Sigur Rós - ÁTTA (2023)

 

Ambient / Chamber Music / Post-Rock

RIYL: sleepyhead, Julianna Barwick, The Album Leaf

★★★★

I needed an appropriate soundtrack for a new graphic novel I had just received in the mail (Lemon Yellow by Ciara Quilty-Harper) so I put on Sigur Rós' most recent comeback album, ÁTTA, expecting it to fade into the background as it did the first few times I listened. The foregrounded comic, a series of tranquil and almost ambient vignettes about people sharing different emotional responses to colors, took much less time to read than the album’s 57-minute runtime, but instead of reaching for another I sat and let the lingering images of quiet interiors, cloudy skies, and brilliant sunsets, all tenderly hand-drawn, bring into focus a new perspective on the sounds I was hearing.

One of the sequences in the comic deals with a person whose partner won't go out for a walk during a storm because the dark grays made him feel blue, but when the sky clears the roles reverse and the narrator becomes the one who wants to stay indoors because the pale azure of the absent clouds made them feel empty. This got me thinking about the sonic landscape of ÁTTA that was currently enveloping my living room (and Sigur Rós' lofty aesthetic in general) not just because they share a post-rock sense of dynamism with thunder and lightning but because their music constantly teeters on the fine line between euphoria and melancholy and, like the vivid hues refracted in the atmosphere above us, can fall to either side depending on who's listening.

Especially on ÁTTA, their mostly percussion-free and amorphous compositions for orchestral strings, piano, and angelic vocals are built swirling around emptiness. For those of us who aren't fortunate enough to speak Icelandic, we have very few concrete details to discern what these shapeless songs are about, so we have to feel them resonate within us instead. At certain times the swelling crescendos make me feel inspired and hopeful; at others the aching beauty of Jonsí's ethereal voice pierces me mournful and elegiac.

Even revisiting the same exact climaxes in these recordings can leave me with vastly different emotional takeaways depending on the setting or my mood going in, and I think that nuance is what makes Sigur Rós' music so compelling. This time around, with an intent inspired by the varying perspectives presented in Lemon Yellow, I noticed so many more details in the beautifully delicate ÁTTA. Paying close attention to not just the sound but also the chemical response it incited within me upon receiving its frequencies, I was able to feel the monumental weight of every careful note.