Music : Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust

Rating: - Joyous
I love this album. It stirs my soul, opening my Heart to the Joy that is infused in their music.

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Rating: - Sigur Ros just gained a new fan with this album
I was not a Sigur Ros fan before I heard their latest album. I've listened to a few of their previous stuff, but none really caught my eye. Until I heard Gobbledigook randomly on myspace, it just blew me away. I heard the clips of the rest of the songs on Amazon, and ordered it. Upon my first listen, I was completely floored. Listening to them was a completely new experience for me. Although I don't understand the words, their music brought tears to my eyes. They stirred something inside my soul and brought out all kinds of emotions. I am more likely to check out more of their previous releases because of this album.

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Rating: - 11 pieces connected together.
There is a great feel of exploration throughout this album... a sense of breaking free. Sigur Ros tries so many things on this album that its hard to assign it an identity. Unlike, say, "Takk..." which I always summed up as being like the first rays of the morning sun, or a sudden flash of light.

To say that this is Sigur Ros' "White Album" might be a stretch, but each song here does seem to have its own identity. They each have features that can't be spotted in any of the other tunes. Whether it is the acoustic "Illgressi" or the escalating "Ara batur" or the extremely quiet "All Alright", you're getting a bag of variably colored marbles here.

The downside of this is that this album takes a while to really digest. It's hard to swallow so many styles in one package at first. I've been hearing this album for about 5 days and I still haven't quite been able to piece everything together.

But what counts here is that every track on the CD is either good, really good, or excellent. My favorite track here is "Godan daginn", which is probably the closest that any of the songs come to being definitive as far as the album goes.

As Sigur Ros has explored when recording this album, I am also exploring their creation. I find something new that I like about it every time that I listen to it. And that goes for the rest of their albums as well, and it's one of the reasons that they are one of my favorite bands.

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Rating: - Row your boat gently
If Agaetis Byrjun were Summer, then () was Winter, Takk was autumn and "...við spilum endalaust" would have to be Spring. (Sorry, but Von doesn't really rate - to be honest, it was just artsy fartsy experimental jams with a couple of gems that still needed a lot of polishing packed in).
Sigur Ros do the Four Seasons, now there's a take. Whenever you get near to Sigur Ros words such as ethereal, aery, celestial, heavenly, glacial, epic and so on and forth tend to jump up around them like little happy, smiling offspring. Not that these adjectives are bad at describing their music, in fact they do so more than well but after eight years or more of it, well they had to go somewhere else really, it was more than inevitable.
What's been totally magical about Sigur Ros is that they've managed to create these unbelievably majestic pieces that just totally blow you away, but ever so gently, like drifting off on a wispy breeze (you know what I mean) out of well, just about nothing really. They have mostly been all about shimmering surfaces, echoes, delays & reverb; about weaving pure magic out of the musical equivalent of fairy floss, and they have done so in expert fashion, reducing many a hard soul to tears in the process. Take their signature tune for example, Svefn-g-englar. When you come right down to it, it's just 4 chords, 4 notes almost, stretched out over 10 minutes. Yet these 4 chords are arranged, instrumented and produced in such spectacular fashion that half the world held its breath it seemed as it drifted and spread around the globe back in 2000/2001.
The feeling here is though that you can only do ethereal, soaring and epic for so long before even that gets tiring, even if not for us the fans, then in any case for Sigur Ros themselves who have probably played Svefn-g-englar a thousand times by now and are probably sick to death of it.
So, having gently floated down to earth, "We Play Endlessly" is much more grounded, present, it's right in front of you and it bubbles and froths and is full of joy and happy things. For the first half. On the second half we do get two epics as the pop feel is toned down in a major way. Ara Batur (Row Boat)works brilliantly. It's everything that makes Sigur Ros one of the best bands in the whole world. Festival, I'm not so sure about. In my mind, for the first 5 minutes it meanders almost aimlessly and interminably, unsure of where to go. But then it suddenly explodes into something gorgeous and totally new for Sigur Ros. After Ara Batur the album seems to drift away into the quiet and stillness of the after Midnight Sun of endless Arctic late Spring and Summer days...I guess we're seeing evolution of direction here, not total re-incarnation, but it's almost like the guys said to themselves after Ara Batur, "Well that's it for us, let's get this over and done with, get back home and have a few beers."

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Rating: - stop reading reviews
i love sigur ros. to hear them sound so alive and fresh, it's pretty much awesome. this album evokes emotion just as well as the past albums, only it's a much different emotion, one of a content for life. for me the sounds of Ágætis Byrjun were the sounds of falling in love, as i was. ( ) was there with me for some of my worst years, not to sound predictable, but for me it was true. this music doesn't need critiquing. just enjoy it. to read some of you write about sigur ros selling out is hilarious. do you really expect to hear Gobbledigook on the radio?