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Rating:
Take the entire Sigur Ros discography produced so far and throw it in the trash: the gentle melodies, the ancestral choruses, and the dreamlike atmospheres! Now recall those rare times (in some moments of Von and ()) when a certain "anxiety" was hinted at and compare them to this EP... they seem like children's songs.
"Brennisteinn" is the negation of all Sigur Ros canons.
"Brennisteinn" is raw, dark, searing art, comparable to a blow to the teeth; emerging from who knows what nightmare and translated into music to instill fear and desolation. All in a mix of electronics, looping noises, and denaturalized orchestral accompaniments. It seems like the soundtrack of a weird film, damn it!
The three songs are each more unnatural than the last. Starting with the title track "Brennisteinn", the only one with a "proper" accompaniment; Jonsi's singing is as far from reality as possible, surreal, icy, and nihilistic; Orri's drumming is relentless, sudden, and in the background rises a colossal, solemn motif. The second "Hryggjarsu´la" is undoubtedly one of the most brutal in the Sigur Ros repertoire, a dark ambient piece that could impress even Lustmord; terrifying in its supreme calm. The last one, "Ofbirta", seems to be the only one in its idleness to illuminate the listener; a skein destined never to unravel, inevitably closing trapped in its own meanders in a slowed down, infinite loop.
With this new pre-Kveikur EP, Sigur Ros don't care about their well-deserved success, they want to prove that they are not resting on their laurels like many have done and will do, but instead, they are in continuous search and evolution, in a relentless exploration of their vast sound, reaching and granting us glimpses of the most inaccessible extremes.
The evaluations are subjective, even more so in the case of Sigur Ros, but I cannot restrain my admiration for them, for what they have done, for what they propose, for what they are.
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