Sigur Rós
Átta

Eighth studio album for Sigur Rós, a full ten years after their last work. The Icelandic band that has best set their homeland to music reunites with their keyboardist after a period of absence (but loses the drummer) and returns in a guise faithful to their path but quite different. We were accustomed to a sound often building up, basically slow but capable of increasing in intensity and noise, marked by obsessive guitar and drum sounds. Set your mind at ease, all this does not manifest here, "Átta" is the triumph of minimalism. But this shouldn't worry us too much, especially if one is predisposed to a mental journey. The music continues to be an absolutely evocative and picturesque representation of sound passages, but everything is slowed down and stripped bare. It is the slowest and most deliberately sparse album in Sigur Rós's catalog, "Átta" makes its stripped-down sound a point of strength, enchanting and scaring with just a few elements; it is not exactly a novelty, the album "Valtari" was already very slow, but here it is exaggerated in every sense, "Átta" is just a "Valtari" taken to extreme consequences, if you liked that one you shouldn't have any trouble familiarizing with this.

No drums (just some very timid percussion), no evident guitar sounds, very delicate and arrhythmic music. The orchestra sets the rules but there's nothing classically symphonic; leading the listener throughout the entire duration is just one large orchestral carpet, which can also become more intense but remains a carpet. In practice, I am saying that "Átta" is not a post-rock album but rather an album of atypical ambient music.

Yet it is enough to satisfy the ears, to charm, to let us travel, it is the demonstration that when you are really good at playing with a few elements, you can do great things, not everyone is quite capable of it.

I am left with a bit of regret for the lack of continuation of the discourse begun with "Kveikur"; I am sorry that that unusual industrial-noise remained an isolated parentheses, but I greatly appreciated the courage to return after a long decade and put themselves to the test once again while still managing to preserve their trademark.