Sigur Ros - ()

"()" 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.