression into childish charm - beguiling, sweet, charming, fun. And those
strings, those rolling, super-reverberant piano riffs - good grief, we're
in the Christmas Spectacular scene from the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour!
Those dark, chthonic spaces of yore, whose worlds-end entrances Jónsi
always seemed to be guarding like some kind of shamanic gatekeeper have been
made over as Santa's Grotto! Complete with brass band and a passing oom-pa-pa
moment. It's all tremendous fun. Is that it? That it's all just a bit too
- well - happy?
Sæglópur (Lost At Sea) - track 6 - does, finally, shift
it, that nagging feeling, with a moment, after a typically lovely, intimate
intro, of the kind that awakens everything in you that only Sigur Rós
can touch, such a moment that everyone who can remember their first hearing
of Ágætis Byrjun will never forget - a devastating plunge
into a full-on ramming-speed bass-blistering happy armageddon of the senses
that has every available follicle between nape and coccyx flickering with
galvanised frenzy - and it is just - unbelievably - GLORIOUS!
Phew.
But that's about the sum of it, unless you're well into kitsch, in which case
Mílanó might ring your bell. (Why 'Mílanó'?
Why not 'Glásgów'? Or 'Quító'?) It's a showstopper,
that's for sure - 'Donatella's Lament', perhaps, from 'Death in Milan - The
Musical' - overblown, oversweet, overlong, and as gorgeous and bombastic as
a Bernini altarpiece.
Or Gong, with its perkily promising, rhythmically uncompromising beginning
that meanders into a sentimental swamp of schmalzy orchestrations and a precarious
vocal line from Jónsi that (I really never imagined I'd find myself
saying this) just gets irritating.
And finally, sandwiched between the similar-sounding Andvari (Zephyr)
and the album's closer, Heysátan (Haystack) (a pair of introverted,
thoughtful little hymns to nature that seem to have wandered in from another
album entirely) Svo Hljótt (So Quietly) again demonstrates the
classic SR bell-curve of an intimately quiet opening building over time into
an almost overwhelming inverted Gullfoss of sound before returning to a quiet
conclusion, and, like the opener, Glósóli, packs all
the familiar armoury of emotional resonance. But there's something missing
...
The burden of expectation, of course, was virtually impossible to support.
When your sophomore album turns out, in retrospect, to have been one of the
masterpieces of its generation, where do you go from there? The brackets album,
although it got lost in parts in the darkness of its own design, was essentially
a coda to Ágætis Byrjun - forged in the same furnace,
and to be considered as a piece with that album's greater golden hoard. Since
then, aside from doing a great deal of touring, the band's creative energy
has been focussed, individually and collectively, on a number (as many as
thirteen, depending on what you count) of very different projects, from the
collaborations with the composer Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson - the Odin's Raven
Magic project, among others - and the choreographer Merce Cunningham - resulting
in the wonderful EP Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do - to 2004's outstandingly fruitful
collaboration with The Album Leaf on his album, In A Safe Place, and
Jónsi's strange participation in The Hafler Trio's Exactly As I
Say, also in 2004. These projects - all collaborations - were all, clearly,
fully-realised creative entities, not time-filling side-projects, and it may
be that their realisation left the creative reservoir available for the material
for a new album less than full. Who knows?
Certainly, it feels as though Takk emerges from a group who, despite
having long since arrived at the zenith of their capability, has, at least
for the time being, run out of things to say. The result is the inescapable
feeling that they're going through the motions of engaging the emotional switches
in such-and-such a sequence because that's how it used to work, which is a
bit complacent and just a little bit sad, because it reminds us of how well
it did. And, on the way, there are even one or two mistakes - like morphing
the delightful Amina - their faithful backing quartet of the last four years
- into Mantovani's Shimmering Strings at more than one point (once might have
been ironic).
So what's missing?
I think, by now, you'll have probably guessed the answer to that.
So it goes.
At this point, as is often the case in such matters, we have a choice - either
to engage with the gravy-train fan-hype and linger in the rainy, tear-disguising
shadows in hope of some self-delusional crumbs of PR comfort, or to bite our
lip, accept that all that is solid melts into air, and, with nary a glance
behind, say the only thing there's left to say to the guys who provided such
an unforgettable contribution to the recent soundtrack of our lives:
Takk.
September 2005
