Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 12/09/05
Label: EMI

In the world of rock journalism, many weapons are required, depending on the friend/foe thrashing around in your bucket/musical device. For example, the brash vocabulary demanded to describe the rush of seeing The Rakes tear-up Camden is vastly different to that when approaching - through a cloudburst, aboard a bright red hot air balloon, say - the new Sigur Ros album. Well, at least this time around we've been afforded the luxury of titles, after 2002's potentially confusing "()".

Back in the day, when Aphex Twin could tear your head clean off just by hitting a radiator with a spanner, Richard D James came up with the concept of representing songs with images. So it was that the beyond hell experience of listening to "Selected Ambient Works Vol II" was made slightly worse by staring at a tiny picture of some grass or the head on a pint of lager. On acid. "Takk" is, perhaps, the one album that truly deserves visual accompaniment, such is the apocalyptic thrill of this music and the tremendously pretentious language and ideas required to describe such lavish sonics. However, in the absence of such radical technology or any vague photoshop skills, we'll attempt to use words and avoid extravagant verbosity.

Three years ago, "()" went some way to banishing Sigur Ros to hell rather than heaven, their angelic dreamscapes blotted by moribund dead-ends and black skylines. However, "Takk" - "Thank You" in Icelandic - is flooded in retina-scorching white light and captures our enigmatic quartet in rapture to sound and their particular manipulation of it. The triple bass drum storm of first single "Glosilli", which sounds akin to God flushing his toilet, was the ideal awakening to "Takk". Preceded by the title track - Radiohead walking onstage in slow motion, soundtracked by Boards Of Canada - "Glosilli" is a shattering experience, collapsing in a fury of noise and fire at the close.

Two other tracks scrape such devastating highs. Emphatically drawn-out at nine minutes, "Se Lest" is like a vapour trail shooting across the sky from a flying glockenspiel, concluding with a marching band inadvertently trooping past the band's recording studio. "Saeglopur", meanwhile, starts-out like DJ Shadow, all menacing, sinister key tones, before Godspeed! You Black Emperor and Mogwai crash through the door, burn the place down in a torment of unhinged violence, leaving a deadening calm in the smoke-filled space.

Elsewhere, and throughout "Takk", there seems to be a cascading piano motif constantly looping around your brain like a subconscious dog whistle. At one moment, it might be enveloped in stately, grandiose strings, then wounded guitars, then rolling drum terrain, then Jon Thorr Birgisson's shrilling alien birdsong. Indeed, the album sweeps ceaselessly through ten interlocked passages like a seeping, gaseous whole. As such, it could reasonably be claimed that "Takk" lacks light, shade and space beyond this deafening, euphoric onslaught.

But wow, it is surely intoxicating. And if "Takk" were actually a painting or a photograph, you wouldn't believe your eyes.

    by Ben Gilbert