bortmechanic
Joined: 10 Jan 2008
Posts: 1
Location: Europe
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 Posted: Thu Jan 10, 2008 10:50 am Post subject: Album review |
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Sigur Ros-Hvarf/Heim
EMI
Icelandic mood merchants’ album of miscellany,released to accompany their Heima concert film.
Doubly titled (it translates loosely as’Haven-Home? Sigur Ros’s new album is a record of two halves. The Hvarf half (do keep up at the back) is a five-track collection of mostly unreleased rarities from the group’s archives, while Heim features six acoustic reworkings of back catalogue favourites. Of the outtakes, Salka pulls off the profoundly Icelandic trick of sounding both despairingly melancholy and utterly lifeaffirming, while Hijomalind - all ice-floe keyboards and soaring, imperious guitar chords etched with Jonsi Birgisson’s schoolboy falsetto - is perhaps the quintessential Sigur Ros song. The acoustic remakes are no less persuasive. Von, the title track of the band’s 1997 debut album, gets an especially beauteous reworking courtesy of string quartet Amiina’s melancholy threnody and a rudimentary tom-tom part. Whatever is behind Sigur Rbs’s ineffable Nordic magic, it doesn’t appear to be powered by electricity.
David Sheppard |
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