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Sigur Rós - Takk... CD (album) cover

TAKK...

Sigur Rós

 

Post Rock/Math rock

3.89 | 353 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

Neu!mann
Prog Reviewer
4 stars Anybody wanting a beginner's guide to the music of Sigur Rós will likely find this 2005 album the perfect introduction to their unique and haunting sound. It plays like a reaffirmation of the band's career to date, combining the subtle strengths of "Ágćtis Byrjun" (my own initiation into the Sigur Rós soundworld) with the deeper melancholy of their anonymous "( )" album, one moment as delicate as an early morning spider's web, and minutes later loud enough to trigger an avalanche.

Put another way: this is music resting comfortably astride that fine line dividing chamber orchestra intimacy and over-amped electronic mayhem. A typical Sigur Rós song gradually moves from nursery rhyme stillness to noisy, cathartic apotheosis, with falsetto Icelandic voices raised in eerie sing-song harmony mantras under a sheer wall of symphonic strings and droning, fuzzed-out guitars. Even with the expected language/cultural barrier there's enough naked emotion here to bring tears of epiphany to your eyes.

And an atypical Sigur Rós song can be just about anything. Bend an ear toward the track "Gong", a Number One hit single in my own private pop-radio charts.

In short, it's a work of rare maturity, from the understated simplicity of the cover art to the autumnal beauty of the music itself. Is it Prog Rock? Maybe not in any traditional sense, but when did truly progressive music ever stick to tradition?

The way I add it up, 50% neo-classical austerity plus 50% Post-Rock power equals a 100% superlative musical experience, very much deserving a privileged spot in the library of any forward thinking Prog Rock aficionado.

Neu!mann | 4/5 |

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