Sigur Rós - Hvarf/Heim
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List Price: Our Price: $13.99 You Save: $1.99 (12%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Buy Used: from $10.66 (click here) Category: Music CD See more new music releases 
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Free Music Notes for Hvarf/Heim
Free Music Review: Nails
Hit: 5 Stars
"If you've looked up this recording , you're probably familiar with the band. If you're familiar with the band , you probably like the band. If you like the band , you'll enjoy this release. Buy it now". Hey Jeff Z, you hit the nail on the head, you drove the proverbial nail in the coffin, and in the words of Veronica Corningstone you "nailed it"! Free Music Review: "live" not really live (thank goodness)
Hit: 4 Stars
A 2-cd ep of recordings. The one disc is a new 5 song studio disc of mostly unreleased recordings , whilst the other disc is a "live" reworking of 6 songs. Gotta admit , when I first heard that the one disc was "live"-it made me shudder. To think we would have a recording of this beautiful band , that uses full-range dynamics , interrupted by whoops , hollers , and wolf whistles , was more than I could take. But , upon listening , it was determined that this was not the case (thank goodness)> If you've looked up this recording , you're probably familiar with the band. If you're familiar with the band , you probably like the band. If you like the band , you'll enjoy this release. Buy it now.Free Music Review: Misleading Description
Hit: 3 Stars
I love Sigur Ros and have all their records. I was looking forward to this release and pre-ordered it when it was available on Amazon. I was excited to learn that it was a double album and was hoping to hear some new material. Unfortunately, this is not the case. It is 2 CD's but only about 70 minutes of music. First CD contains early work (5 songs) and second CD contains 6 live tracks. I think $13.97 is kind of pricey for 11 songs of previously available material. It would have been nice if Amazon provided more of a description, i.e. tracklisting, etc. I can currently listen to the full EP on Rhapsody. Once again, this is a 2 Disc EP and not a full lenth LP. Hopefully, the accompaning 2 disc DVD is a better value.
Free Music Review: Icy White Noise : The Return of the Inuits
Hit: 5 Stars
First of all, Hvarf/Heim is not so much a follow-up as a detour. It offers 70 minutes of music spread over two CDs: the first featuring rerecordings of tracks from their 1994 debut album Von, plus outtakes, the second acoustic versions of better-known songs.
From "The Guardian" : "Despite its tangential nature, the first CD encapsulates both what's admirable and what's off-putting about Sigur Rós' music. There's Salka, which shows off both their way with a winding guitar melody and enviable capacity to sound simultaneously wistful and triumphant. Hafsól, meanwhile, demonstrates the band's ability to alight on a sound that's unfathomably appealing: in this case a drumstick being rattled against bass guitar strings, a noise that, improbably enough, turns out to have the same warm, comforting quality as the smell of freshly brewed coffee. But in the debit column, there is Í Gaer, which wobbles unsteadily along the line that separates winning grandiosity from hollow bombast, and the creeping feeling that for all their admirable sonic experimentation, there's often something slightly formulaic about the results.
For every moment you're carried along by a song's sweeping loveliness, there's an equivalent moment where you find yourself wondering if their sound isn't a little uniform for its own good: everything proceeds at the same pace, the vocals always wail, enveloped in reverb, you're never that far from a dramatic surge in volume or a string-augmented climax.
It's a feeling that the second disc does little to dispel. The tracks all seem to have been taped in deserted community halls in rural Iceland, or outdoors by fjords and waterfalls, but they're not quite as atmospheric as their intriguing recording locations suggest.
Indeed, most of the time, the acoustic versions don't actually sound that different to the originals. Ágćtis Byrjun and the instrumental Samskeyti take on a marginally tweedier quality with their guitar effects replaced by a harmonium. The version of Von is a little less cavernous than its incarnation on CD1.
On Vaka, the experiment yields real dividends - with the echo stripped away, Birgisson's vocals take on an unexpected visceral intensity - but the rest sounds homogenous: like beautiful background music."
However, this is not a bad thing. As a double CD, this is perhaps the least accessible of the entire Sigur Ros catalog, simply because of the nature of the material. You can't really call this a 'proper' studio album. One thing is clear though - if you're into atmosphere, and if you own a really snappy sound system, this is the kind of album you should be buying.
Personally, albums such as this work for me because I have a personal relationship with my music over my headphones, and occassionally venture to play them on my music system as well. "Hvarf/Heim" sounds totally different on both my Ipod, and on my music system (I have the latest Philips home theater). I can't explain it. So if youre planning on buying the CD to rip it to your Ipod, or if you plan to just download the audio files, you're missing the big picture. This is big, sweeping mood music that should envelop a room.
Five Stars. Iceland has never sounded more inviting.