In many ways, it’s a misnomer to call Sigur Rós a rock band. They play music, live and in studio, and they release albums. There are guitars, bass and drums, and they tour in theaters and arenas across the world. But the experience of seeing a Sigur Rós performance goes somewhere beyond traditional conceptions of popular music, rock or classical or anything else really.
In many ways, it’s a misnomer to call Sigur Rós a rock band. They play music, live and in studio, and they release albums. There are guitars, bass and drums, and they tour in theaters and arenas across the world. But the experience of seeing a Sigur Rós performance goes somewhere beyond traditional conceptions of popular music, rock or classical or anything else really.
It’s no surprise that their euphoric, cinematic soundscapes are often used to score films — their songs sound ancient, with ethereal timbres colliding and intertwining like a sinuous dance that’s existed time immemorial. Here, strings dust like a light film of snow coating blades of grass; there, the percussion, the cracking of ice, bass and cymbals in crescendo as the awe-inspiring largeness of a rock face cuts into the clouds above.
As such, Sigur Rós presents itself as more of a noble spectacle. They are not above some grandiosity or even panache in their stage show. But the nature of their music, and indeed, their entire ethos, is solemnity. The show, like their music, is meant to inspire awe.
Even when stripped down from more than ten members in many past live iterations to their core as a trio, Monday night at Asheville’s Thomas Wolfe Auditorium the spectacle felt almost too huge for the packed 2,400 seat theater.
At the back of the stage, a transparent LED screen backlit the group with tetrahedrals, birds, a forest and shapes resembling bacteria under a microscope. During the second set elaborate scaffolding revealed grids of pulsing LED lights.
Frontman Jón Þór Birgisson, better known as Jónsi, spent the majority of the set shredding away with his cello bow and guitar in textbook fashion, daring the audience to travel deeper into the music. His unearthly counter-tenor soared into the rafters above lush ambiance and ascending and descending percussive waves.
Each of the two hour-long sets included a variety of songs old and new, with inventive reworkings of string-heavy pieces like those from Agaetis Byrjun.
The first hour remained fairly mellow, with spotlights and patterned textures lighting a more classically structured set list. It was bewitching nonetheless, beginning and ending with drummer Orri Páll Dýrason alone, playing the other two band members in with drums, and back out again on piano.
If the first act of the performance put the audience under the band’s thrall, the second was a call to action, a build toward complete catharsis.
The set started in tight formation behind the LED screen, lit at first from behind by a star-shaped light. As the band played into an electronically revised “Starálfur,” the LED scaffolds on the edges of the stage shone while video projections on the screens behind and in front of the band washed them in a eerie blue light.
Throughout the remainder of the set, the screen lifted and dropped to great effect, drowning the band in red light, displaying video projections and generally overwhelming with the sheer amount of gorgeous visuals.
By the closing set’s midway point, audience members moved by the near-religious display dancing and throwing their hands in the air. The crowd answered the call to their feet by frontman Jonsi for the closing songs, “Fljótavík” and “Popplagið.”
It would be believable enough if the band disappeared from the stage in a dense fog, turning into a flock of ravens or arctic foxes padding off into the wilderness. Instead, as the roar of the crowd overtook even epic scale of the closing songs, the band came back out, grinning and clapping, gleefully tossing cymbals across the stage on their way.
The crowd roared again, and the band graciously clapped their appreciation right back before exchanging looks and sheepishly taking a bow.
Maybe they could be of this earth, after all.
Set 1
Á
Ekki Múkk
Samskeyti
E-Bow
Dauðalagið
Glósóli
Smáskifa
Set 2
Óveður
Starálfur
Sæglópur
Ný Batterí
Vaka
Festival
Kveikur
Fljótavík
Popplagið
