Sigur Rós
( )

One day, while taking one of those usual tests you receive by email from friends, I found myself answering this question: "the album you would like played at your funeral." I had no hesitation and wrote "( )" by the Icelanders Sigur Ròs. The reasons for my choice? It is absolutely the most moving, emotional, pathos-rich, tear-filled, deep, dark, and luminous album I know.

The album, minimal from the booklet itself, sees the Icelanders performing a type of music with no boundaries or definitions: it is the description of vast icy spaces where ice and fire simultaneously reign (like Iceland), it is the description of a life slipping away and one being born, it is the beat of two hearts united forever living a single life for them long as an eternity, but in time only as long as a second. The album is composed of eight suites in which the leader and singer Jons uses his beautiful high-pitched voice as if it were an instrument, modulating it at will and articulating sounds that belong to no language, but which everyone can interpret as they wish by constructing their own text.
For these and other characteristics, it is perhaps the most melancholic, dark, and mysterious work our band has created so far. The tracks follow one another placidly, with "post-rock" structures that often culminate in a crescendo of emotions and pathos: even if this may seem monotonous, believe me, it is not at all. Of course, it is not everyday music, and especially not for every mood, and even those accustomed, like me, to listening to musical genres often (perhaps too sarcastically) defined as "suicidal and depressing," are inevitably touched deeply by the cold chants of the group. A more careful listening also reveals an emotional split within the album: tracks 1 - 2 - 3 could be seen as a journey from darkness to light (a life being born perhaps), while the remaining five might refer to an opposite journey (a life therefore dying).

It's hard to point out the most representative pieces: never as in this album does subjectivity (linked to the message that each track communicates to the listener) also restrict the overall judgment. "Untitled 1" is as sweet as a caress from a mother to her son lying still in bed with a high fever, it is the kiss between two people who love each other and promise themselves to one another forever; "Untitled 2" is a walk on a winter beach in the company of people you hadn't seen for a long time and to whom you are and will always be attached; "Untitled 3" is linked to black and white images depicting a childhood faded and lost in fact but forever in our minds; "Untitled 4", wonderfully reused in the final scenes of the movie "Vanilla Sky", is the plastic void unleashed the moment a soul departs from the body that hosted it, and makes its entrance into what are in many depictions the "Elysian fields", in others simply paradise, eternal peace and the sun always illuminating us; "Untitled 5" is perhaps inspired by the ocean depths, where every sound is muffled and stretched to the extreme, and where life as we know it probably has different meanings, or perhaps doesn't exist at all; "Untitled 6", a majestic and dreamlike requiem, the memory of someone who is no longer there except in our hearts, whose memory unleashes emotions so strong as to create an emotional tension that can be released only with a liberating cry; "Untitled 7" is the painful scream of a heart torn by pain, for a separation that can be physical or mental; the mighty "Untitled 8", the longest, with its explosive finale with dreamy and mysterious tribal rhythms, a maelstrom that engulfs us and overwhelms us leaving us ecstatic though with a broken heart and breath taken away.

More than an album, a life experience, a portal to unexplored inner places, a key to your deepest memories and most ancestral urges, these are Sigur Ròs of "( )".