( ) Review
( ) is the fourth full-length album from Icelandic band Sigur Rós. It comprises eight untitled tracks divided into two parts: the first four tracks are more "light and optimistic," while the latter four are "bleaker and more melancholic." The two halves are divided by a 36-second silence.
The album’s title consists solely of two opposing parentheses. It has no official pronounceable title. Fans have referred to it as "Parenthesis," "Brackets," or "Sausages," after the parentheses' resemblance to the meat product.
The packaging has the ( ) cut out of the sleeve and a natural image (taken from outside of their studio in Ãlafoss) under them. You can see the whole image when you pull out the CD case from the sleeve. Four different covers were made for sale in different areas: America, Australia, Europe, Japan.
The album's vocals are recorded in a constructed language the band calls "Hopelandic," which consists of meaningless syllables and resembles scat singing. Most of the syllable-strings sung by vocalist Jón Þór Birgisson are repeated many times throughout each song, and often throughout the whole album.
Interestingly, many of these Hopelandic "phrases" resemble English words and phrases (for example, "you sigh," "you sold," "you sign no more," "you sigh so long", "you sat alone"), leading many listeners to interpret them as such, thus inventing their own meaning. It is unclear whether this effect was intentional, but for a while after the album's release the band's web site featured a multimedia application that played tracks from the album while displaying various hypothetical lyrics suggested by fans. The album's packaging also included a 12-page booklet of blank pages, on which fans were invited to draw or write their own interpretations of the music.
Sigur Rós would also go on to release a music video for Untitled Track #1 ("Vaka"). The music video shows a post-apocalyptic world in which children, attending school, get ready to go outside and play in the nuclear snow. The children, after putting on many layers of clothes as well as ominous gas-masks, go outside to play. The play of the children is characterized by fun, and destruction of the old world from which they came. The final scene shows a little girl breaking her gas mask and dying in the nuclear snow, finally seeing the world for its true beauty outside of the glass confines the children have been forced to use.
( ) has sold over 500,000 copies worldwide.
