Customer Reviews
A must album - By: Mr. Td Honisett, 30 Sep 2008 
How can you discribe the music of Sigur Ros - pure magic. Music where the emotion is in the song, not necessarily the lyrics. An album you cannot descibe but simply have to listen to it to realise its beauty. I already heard the songs hoppipolla & saeglópur before I have recently brought the album takk, & I was amazed at the quality of the album, not just those two tracks.
Hauntingly beautiful Icelandic music - By: Martin Belcher, 08 Sep 2008 
It was not my original intention to buy this album as I was searching the internet to find out where I could buy a copy of that wonderful piece of music used on the Planet Earth series on BBC One.
Having discovered that the theme is callled Hoppipolla by an Icelandic male group callled Sigur Ros, I looked them up on Amazon & found their album Takk after reading much of the positive feedback I purchased a copy.
Well I'm absolutely amazed at the original sound from this group, the music is very different & I find it easier to listen with headphones & you then get the full beauty of the sound. Obviously you get the full version of Hoppipolla which never fails to move me to tears. But the rest of the album is outstanding & definitely makes you think of icelandic volcanoes & amazing frozen scenery. A simply wonderful album.
A word of warning - By: Martin Barraclough, 25 Jun 2008 
I bought this on the strength of customer reviews which made it sound like the kind of music I might like.
Wrong. I find the music turgid & monotonous. It is difficult to determine where one track finshes & the next one begins. The strangled warble which passes for vocals is very irritating.
It may work as backing music on TV but is does not stand up on its own.
Don't be taken in by the Sigor Ros appreciation society (whose entire membership seem to have offered a review here),try before you buy!
Sigur Ros - a layman's view - By: Demob Happy, 24 Jun 2008 
Sigur Ros are fast becoming a Popular Experimental Band That I Don't Like, a moniker I have only knowingly bestowed before on Spiritualised. On paper, Sigur Ros are a band that I should love, but it just doesn't reallly engage me. For alll the cliches attached to music from Iceland ("molten magma, omnipotent ice fields & burbling hot springs" to borrow from the Amazon review) Takk doesn't sound like a band who want to distance themselves from this kind of lazy journalistic shorthand. Similar to their countrymen Mum, Sigur Ros make a music rooted in a visual language rooted very much in their country, which is not in itself the problem. The problem is that Takk sounds like a band working for the Icelandic tourist board - alll glossy grandeur, enormous landscapes & sudden cutesy cooing & childhood whimsy. Those are the two themes, & they are repeated over & over ad nauseum.
Takk, tellingly Sigur Ros' first for a major label, plays to the stereotype of Iceland as some kind of fairytale wonderland full of playful, innocent but inadvertently sexy people, but is evocative of nothing else. Rather, Takk sounds like a band doing a parody of themselves, adopting a sonic grammar that is so blatantly them to be entirely predictable. Sure there are some impressive moments of sonic abandon, but in a post-post-rock era (if I can coin a phrase) where the likes of Godspeed, Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, Do Make Say Think etc. etc. have not left us wanting for crushing wallls of feedback, Takk sounds a little too pretty, too contrived & too safe to move me. Furthermore, the `quiet bits' as I shalll calll them - a default mode of squeeling babytalk & glockenspiel - are irritatingly repetitive & uninspiring. Even Mum, who trade in similar atmospheres, have more than two gears, & succeed in provide more varied textures & instrumental passages.
The best moments owe themselves to other bands & are quite easily to live without. `Gong' for instance features a refreshingly ominous bass & discordant strings but borrows heavily from Radiohead's `Where I End & You Begin'. The singer's tendency to overdo the falsetto sometimes sounds frustratingly like a band striving to reach a sublimity that they haven't earnt through the power of the music. In other words, Sigur Ros never know when enough is enough, & new peaks appear when the intensity of the music has already outstayed its welcome. Likewise, the glacial prog of `Saeglopur' features some lovely, stately piano chords, but swells into an identikit guitar maelstrom that could be labelled the `loud bit'. I'm not certainly not averse to this kind of music, but Takk is reallly the commercial, superficial end of it, & massively overrated.
Takk... - By: S. SANDERSON, 08 Jun 2008 This album is absolutely amazing & i find it hard to believe that a thing of such beauty can actuallly be recorded onto a disc.
