Sigur Ros - Hvarf/Heim

[Aaron]

New Sigur Ros album out today!  It's the double companion record to their movie coming out entitled "Heima".

2 cds, 5 tracks on 1, 6 on the other.  All songs ranging from 4:43 to 9:47 in length


http://sigur-ros.co.uk/band/disco/hvarf-heim.php

I'm partially through the Hvarf EP...Really good so far.

[bloop]

It is worth noting that there isn't all that much new material here, but it is gorgeous anyway.

[Brenden]

I really, really like it so far. Nice to see them have a few suprises here.

[murlough23]

I'm usually curious to hear acoustic reworkings of a band's material, particularly when they rely on a lot of layers and ambience and so forth in the studio versions - I like to see how they approach this inventively with a minimal amount of instruments and/or electricity in their arsenal. This will be no different. My only complaint is the same one that I had with Thrice - why put on two EPs being sold together what would fit on one CD? It doesn't affect the quality of the music, but it does affect the ability to listen to it uninterrupted (for those of us who are still archaic enough as to buy actual CDs, anyway). It's not like Sigur Ros has never had to face the issue of how to present two distinct movements of music all on one CD before, and hell, I'd prefer a 30-second gap to two CDs.

NP: "Whatever It Takes", Lifehouse

[Aaron]

It's all about contrast.  One EP is studio stuff. The other is live acoustic stuff.  It doesn't make sense to put it all together on one disc.

[bloop]

That's really a non-issue to me.  It doesn't appear to be making the price any different from what a typical single album would cost, and it is visually appealing.

[murlough23]

Yeah, I know. The issue is that I put a CD in, and then 20-30 minutes later, I have to change it again. Kind of a pain in the ass when I'm driving.

Plus it's kind of wasteful from an environmental standpoint. (Then again, so is buying physical CDs when everyone else is starting to go digital.)

NP: "The Joke", Lifehouse

[bloop]

I understand what you're saying - it would be a little annoying I guess (about the same as changing sides on my record player, I suppose). 

I think Sigur Ros sees themselves as both musical and visual artists.  I think the presentation piece is very important to them.  I mean, if an artist could paint on both sides of their chosen medium, would one expect them to do that just for the economy of that approach?  Would it even be considered two separate pieces of art if they did choose to go in that direction?  IDK, I'm just trying to think the way I think the band might.

[murlough23]

I mean, if an artist could paint on both sides of their chosen medium, would one expect them to do that just for the economy of that approach?

Probably not, but it wouldn't really require any effort on your part to redirect your eyes from one painting to the other, either. I'm not sure that analogy really works.

NP: "Make Me Over", Lifehouse

[bloop]

Depends on where the paintings are in the gallery.

[murlough23]

Depends on where the paintings are in the gallery.

I was assuming they were side-by-side because the artist intentionally presented them side-by-side.

NP: "Electable (Give It Up)", Jimmy Eat World

[bloop]

The artist intentionally presented the CDs so you'd have to take enough time to change them.   

You know what annoys me?  The "æ" character.  Where the hell do they think they're selling most of their extraneous CDs!   

[Brenden]

I didn't find it that hard to change cds while driving the three days it took for me to drive from NY to TN.

[murlough23]

I didn't find it that hard to change cds while driving the three days it took for me to drive from NY to TN.

Yeah, I've gotten good at it while driving, but let's be honest, it's not the safest thing in the world.

Fortunately I take most long-distance trips with my wife, but she gets really sick of constantly having to play DJ, so I guess the rule for those trips is "no listening to short CDs".

[bloop]

Try changing albums on an iPod while you're driving.  It isn't much better.

I guess the simple solution is to burn it all to one disc for car trips.  A blank CD is very cheap.

[murlough23]

Try changing albums on an iPod while you're driving.  It isn't much better.

Well, there goes my theory that I don't get to whine because I haven't made the jump to the full-digital mode yet.

I guess the simple solution is to burn it all to one disc for car trips.  A blank CD is very cheap.

Great, so now I have to burn myself a CD of something that I've already bought on CD. Brilliant.

NP: "The Championship", The Polyphonic Spree

[murlough23]

I think Sigur Ros sees themselves as both musical and visual artists.  I think the presentation piece is very important to them.  I mean, if an artist could paint on both sides of their chosen medium, would one expect them to do that just for the economy of that approach?  Would it even be considered two separate pieces of art if they did choose to go in that direction?  IDK, I'm just trying to think the way I think the band might.

Another thing to keep in mind here is that this is basically an "odds and sods" type of collection. It's not like all of the songs on Hvarf were written with the intent of being presented as a unified piece - they appear to be individual compositions that didn't make their albums (or, in one case, a remake of an early album track, which is interestingly reprised in its acoustic version on the second disc.) And of course Heim is just reworkings of songs we already know. I can definitely see how the twom discs are distinct from one another, but it's all a bunch of loose ends in any case, so I somehow doubt that either set of songs is meant to be such a grand artistic statement that to have both sections on one disc would ruin the presentation.

That said, I actually listened to both discs for the first time last night, and noted that both were between 30 and 40 minutes in length, which is as long as some artists' full-length albums, so please understand that my nitpick here is an extremely minor one.

NP: "Backdraft", Thrice

[bloop]

It's a good collection, but there isn't enough new material here for me to call it a new album, per se.  It's quite good, but I think the gold standard for these sorts of things was Waits's Orphans project a year or two ago.  Because so much of it is reworking older material, I don't really know where to put it in my journal.

[Aaron]

Again, it's a companion album (soundtrack per se) to the movie they are releasing. 

[murlough23]

Again, it's a companion album (soundtrack per se) to the movie they are releasing. 

Which, if I'm understanding it correctly, is a concert video/documentary about the band. So it's not like they went and wrote a unified set of songs about a specific subject for a movie about some subject other than themselves. It's a soundtrack in the same sense that U2's Rattle and Hum i a soundtrack, rather than something like Bjork's Selmasongs or that album Jack Johnson did for Curious George or whatever.

[murlough23]

I'm starting to realize that they didn't really pick their best songs to showcase in acoustic format on the Heim EP. "Samskeyti" (a.k.a. track 3 from ( )) didn't really have to change much, and is beautiful in any incarnation but kind of a weird way to lead off as the first track on a CD. "Heysátan" is boring in any incarnation, and it kind of ticks me off that they picked the worst track from Takk... as its only representative. "Ágætis Byrjun" (the song, not the album) never excited me that much, either, and it had kind of an acoustic sound to begin with, so what's the big deal here? And "Vaka" (a.k.a. track 1 from ( )) really needs those echoing vocals to give it the character that made it a standout originally. That just leaves "Starálfur" (which I love, in both of its versions) and "Von" (which I don't know the original version of well enough to have formed an opinion on just yet, but we needed two new versions of this about as much as we needed "The Eleventh Hour" twice on Jars of Clay's Furthermore). Not an impressive way to reconfigure some of the band's classics, if you ask me. They should have tried to do some of their more adventurous tracks acoustic instead.

It's gonna take some time before I really have an opinion on Hvarf, as new Sigur Rós tracks always take longer for me to tell apart than many other bands' songs, due to the disadvantage of not being able to use lyrics as a differentiating factor. That's not a criticism, just a lesson I've already learned about not judging their work too soon (I made that mistake when I declard that Takk... was boring and played it too safe; now it's probably the Sigur Rós album I pull out and re-listen to the most).

Incidentally, the song title "Heysátan" still amuses me. I know that it really means "Haystack", but part of me wants to pretend it's Icelandic for "Shout at the Devil".

NP: "Hljómalind", Sigur Rós

[glatisant]

Slightly OT question: for someone who’s never listened to Sigur Rós before, would this be a good place to begin?  If not, which of their works would you recommend starting with?

[murlough23]

Slightly OT question: for someone who’s never listened to Sigur Rós before, would this be a good place to begin?  If not, which of their works would you recommend starting with?

No. Start with either Takk... or Agaetis Byrjun.

NP: "Burn the Fleet", Thrice

[glatisant]

No. Start with either Takk... or Agaetis Byrjun.

Thanks.  Can you elaborate a bit?  What makes these two albums more accessible?

[murlough23]

Thanks.  Can you elaborate a bit?  What makes these two albums more accessible?

http://www.epinions.com/content_196759752324

http://www.epinions.com/content_82266394244

And just for the sake of comparison...

http://www.epinions.com/content_86807514756

[glatisant]

That was a bit more elaboration than I expected to get.    Thanks again.

[murlough23]

That was a bit more elaboration than I expected to get.    Thanks again.

I had already written those reviews, so no biggie for me.

In general, because I'm an album-oriented sort of guy, I tend to want a new listener to experience an artist I enjoy through a unified work of songs that they all wrote with the intent of them fitting together first, rather than a hodgepodge collection of B-sides and alternate versions. Not that Hvarf/Heim is a bad collection, but I think it's better appreciated once you're already familiar with the group and some of their best-loved songs that are being remade.