New Sigur Rós!!!
There's a brand new Sigur Rós album coming our way in June, entitled Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust (in English, With a buzz in our ears we play endlessly). Apparently, the band just finished the album a month ago and they wanted to release it immediately.
As a teaser, you can now download the first single, "Gobbledigook," at their web site--and if you do that you HAVE to check out the video, which is a wonderful complement to the song (plus, lots of nudity!). [Oh, and the song might be playing on the widget in the post below.]
I've been a big fan of Sigur Rós for a very long time. Their music is ethereal, oblique, powerful, and [add more cool adjectives here]. I listen to them all the time--much to my wife's consternation (though she can't talk--she's obsessed with Depeche Mode). When I first heard the new single (earlier today, when it premiered on BBC Radio 1), I was amazed how different this song (and, ostensibly, the album) was from their previous music. Their earlier music is, to me, very elemental--kind of a soundtrack to their native Iceland and its geysers, glaciers, volcanoes, fjords, and empty, open spaces. I visited Iceland when I was 15 (spent two months there, as I noted in a previous post); that experience (over 20 years ago) permanently burned Iceland's beauty and emptiness into my thoughts and dreams. What shocked me most about the new single is how alive it feels--how human, warm, earthy, and even playful it is. These elements are evident on earlier songs (especially on Takk...), but there's a messiness here that is pretty new. That's messiness in a good way--in a Rolling Stones kind of way.
I'm still not entirely sure what I think about the new song--can't say it's the best thing of theirs I've ever heard. But it is new and is very different from anything else in popular music, so I am excited by this direction and look forward to hearing the whole album so I can put the song (and the emotions that came with it) into their proper context.
I encourage you to download the new song, check out the video, and let me know what you think.
