Med sud i eyrum vid spilum endalaust

In the near-decade since their 1999 breakthrough Ágætis Byrjun, Iceland's Sigur Rós have made pathos their playground. For them, "little" is scarcely an option: Instead, they've built a career out of conjuring God-sized renderings of sorrow, fragility, and teary joy, rarely on a scale anything less than epic. They've done this instinctively and automatically, sometimes to the detriment of their compositions, leaving the impression that the songs are secondary vessels for spectacle. In the sense that they're less concerned with intellectual honesty than they are with the overall visceral impact of the thing they're creating, Sigur Rós are the Michael Bays of melodrama.

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