This sort of nonsense might fly in Reykjavik, but it’s forgivable here only if the music is something special. Sigur Ros’s breakthrough CD, 1999’s “Agaetis Byrjun (Good Start),” could have withstood all the pretensions. The tracks on “Agaetis” took their sweet time, with Jon Thor Birgisson’s angelic vocals–a mixture of his native Icelandic and made-up sounds that he calls “Hopelandish”–often waiting several minutes to join a twinkling guitar-and-strings melody. The crescendos, when they finally arrived, felt like earthquakes. “Agaetis” landed on dozens of top-10 lists, and the band was hailed as the second coming of Radiohead.
The trouble with “The New Album,” whose overall tone is more spare and sorrowful than “Agaetis,” is that too many of the songs build and build and then… end. The band’s got gorgeous melodies to burn, but they wind up being much ado about not enough. The CD clocks in at 71 minutes, and long stretches of it bring the same exhilaration as a good, hard, soul-cleansing cry. The rest sounds more like the score to a sad movie than a proper album. Silly me, though, using words to make my point. Let’s put this in language Sigur Ros can understand. :-(
