‘Inni’ Gives Sigur Rós Suitably Epic Context

Sigur Rós is not a band that does anything small. Even the Icelandic post-rock outfit’s most spare tracks are fraught with unspoken emotion on a huge scale, to say nothing of the sprawling epics such as “Hoppípolla” for which the band is most known. Textured by bowed guitar, insistent percussion, and slowly transforming arrangements, and carried to new heights by frontman Jon “Jónsi” Birgisson’s flawless falsetto, Sigur Rós has always created songs and albums that sound more like aural manifestations of intense feeling than anything else.

They haven’t released any new music for three years, since 2008’s “Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust” (“With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly”); they went on hiatus after playing their last show at London’s enormous Alexandra Palace in the same year. For that last show in London, they were filmed by Vincent Morisset, and they turned the subsequent film and recording into “Inni.”

At an hour and 45 minutes of music and an hour of film, “Inni” is a massive release. But its duration is appropriate considering the depth and breadth contained within it. There has always been something unfulfilling about Sigur Rós’s studio albums, as if the clean production and mastering took away from the music’s impact and suffocated it a bit. “Inni,” then, is Sigur Rós at its most fully realized: the music can breathe like it never could before.

For a select few tracks, the overwhelming bigness that dominates the sound of “Inni” diminishes their efficacy. The minute-long crescendo of “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur,” which on “Við spilum” started from the hushed notes of piano and celesta and built to the most explosive finale of the entire album, feels on “Inni” like it has no foundation from which to build. It loses too much of the spine-tingling propulsive emotion of the original.

Fortunately, though, live treatment enables the four members of Sigur Rós to extract new depth in the overwhelming majority of the tracks. The opening “Svefn-g-englar” is not the mellow, removed slow jam as it was on “Ágætis byrjun;” the booming acoustics of the hall, combined with the addition of distorted guitar, give the song a weight and a momentum that wasn’t there before. And where “Sæglópur” felt compressed and tight on “Takk...,” here it feels towering and expansive.

And they also play brilliantly off the energy of the crowd. In “Festival,” for example, Jónsi holds a single trembling note for—count it—48 seconds. After the first 20 seconds, the audience begins to cheer, then dies down; as soon as they realize that he’s still holding the note after another 20 seconds, they go nuts. At the peak of their excitement, the band breaks into the drivingly energetic second half of the song.

By nature, this album displays the consistency of their output across a lengthy career. Longtime fans of Sigur Rós won’t be disappointed with the album’s scope: though the focus is on tracks from “Við spilum,” “Inni” contains songs from every album since and including 2000’s “Agætis byrjun.” It effectively serves as an assertion of their continued relevance, even after their absence.

Finally, in addition to being a perfectly tuned retrospective on Sigur Rós’s work thus far, “Inni” closes with a brand new track called “Lúppulagið.” It’s an ethereal, atmospheric track centered around a simple piano melody and characteristic bowed guitar, reminiscent of “Untitled 1 (Vaka)” or “Untitled 3 (Samskeyti)” off of “( ),” Sigur Rós’s 2002 album. “Lúppulagið” is brooding and melancholy in its affect as it slowly blossoms then fades away into silence.

It’s a fittingly calm way to cap off an album that, for the simple fact that it’s a live recording played by real human beings, packs more raw force and emotional power than any previous Sigur Rós release. Finally, these songs’ potential has been fully realized on record.