Sigur Rós -- Valtari

8/10

The first half of Valtari may be the best thing Sigur Rós have ever done. It's a thick river of emotion, wave after wave, an inescapable mass of feelings, happiness, sadness, rage, fear, joy, grief, death, rebirth, all in choral currents, lava flows of bass, drum thumps and wave-crashing cymbals, wiry strings, bursts of electric chimes and twinkles and light, rolling over the listener like a moss-cushioned glacier. Then the currents slack, and the grade of the riverbed increases, and the flow thickens to unremarkable mud. The band picked up a bad habit on their previous album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust: start off strong, then rip the backbone out of what you are doing and float out the end on a limp, still, unexceptional sea of melancholy, with your rhythm section sitting miles down the beach. Rolling Stone described a major portion of the latter half of this album as, "a layered, gorgeous nothing, lush with nuanced drift and harmonic sweetness," which is a really nice way of saying something makes for pleasant, unobtrusive background music. What a shame, as this could have possibly been their best album. It's clear from Valtari's rocky, drawn-out development that the band had trouble figuring out what they wanted to do musically, and rather tellingly, keyboardist, Kjartan Sveinsson, left immediately after it was completed. If only the creative restlessness apparent on that first half had continued to the second...maybe  Sveinsson could have found a reason to stay. As it is, it seems that the band have run out of creative juice--in the six years since this was released, they've only put out one more album, with no other long plays on the horizon. Still, with a first half that is so incredibly strong, and a back half that is, at worst inoffensive, it's hard not to hold Valtari in some regard.


2012 XL Recordings
1. Ég anda 6:15
2. Ekki múkk 7:45
3. Varúð 6:37
4. Rembihnútur 5:05
5. Dauðalogn 6:37
6. Varðeldur 6:08
7. Valtari 8:19
8. Fjögur píanó 7:50