Product Description

The Fourth Album from the Icelandic Art Rock Group was Written, Performed and Produced by the Band (Along with Co-producer Ken Thomas) at their Studio in Alafoss, Iceland. This Album Justifies Every Amazing Claim Ever Laid at this Exceptional Band's Door. Huge and Intimate, Orchestral and Gossamer-light, Rich Layered and Essentially Simple, It's the Work of a Band Operating at the Very Top of their Game. "Takk" is an Instant Classic and Might Well Turn Out to Be Sigur Ros's Masterpiece.

Track Listing

1. Takk...
2. Glosoli
3. Hoppipolla
4. Meo Blodnasir
5. Se Lest
6. Saeglopur
7. Milano
8. Gong
9. Andvari
10. Svo Hljott
11. Heysatan

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #156 in Music
• Released on: 2005-09-12
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Many a critical evaluation of Icelandic quartet Sigur Ros has resorted to stock imagery of molten magma, omnipotent ice fields and burbling hot springs--and reasonably so. There's no disavowing the geophysical heartbeat which invigorates the very soul of this most supernatural of bands. Takk may well be Sigur Ros's most stimulating interpretation of their habitat yet--verdant serenity to pregnant anticipation to brutal paroxysms of volcanic thunder via icicle-like celestes, howling electrical winds of curving guitar feedback and hymns seemingly sung by castrato pixies.

Strange and overwhelmingly beautiful. Some may think of Sigur Ros as a permafrosted Pink Floyd (circa Zabriskie Point) and while it's facile to say as much it's an honour certainly worthy of them. There's a seamless, symphonic poetry to Takk where the exultant "Gong", the euphoric choristry of "Hoppipolla" (like the Beach boys turned into snowmen) and the National Geographic panoramas of "Glososli" blend with intuitive homogeneity. You'll wish you were here. --Kevin Maidment

Customer Reviews

A word of warning
I bought this on the strength of customer reviews which made it sound like the kind of music I might like.
Wrong. I find the music turgid and monotonous. It is difficult to determine where one track finshes and the next one begins. The strangled warble which passes for vocals is very irritating.
It may work as backing music on TV but is does not stand up on its own.
Don't be taken in by the Sigor Ros appreciation society (whose entire membership seem to have offered a review here),try before you buy!

Sigur Ros - a layman's view
Sigur Ros are fast becoming a Popular Experimental Band That I Don't Like, a moniker I have only knowingly bestowed before on Spiritualised. On paper, Sigur Ros are a band that I should love, but it just doesn't really engage me. For all the cliches attached to music from Iceland ("molten magma, omnipotent ice fields and burbling hot springs" to borrow from the Amazon review) Takk doesn't sound like a band who want to distance themselves from this kind of lazy journalistic shorthand. Similar to their countrymen Mum, Sigur Ros make a music rooted in a visual language rooted very much in their country, which is not in itself the problem. The problem is that Takk sounds like a band working for the Icelandic tourist board - all glossy grandeur, enormous landscapes and sudden cutesy cooing and childhood whimsy. Those are the two themes, and they are repeated over and over ad nauseum.

Takk, tellingly Sigur Ros' first for a major label, plays to the stereotype of Iceland as some kind of fairytale wonderland full of playful, innocent but inadvertently sexy people, but is evocative of nothing else. Rather, Takk sounds like a band doing a parody of themselves, adopting a sonic grammar that is so blatantly them to be entirely predictable. Sure there are some impressive moments of sonic abandon, but in a post-post-rock era (if I can coin a phrase) where the likes of Godspeed, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, Do Make Say Think etc. etc. have not left us wanting for crushing walls of feedback, Takk sounds a little too pretty, too contrived and too safe to move me. Furthermore, the `quiet bits' as I shall call them - a default mode of squeeling babytalk and glockenspiel - are irritatingly repetitive and uninspiring. Even Mum, who trade in similar atmospheres, have more than two gears, and succeed in provide more varied textures and instrumental passages.

The best moments owe themselves to other bands and are quite easily to live without. `Gong' for instance features a refreshingly ominous bass and discordant strings but borrows heavily from Radiohead's `Where I End and You Begin'. The singer's tendency to overdo the falsetto sometimes sounds frustratingly like a band striving to reach a sublimity that they haven't earnt through the power of the music. In other words, Sigur Ros never know when enough is enough, and new peaks appear when the intensity of the music has already outstayed its welcome. Likewise, the glacial prog of `Saeglopur' features some lovely, stately piano chords, but swells into an identikit guitar maelstrom that could be labelled the `loud bit'. I'm not certainly not averse to this kind of music, but Takk is really the commercial, superficial end of it, and massively overrated.

Takk...
This album is absolutely amazing and i find it hard to believe that a thing of such beauty can actually be recorded onto a disc.