Post Rock/Experimental charts

Review: It's either the most timely re-issue of 2020 or the most inappropriate. Cast your mind back to when everyone's (or at least most people's) favourite Icelandic woodland sprite power-chill-pop oddities released Takk... Back in 2005 it was a symphony of celebratory, life-affirming walls of sound, the ideal score to an Attenborough documentary. Now it feels a little a painfully poignant and emotionally charged sonic memory of a lost world. Fear not, though, like this album, the good days will return again.

In the meantime kick back and remind yourself how good this record is. Not quite on a par with the preceding LP, ( ), which took this unique troupe from obscurity to global stardom by way of soft yet subtly gargantuan harmonious arrangements, here the songwriting and craft is more traditional, and certainly better suited to platforms like radio. Nevertheless, the tracks are no less beguiling, bewitching or intoxicating.

Review: The year is 1999 and while the sounds of Ibiza lounge house and blistering trance dominate much of the radio waves, elsewhere in Europe something very special is taking form. At this point in time, Sigur Ros had only put out one album, Vonn, in 1997, and followers who joined more recently, when the Icelandic oddities broke into major TV advertising campaigns and movie scores, but haven't looked back at their origins, might be surprised at what that one sounded like. Altogether darker, much more cacophonous.


Aegis Byrjun would follow the groundbreaking but largely unsung debut (Vonn only sold 300 copies in their own country) with a groundbreaking moment that set a precedent for everything they have done since. This is where big brands like Nissan pricked up ears, mesmerised by a sound that's at once alien, yet also deeply human, huge but intimate, classical yet contemporary, and fundamentally focused on triggering emotions.