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Hvarf/Heim isn't the album to mark a musical departure for Sigur Rós.
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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.
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It's all so tightly buttoned down that the first listen evokes a certain déjà vu; You haven't heard it before, and yet you know what's going to happen anyway.
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Q MagazineOn it's own terms--striving to be more interesting than the standard album--Hvarf-Heim is clearly a success. [Dec 2007, p.114]
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UncutThe five new tracks that open proceedings, however, fail to add much to band's remit. [Dec 2007, p.102]
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Far from essential, Hvarf/Heim can merely be looked at as a stop-gap before the next proper record.
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The question then arises whether this double album is “necessary” in the overall scheme of Sigur Ros’s work.... When listening to Hvarf, the answer is decidedly “yes” for sustaining their known output, but on the Heim side of things, with its stripped down, string-focused, acoustic sound, the answer leans towards “no”.
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Unbalanced and ill-executed at times, Hvarf-Heim is a supplementary release.