The Sigur Rós frontman’s muddled attempt at a pop album is a cathedral of feelings without referents: beautiful, boring, generically uplifting, and deliberately meaningless.
The first words that swim up from the dark, supple electronic void of “Exhale,” which opens Shiver, Sigur Rós visionary Jónsi’s striving but muddled attempt at a pop album: “Breathe in, breathe out.” They’re followed by a consoling mantra of assurances: Everyone’s alright and it’s just the way it is. It isn’t your fault and you can just let it go. It’s as if Bruce Horsby had been hired to write lyrics for Frozen.
It would be unfair to suggest that Jónsi is addressing these complacent platitudes to anything more specific than the solipsistic affirmation proven to forge positive associations with car commercials. But the disconnection of his words from our times is conspicuous, and it characterizes an album that appears cordoned off from any world beyond the self. Shiver is a cathedral of feelings without referents, almost without qualities beyond their enormous size. Its spasms of idiosyncrasy can’t entirely conceal what is basically an artsier, hookless Imagine Dragons—beautiful, boring, generically uplifting, and deliberately meaningless.
Of course, substance was never Sigur Rós’s strength, either; sweeping scale and emotional texture were. The popular Icelandic post-rock group dispersed orchestras into romantic mists and meaning into its own “Hopelandic” gibberish; on Shiver, Icelandic-language lyrics sometimes relieve the numbing banality of the English. Frequent Charli XCX producer A. G. Cook’s hectic Max Martin style is far from a natural fit for the dramatic, drawn-out singing Jónsi prefers, and without the dynamic presence or indestructible hooks of a pop artist, most of the alchemy he discovers with Cook is spinning gossamer into lead.
Jónsi still has a lovely voice capable of large-scale expressive effects, computerized or otherwise, but his monotonously slow and solemn register clashes with this busy, nervously worked-over production. The songs alternate between passages deconstructed to the point of formlessness and passages swarming with overcompensating activity, liberally dashed with pop clichés. Big tumbling ’80s drum hits, singalong nonsense earworms, and lustrous EDM plug-ins burst in and out, but a lugubrious mood steals back over all.
Almost every song has a good part mired somewhere in the longueurs and affectations. If the rest of “Wildeye” had more to do with its anthemic third minute, it might be a banger, but this moment of clarity is cramped by long ranks of noisy drums and a pitiful woo-woo hook that feels like a stem from another song. “Kórall” has a beating heart, though it’s hectored by IDM test patterns and balloon squeaks. “Sumarið sem aldrei kom” is a welcome choral respite, “Hold” shows signs of cohesion, and “Swill” is solid, forgiving some grating dubstep gestures.
But by then, the record may have already worn out all but the most dedicated listeners. Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser is wasted on the interminable “Cannibal,” which has a nice little climax that can’t quite shake off the preceding dream-pop slog. In “Salt Licorice,” poor Robyn has to grit her way through a sandstorm of bitcrushed synths before a warm Europop throb finally clears the air and gives her some room to maneuver. The parts of Shiver that strain to be fun and fresh can’t seem to break orbit from the grandiose mass of Sigur Rós, and the album leaves a sense of oppressive profundity in its bulky wake.
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