Day 17, Sigur Ros - Takk

I thought it may be fun to implement a grading system to the blog. There will be three categories: Stars, which will be a number one through five; favorite track; and would I see them live, and if so, for how much. The last one will be fun and little more personal in that it will openly reflect my financial misery.

So let’s start it up here with Sigur Ros – Takk
Stars: 4
Best Track: Gong -> Gong Endir
See them live: 65$. I’ve actually heard that seeing this band live leads to spiritual enlightenment…which I dig.

I’ve owned Takk for years. A friend of mine in college gave it to me and demanded I get stoned and listen to it in the dark in bed—which I still have not done, to this day. I put it on in the background once and didn’t vibe on it, most likely due to circumstance, and then abandoned it with a promise to return. Throughout college, more conversations about music and god and peace and truth and passion and excitement and energies and sadness and rock and roll went down than I can even bare to remember, and somehow Sigur Ros found its way into enough of them that I felt like I was constantly reminded that I was due for a revisit. It never happened until today, though.

The album is a cinematic, dramatic, epic, triumphant piece of work that conquers you. If you are caught in the right mindset, it could swallow you up, but in the wrong one, it may just sound pretty, and quiet, and then suddenly big, but always pretty. I listened to it once while driving into the heart of East New York, Brooklyn and it didn’t sit right. I was all on edge from the drive and the fact that I was in one of the ugliest places in the nation, and I was actively ignoring it. But later, I listened to it on my headphones, exhausted after a long day, and it washed me clean. Since the lyrics are Icelandic, I had no idea what they were talking about, so I developed my own narrative, like you would with any good instrumental music. My narrative was about the battle you have to fight to find peacefulness.

Every moment is well tailored to a very specific sound. There are strings—real and synthetic—gobs of reverb, massive guitars when necessary, piano, etc. It is well shaped, to say the least, as no song outlays the rest of the album. It is one complete body of work, which is unusual these days. This entity will seep out of the speakers and tickle you with quiet, emotional noises, and then build to a steady rhythm and melody, and then finally explode like fireworks. They create this wave very naturally, too. There are no abrupt peaks—in fact you usually have to wait through a couple tracks to get one—and the valleys are slowly climbed down into.

But if you aren’t ready for it, Takk may be a little hard to take. It is much better balanced than, say, The National’s Boxer, but there are still some subdued moments that might turn off the over-eager beaver. There is a lot of empty space in between songs that leaves things sounding…well…empty. You may also find the male squeaky falsetto singer off-putting, like a eunuch with a nosebleed.

But Takk is not going to be one of those albums you really have to work at to love. There isn’t a lot up it’s sleeve. This isn’t to say that it is dry or uninteresting, though. Just think of listening to a Charlie Parker recording: it is infinitely complex, intricate and interesting, but you know what you’re getting into after the first listen.

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