Sigur Rós: ( )

The Icelandic band Sigur Rós has made many creatively audacious decisions since forming in the mid-'90s, while its members were still in high school: singing in a sort of pidgin Icelandic, using androgynous voices as if they were instruments, incorporating lengthy stretches of silence into its songs, releasing the sublime 10-minute "Svefn-G-Englar" as a single, and so on. Then there's Sigur Rós' domestic major-label debut, the essentially untitled ( ), which bears no song titles, liner notes, or words even remotely discernible beyond recurring variations on what sounds like "you say." On the surface less accessible than Sigur Rós' masterful 2000 breakthrough Ágaetis Byrjun, which earned the group rave reviews and the unofficial title of The Next Radiohead, ( ) meanders and creeps through eight tracks in a whopping 72 minutes, oozing portent between moments of thrilling, cathartic release. On paper, the disc begs for backlash—it courts many adjectives, and "unpretentious" isn't one of them—but it actually transcends its predecessor in its unsettling, under-the-skin beauty. Unlike Von, Sigur Rós' so-so import-only debut, the new record uses its sonic sprawl for the benefit of freestanding songs with their own separate structural underpinning, each periodically recalling the work of Low or former (and extremely well-matched) tourmate Godspeed You Black Emperor! The latter surfaces as an obvious reference point for the glorious final track, which builds from seething repetition to whomping bombast with assurance and awesome power. It's a fitting conclusion to a free-floating chunk of music that revels in being exhausting, unsettling, ingratiating, and awe-inspiring in one grand, elegant gesture.