The Justice

Media Credit: courtesy of sigur-ros.co.uk Sigur Rós

With all the recent talk about Radiohead, I had almost forgotten that other much loved indie band: Sigur Rós. This month the sweet-timbered boys from Iceland give us the release of Hvarf/Heim, a double CD compilation that apparently translates into English as something along the lines of "Disappearance/Home." The album is being released in conjunction with Heima, a DVD that documents the band's 2006 tour of their native Iceland, and with frontman Jónsi Birgisson's confirmation that the band is heading back to the studio this month to start work on a full-fledged album, there has been no lack of activity on the Sigur Rós front.

Hvarf/Heim is essentially two EPs. The first, "Hvarf," is a collection of three previously unreleased songs and two reworkings of tracks off their somewhat underwhelming 1997 debut album, Von. The second, "Heim," is made up of six acoustic renditions of already released songs, including such staples as "Starálfur" and "Ágætis Byrjun." Both discs are more or less magnificent, but by this point we've come to expect as much. When dealing with a band like Sigur Rós, a band that has consistently released some of the most thoughtful, innovative and all-around beautiful music in the past decade, anything less than breathtaking is simply unacceptable.

The three previously unheard songs that start off "Hvarf" are strong enough that they would have been standouts on any normal Sigur Rós album, with the exception of "Í Gær." The highlight of the three is the second track, "Hljómalind," which has been released on a single with the acoustic version of "Starálfur" that appears on "Heim." The two, appropriately paired as "Hljómalind," evoke the subtle glory of 1999's Ágætis Byrjun more than any of the other songs.

The third track, "Í Gær," is the overt Achilles' heel of the entire effort. It starts interestingly enough with a glacial xylophone section, but the tranquility of the opening is soon shattered by eerily Pink Floydish guitar bursts that are just too abrasive and amateurish to fit in with the rest of the album. But then again, I suppose there is a reason it was never released before. "Hvarf" is rounded off by two re-recordings of songs from Von, both of which display the musical maturation Sigur Rós has undergone in the last decade. The new version of "Hafsól" is such a profound improvement over its Von counterpart that I was inspired to relisten to the entire original album in search of other prematurely dismissed gems.

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