A-chu-ee-oooooh... A-chu-ee-oooooh...

NUMBER 4

Busting out the big ones now. Number 4 is the pop sensation of the year, get down and funky to... No.
Wait, don't, it's Sigur Ros.

I have a feeling, without checking, that most of my posts here have started x, y or z band are ace, or are the best band in the world or something. I guess I should hold back then, but Sigur Ros are certainly pretty darn fine. This is their fourth album, give or take the odd fancy-pants EP, and to be honest it's very Sigur Ros, for want of a better description. You know how bands that develop a particularly unique sound find it difficult to expand away from that? It's not neccessarily a bad thing, especially if there really is no-one else that sounds like them, but you do catch yourself thinking, despite yourself, that there's nothing really new that you're hearing.

So it is with Takk, the latest from the girly-voiced Icelanders. If you have Aegetis Byrjun or () then there's not neccessarily anything that'll startle you here. However, you've got another album from Sigur Ros, and this is a good thing. It's definitely a good thing, seeing as what you have here is a band like no other: one that conjures up the "fire and ice" of their homeland and distills it to a massively pretentious, yet still very much likeable post-rock; one that takes the traditions of rock'n'roll and translates them to another dimension, a completely different plane where the bowed guitar is not the gimmick but the norm, where the high-pitched singer is less Robert Plant, more an otherworldly choirboy singing in a made-up language, where a marching band wandering across stage is not considered odd.

Drama and scale are maybe as much band members as the bassist, or the drummer would be to a traditional band. If someone is needed to play the xylophone then someone will play the xylophone. If the song requires a 10-piece string section, then that 10-piece string section will be hauled on tour with the band. Live shows incorporate a progressively more impressive light and projection show, done with bombast yet subtlety, at times overwhelming you with almost strobing images, at others lulling you with gentle silhouettes.

Sigur Ros tend to be a band to polarise opinion. I've heard 'whale music' used of them before, to which I probably should've gone off on a tangent about the natural beauty of whalesong. I don't think I did. It' s probably for the best, I don't really know much about whalesong. Anyway, at risk of sounding like those elitists that everybody hated at school, it's fun when the majority of people look at you like you're some kind of freak when you tell them that you like a band from Iceland who sing in a made-up language, have ten minute songs as the norm, and are generally more pretentious than Radiohead had they signed to Warp. That said, Sigur Ros have seen a significant upsurge in popularity this year that will probably result in an even more overblown and Sigur Ros-esque album next time round.

As a wise man once said: back of the net!

Download my upload: Glosoli
http://s8.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=06OGZPREJ5RXF2QMI7CFDD3WRE

My apologies, it's in WMA as I'm at work and can't figure how to get Windows Media Player to rip to MP3.