Performer Notes
- "()" was nominated for the 2004 Grammy Awards for Best Alternative Music Album and for Best Recording Package.
- With critical darlings Sigur Ros releasing an album called ( ) that features eight untitled songs, this Icelandic outfit continues to go against the grain in a manner so esoteric that it's easy to imagine the band's oft-cited influence on Radiohead. Ironically, the vocals here depart from the previous albums' Robert Smith-like tones for a sound highly reminiscent of Radiohead's Thom Yorke. Perhaps SR is just returning the favor. In any case, most of these songs clocking in at over ten minutes, and the oddness quotient goes up considerably when you hear frontman Jonsi Birgisson singing in a fusion of Icelandic and a made-up language called Hopelandic. Infused with a melancholy mood wrapped around swirling, ambient keyboards and floating guitar chords, the dynamics become the bellwether of this musical exercise. With this kind of purposefully funereal pacing, listeners will either be praising this album as another example of Sigur Ros's innovation or attempting to rise from catnaps to declare that the emperor has no clothes.
Professional Reviews
Rolling Stone (11/14/02, p.86) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...Sigur Ros make atmospheric music with lyrics in garbled Icelandic, heavy on the strings and keyboards - beautiful..."
Spin (1/03, p.71) - Ranked #22 on Spin's list of 2002's "Albums of the Year"
Spin (12/01/02, p.140) - 8 out of 10 - "...There's something awe-inspiring about this band's single-minded pursuit of mellow drama..."
Entertainment Weekly (11/1/02, p.70) - "...The Icelandic quartet again create an ethereal stir with sparse, atmospheric melodies and a falsetto wail..." - Rating: B+
Q (12/02, p.112) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...They make soaring, mind-expanding music that's near impossible to resist....This is a masterpiece of bombed orchestral elegance, at once expansive and intense..."
Uncut (12/02, p.140) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...It weaves a gigantic, undulating backdrop onto which you can project what you will..."
Magnet (1/03, p.106) - "...Sigur Ros occupies a space somewhere between the free-soaring folk jazz of Tim Buckley, the aquatic ethereality of the Cocteau Twins and the oceanic post-rock of Mogwai....The instrumentation arrives in vast, dense, Radiohead-plays-Pink Floyd waves..."
CMJ (11/18/01, p.6) - "...A soothing, uplifting compilation of wonder, reflection and vicissitude and an extended glimpse beyond the mundane..."
Mojo (Publisher) (1/03, p.98) - "...The album rocks, its symphonic depth and stratosphere-surfing melodies more affecting with each subsequent listen..."
