Jónsi & Alex is Jónsi Birgisson, Sigur Rós vocalist/guitar player-with-bow extraordinaire, and Alex Somers, musician and visual artist to, among others, Sigur Rós.  On their debut album, Riceboy Sleeps, they combine for one mother of a meandering glide through the subtleties of sound.  The album started as a side project between Sigur Rós recordings and that’s about the best place to start talking about it.  While Sigur Rós two most recent studio releases, Takk… and Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaus are—dare I say—more accessible/less steam-of-consciousness than their predecessors— Jónsi & Alex with Riceboy Sleeps veer backwards more towards the epic ethereal territory of ( ).  The spacey, outer-worldly journey of Riceboy Sleeps feels like a walk through the valley of imagination; at times it sounds like it could be the lost soundtrack to a film you’ve never seen but know the script by heart, and yet it can just as well be the strange look by a stranger you can’t take your eyes off of.  Spare of almost any vocals, Riceboy Sleeps focuses more on the symmetry of the submissive, each song seamlessly bleeding into the next, free of any real climax, but sustained of something special, always beneath the surface, but never without a face.  With its light sound Riceboy Sleeps isn’t for the light-hearted; if you want the meat and potatoes of Sigur Rós you better point yourself somewhere else.  But if you can walk into Riceboy Sleeps with an open mind, Jónsi & Alex will help open your ears.  Give it a chance and you’ll be amazed what you hear; you don’t have to be a believer to believe.

It’s impossible not to hear Arcade Fire all over London-based Fanfarlo’s debut album Reservoir; at times, if you didn’t know any better, Fanfarlo might sound like the best Funeral era tribute band you’ve probably never heard of. And though the sound is never as full as Arcade Fire, Reservoir is more whimsical—a dance in the cool rain of a hot summer night, John Cusack in seemingly every movie he’s ever made style—and more personal, forever brimming with the threat of a washout but never quite making it; less catastrophic than it is cathartic and intimate; a hug, a confession, something that just makes you smile. On the family tree of influences, another ancestor is Sigur Ros, who have done a lot in the way of promoting Fanfarlo, and it’s easy to hear why; they share the same rare air atmospheric zip code as their Icelandic contemporaries. Reservoir is the type of album that could be on in an otherwise empty room, and for the first few songs you don’t really think about what you’re listening to—you just listen—but sooner than later you find yourself asking, “Who is this?” and suddenly the room feels full, more comfortable, and you realize without thinking too much about it how easy it is for music—that is good music—to be your companion. In “Runner Up” Simon Bathazar sings, “Stay clear of the runner up/He’s got some tricks he’s not afraid to try.” Fanfarlo may sound a lot like bands you’ve already heard of, but it takes something else to keep you wanting to listen. They’ve got that something else.

Iceland’s Sigur Rós return to once again prove that you don’t have to understand what the hell you’re hearing to fall in love with it. Their new album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, is the band’s fifth full-length offering, and perhaps their most dynamic. The album opens with “Gobbledigook,” a tumbling tune that sounds an awful lot like Arcade Fire, and is followed by “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur” which both seem to foretell a more robust—almost glam-era Bowie—grandeur to come. As a whole, however, the album settles somewhere in between that and more of the same luminous Jónsi Birgisson’s falsetto-driven landscapes that Sigur Rós is famous for. Surrealistically seductive in its soundscape, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, concludes with “All Alright”, a piano-propelled track which is one of their most beautiful songs to date. It also happens to be the band’s first predominantly English track. In it Birgisson whispers, “Now he’ll know/What I’m telling.” Fitting perhaps in its irony, but whatever language they use—Icelandic, Hopelandic, and now, English—the message is universal.