Audio Mixer: Flood.

Recording information: Assault And Battery, London, England (01/2008-04/2008); Egrem Studio, Havana, Cuba (01/2008-04/2008); EMI Abbey Road Studios, London, England (01/2008-04/2008); Kjartan's Living Room (01/2008-04/2008); Langholtskirkja (01/2008-04/2008); Sear Sound Studios, New York, NY (01/2008-04/2008); Sundlangin, Alafoss, Iceland (01/2008-04/2008); Sundlavjin (01/2008-04/2008).

Photographer: Ryan McGinley.

Sigur Ros's fifth studio full-length, MED SUD I EYRUM VID SPILUM ENDALAUST, begins with such a tour de force of orchestral pop in the first half, listeners will recall Brian Wilson's self-describing "teenage symphonies to God." Pilfering from both the Arcade Fire--see the rousing second track "Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur"--and Animal Collective--see the lead-off single "Gobbledigook"--in equal measure, the Icelandic quartet create a masterwork that weds their soaring bombast to near-conventional pop structures and adds an experimental joy to their normally somber obsessiveness. The latter half of MED SUD is more in line with their previous effort, TAKK..., with more lived-in textures and slower paces, but after the poppy first half, the change is welcome. The album was recorded in a house in Reykjavik by Flood, who finds the same hooks and sweeping passion here that he did over two decades before engineering U2's THE JOSHUA TREE.

With their fifth full-length album, Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust (translated as With a Buzz in Our Ears We Play Endlessly), Sigur Rós have taken the poppy, sunshiny leanings of their previous album a step further into the light. The band has always been known for otherworldly soundscapes, and while there is enough of that here to keep the faithful happy, the band also writes straightforward, three-minute pop songs like the incredible catchy, sticky-sweet duo ("Gobbldigook," "Inní Mér Syngur Vitleysingur") that kick the album off like the first rays of the morning sun blazing through your bedroom window. That feeling continues on through the album as both the joyously soaring vocals and the buoyant melodies keep things floating happily on air. The arrangement of sound is quite different from previous albums, too. In the past their sound was characterized by a great wash of instruments merging together into great, gently heaving walls and waves of sound; on this album, for the most part, you can pick out individual instruments whether it's the acoustic guitar that underpins many of the songs (and provides the main backing on the intimate and quite lovely, and quite un-Sigur Rós-like, "Illgresi") or the lone piano that begins "Ara Bátur" (which does expand out into an epic undertaking with over 90 people including the London Sinfonietta and London Oratory Boy's Choir eventually playing on the track). Despite the few tracks that reach for the heavens, for the first time the band sounds grounded and stripped down. Songs like "Festival," with its pounding bassline and charging drums, and the melancholy album closer, "All Alright," which is based on a lonely piano figure (and features lyrics sung in English for the first time in the group's history), are firmly tethered to earth and shorn of excess artifice. In the past it was easy to be impressed with the sound of Sigur Rós, to be carried away by the grandeur of the band and be hit hard by the titanic emotions. On Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust you can really hear the human hearts behind the wall of sound, and while the emotional impact is on a smaller scale, somehow it is even more affecting. ~ Tim Sendra