One of my favorite bands, Icelandic ambient quartet Sigur Ros, appear to have split. The band has described it as "taking it easy" and cited falsetto Jonsi Birgission's solo project as the reason for the hiatus. But after a scrapped record and growing creative disparity amongst the band's members, it sounds more like a breakup. 

Senior year of high school I saw them play Benaroya Hall in Seattle. Their sweepingly-involving instrumentation mixed with some pretty stellar (if shoddily photographed) visual imagery. I remember, there was a woman sitting a few seats down, tan and in her late 40s, telling us about their show in Denver. She had followed them west into California and up the Pacific coast. It was that sort of transformative experience.

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This weekend, my buddy Luke out in San Francisco recommended I check out a track called "Home" from this summer's Up From Below, the debut of Ima Robot frontman Alex Ebert's ensemble project Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. I'm still only a few tracks deep on the album right now, but it has such a galant, 60s-pop playing during a bloody slow-motion shootout sort of vibe, that it's forcibly interesting. 

"Home" opens with a whistle hook reminiscent of "Young Folks," the Peter Bjorn and John single that took over the radio, mall intercoms and WB programming in 2007. If you don't remember the track (you were born after 2007 or you live in a place without shit-tons of Apple stores), here's what Pitchfork thought of it: 

The song was ranked #5 on Pitchfork Media's "Top 100 Tracks of 2006" list. Pitchfork reviewed the song on 19 July 2006, giving it three out of five stars.[1]

Leave it to Pitchfork to hate on the popular stuff. It's a sharp track on an album these eighteen folks really seem to like but Rolling Stone called "an art-college thesis." Wherever your alliance may lay, there's an interesting unofficial music video of it on YouTube: 

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The cold has settled in, the roads are icy and the snow is starting to turn grey. Boston shuts down early, some sort of ancient three-way arrangement between the bars, the transit authority and puritan settlers. The streets are whisper silent early one weekday morning, a light dusting paints over last weekend's vomit and spilled drink stains.

Put this song on your iPod for when the snow begins to fall heavy, and you're stuck waiting for the last bus home.   

Jeff was born the son of musician Tim Buckley in Anaheim, CA in 1966. After a long stint gigging in Los Angeles, he found popularity playing covers in Manhattan clubs. He released his only studio album in August of 1994, titled Grace. Three years later, Buckley was waiting for his band to arrive in Memphis, TN, to lay down tracks for his second album, My Sweetheart the Drunk, when he drowned in the Wolf River.

//Grace has gone on to sell more than two million copies.

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