Review Summary: Attantion please
In their years of peak activity, Sigur Ros' music seemed to nurture a state of perpetual germination, teeming with life and childlike wonder at every turn: frontman Jónsi's falsetto was something akin to the sight of a chick emerging wide-eyed from its egg, and each and every one of their umpteen saccharine flourishes smacked of innocence conserved rather than lost. Anyone who dwelled on when they might finally
grow up had magnificently missed the point - and yet, their long-awaited comeback
Átta sees them emerge from a difficult set of years as an unmistakably 'mature' band.
This says as much for the record's comparatively austere approach as for its context: Sigur Ros' prospects were immediately dented when drummer Orri Páll Dýrason (the driving force behind 2013's excellent
Kveikur) left the band following sexual assault allegations in 2018. He remains unreplaced. Reduced to a duo based in two separate countries, Jónsi and bassist Georg Hólm were further waylaid by charges of tax evasion that same year, owing to an error on the part of their former accountant. Though they repaid a shortfall of over £800,000 with interest, a further set of charges were brought in 2019, and it took Jónsi until March this year to refute these in court. The enterprise he and Hólm ran in the meantime was more a business in control of the Sigur Ros back catalogue than anything you'd call an active band. A rough time in and of itself, but also perhaps an overdue burnout - we used to hail the clattering mystique of 2013's
Kveikur as a fresh breath of inspiration, but in retrospect it's just as easy to see it as a violent reaction against the strain of a prolific career well into its second decade. The band's wide-eyed enchantment has maintained such trenchant popularity precisely because of its un-worldliness, but there seems to have been a natural limit to how much it could weather.
In this sense, we are perhaps lucky to have
Átta at all. The impetus for the record seems to have come from a spontaneous creative reunion between Jónsi and keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, who left the band in the period between
Valtari and
Kveikur. Jónsi remarked in interviews on the effortlessness of playing with an old friend, and the album's first joy is the seamlessness with which it revives the band's trademarks - from the moment the opener "Glóð" enters with a swell of keyboards and reversed cuts of that inimitable voice, you could never mistake this sound for anyone else. This in itself arguably qualifies
Atta as a successful comeback.
Its relation to the rest of the Sigur Ros discography warrants a more delicate unpacking: it's tempting to spotlight the since-departed Dýrason as the key player on
Kveikur and Sveinsson as that of
Valtari, and mark
Atta as a return to the drippy shimmer of the latter; its tendency towards wistful ambience and away from euphoric climaxes certainly supports this on the most superficial level. Listen closer, however, and you'll find a great distance between the two: while
Valtari was a more patient exploration of the same Peter Pan springland the band had steeped themselves in since
Takk…,
Atta is an altogether more spartan affair. Its arrangements are more economical, its motifs shy to linger past the moment of their delivery, its focus squarely on the front-and-centre rather than peripheral shimmer, its strings sleek and streamlined where once they seemed to stretch their embrace around entire worlds. Its scope is far less an amplification of the Sigur Ros tropes many still hold dear than a dignified
this is what we have left.
All this quickly becomes apparent on "Blóðberg", which makes its way with neither tension-and-release nor
Valtari-esque sentimental saturation: it's a fragile number that articulates more with the space between its notes than with any individual swelling of strings. While no less swoonable than the band's standard fare, this track eschews their typical optimism and fleshes out a decidedly autumnal panorama - it softly asks its listener to
wait, yet never reveals what for. Its magic as such lies in neither instant nor even delayed gratification, but in the intrigue of open-ended questions. The following track "Skel" provides a response of sorts to this in Jónsi's midway vocal ascension, perhaps the most openly climactic point of the album, but this rings out with the solemn force of a eulogy and sidesteps the climactic giddiness of Sigur Ros past. Even the album's most immediate cut - certainly its most maximalist! - "Klettur" doesn't build so much as it pulses, courtesy of a gigantic bassline from Hólm (who is hardly to be heard elsewhere). This is a record that clings to individual moments rather than concertedly building itself out of them, and its most concrete show of pathos seems to lament its own transience.
As such,
Átta is at its best and most cogent when it draws itself together in a show of quiet fortitude, as on the stirring closer "8", but it falters somewhat when its expanse reaches the scale where one might attempt to chart it as something album-sized. The run from "Mór" to "Fall" (i.e. the majority of the backend) is so consistent in its approach, so reluctant to support Jónsi's performance with anything beyond the ebb-and-flow of the string section that its subtleties become first familiar, then interchangeable, and eventually shapeless; these tracks' beauty demands an almost devotional focus that I suspect all but the band's most ardent fans will struggle to sustain.
Átta has enough going for it to warrant an inspection from the rest of us, but it's both fairer and far more flattering to view it as the conclusion to a troubled chapter in the band's history than the enthusiastic heir to any hefty expectations you might otherwise burden it with.
