“I sometimes get this strange and sort of uncontrollable urge to want to go home.“
-Georg Hólm, member of the band Sigur Rós
Majestic, grand, expansive, surreal, breath-taking, stunning, arresting, inspiring, beautiful, staggering, personal…and I’m already out of words to describe the fairly recently released film by the Icelandic band, Sigur Rós. (Okay, it was released back in December of ’07. I just hadn’t gotten around to checking it out until a couple weeks ago.)
Sigur Rós is a band that has been making their other-worldly, alien, and powerfully intimate music for close to a decade. They sing in Icelandic and a lyrical non-language that is roughly translated from the Icelandic name for it as “Hopelandic.” It is not a Tolkien-like “language” per se, as its “words” mean nothing in a literal sense but, in many ways, it serves some of the same purposes as language. I don’t happen to be fluent in Icelandic, so I can’t tell the difference between the two anyway — and it doesn’t matter. Each album they’ve released has found them making music that breaks beyond the barriers of language to get as close to communicating feelings and emotions that language can only hope to convey, or struggle to give an idea of.
Yet for most of their careers, the band members themselves have remained enigmatic and closed-off, buffered from the world by their ethereal music. Heima, which means “at home” or “homeland,” takes us beyond that barrier and uses the music to immerse us in the things that make them who they are, where they come from, what their “home” is.
Hopping Into Puddles 