Let’s get something out of the way: Sigur Ros is an Icelandic band, and Icelandic bands are weird. If you’ve ever heard Bjork, Mum, or Kitchen Motors, then you know what I’m talking about.

Blame it on the glaciers, volcanoes, the midnight sun, or something in the water, but the Icelandic imagination is distinctly warped, and this makes for awesome music.

Born of a land steeped in equal parts history and mythology, Sigur Ros has a sound both classical and otherworldly.

Employing clarinets, tubas, glockenspiels, electric bowed guitars, Moog synthesizers, and an impossibly high falsetto that ranges somewhere between Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and a 14th century castrati, Sigur Ros builds layers upon layers of sound that shift with seamlessness from sleepwalking funeral dirges to cosmic make-out sessions to apocalyptic meltdowns, often within the space of a single twelve-minute song.  

This is great, if you’re into it. However:

While the instruments all blend together beautifully, at times bordering on the sublime, the overall effect can be off-putting to the unaccustomed ear.

There are no hooks in these songs, no choruses, not even much in the way of lyrics, and most of those are rendered in “Hopelandic,” singer Jonsi Birgisson’s made-up tongue. The songs average well over eight minutes, and tend to bleed over into one another, with no distinct beginnings and ends.

A Sigur Ros album can have the paradoxical effect of being both unforgettable and impossible to remember. You know you’ve heard something amazing, but if asked to pick a favorite song, or even hum a few bars of one, you’re at a loss.

This makes for a sort of musical meditation: By the album’s end you’re not entirely sure of what’s gone on inside you, but you feel the change, the inner gears shifted and realigned; you feel a little lighter, a little calmer, a little more you.

Like meditation, Sigur Ros is not for everyone. “Takk” is touted as the band’s most accessible album to date, but that’s not saying much.

There are tiny concessions toward the mainstream, like song titles. “Takk’s” songs are also more traditionally structured; there’s even a candidate for a single, “Gong,” a song one could dance to if so inclined.

Still, most songs clock in at well over six minutes, fade to silence for twenty seconds at a stretch, and while the lyrics are in an actual language now, it’s Icelandic; so unless you’re among the half million people in the world who speak it, don’t expect any revelations there.

Compared to other, non-Icelandic bands, Sigur Ros fits in somewhere between Broken Social Scene and Radiohead.

Sigur Ros and Radiohead are good friends (they’ve toured together and collaborated on side-projects) and share much of the same fan base, so if you like Radiohead, you may like Sigur Ros.

A warning: if you disliked the direction Radiohead took on “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” (albums Radiohead admits were heavily influenced by Sigur Ros), and wish they’d lose the ambiance and get back to rocking out, you may want to stay clear of “Takk.” Not that there isn’t some nice, fuzzy, distorted guitar work on “Takk,” it’s just that most of it is done with an electric bow, rather than a pedal and pick.  

Even loyal fans may need a couple of listens to really feel at home in “Takk’s” giddy, playful soundscapes.

Fitting its title, “Takk” (Icelandic for thanks) is a brighter, more shimmering album than the band’s last release, “( )”. Those who fell in love with “( )’s” glacial-slow, snow-soft layering of sound may be put off by “Takk’s” abundance of cheery horns and warm strings.

For those unacquainted with Sigur Ros’s second album, the erotic, ecstatic starchild “Agaetis Byrjun,” this newest release may sound alarmingly happy, even joyful.

And it is joyful. I often found myself smiling, even giggling at certain parts  the phantasmagoric polka band comes to mind  which is odd, for a Sigur Ros album.

 I tend to approach Sigur Ros the same way I do a good art film  something to be enriched by, not delighted with. But “Takk” is more Fantasia than 2001: A Space Odyssey, and you know what? That’s alright.