A Sigur Ros concert is a balancing act of musical extremes.
At times, the music is so brittle that it feels like you almost need to hold your breathe to not shatter the quietly alluring mood.
Then there are points where the Icelandic band comes at you with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, taking your breathe away as it delivers towering wave upon towering wave of distorted sound and feedback.
And each side of the coin was equally impactful and effective as Sigur Ros brought its first North American tour in five years to Stanford University’s Frost Amphitheater on Tuesday, May 17.
The group delighted the approximately 5,000 fans in attendance with material from throughout its discography, touching upon six of its seven studio albums during a single set, no-encore show that ran almost exactly 2 hours.
Attendees also got a taste of the new material that Sigur Ros is working on and plans to release later this year, as the band performed the new song — reportedly called “Gold 4” — in the later stages of the show. The track sounded brilliant, on par with the classic cuts in the set list, and certainly should have people excited about hearing the group’s first batch of new songs since the release of “Kveikur” in 2013.
The lineup for the evening featured founding members Jónsi on vocals and Georg “Goggi” Holm on bass as well as returning band member Kjartan “Kjarri” Sveinsson on keys and touring musician Ólafur Björn “Óbó” Ólafsson on drums (although, everybody onstage played multiple instruments). This marks the first time in 10 years that Jonsi and Holm have toured with Sveinsson, who was out of the band from 2013-2022.
Sigur Ros opened the evening with a whisper, conjuring up a soft and subtle soundscape with “Vaka” and “Fyrsta” — both of which hail from the band’s best known (and flat-out best) album, 2002’s “( ).” (No, that’s not a typo — the album title is simply two parenthesis.)
The music was intimate, meditative and so very fragile, to the point where a person trying to find his seat in the crowd seemed more than just a distraction, but rather something that might cause the whole tuneful house of cards to come tumbling down.
Jonsi’s falsetto was, as always, otherworldly, underscoring that — even after all these years — nothing else quite sounds like Sigur Ros. And, as good as they are on record, the band truly shines brightest in concert.
Part of what separates the Sigur Ros from the masses is, of course, the lyrics — which are delivered in a mix of Icelandic and band’s own made-up Hopelandic language. The combination should feel very foreign, especially to someone who doesn’t speak Icelandic, yet somehow it ends up feeling exactly the opposite. The intensity of the emotion that fuels Jonsi’s lyrics somehow makes them feel universal.
With Sigur Ros, it’s almost like the less you understands with your head, the more you feel with your heart. And it’s hard to imagine writing that same sentence about another modern band.
The group would also tear through some absolute avant-garde rockers, which were made all that more powerful coming in the midst of the more-subdued material. Notably, it felt like somehow we had been transported to a My Bloody Valentine show — and that bigger earplugs were needed — when Sigur Ros thundered its way through “Glósóli” from 2005’s excellent “Takk…”
Jonsi spent most of the night sawing at his guitar with a bow, creating mind-blowing noises that one might not believe are possible from the instrument. He also didn’t say much from the stage, other than to tell the crowd that the president — the president of Iceland, that is — was in attendance. The frontman didn’t appear to be joking, so perhaps Guðni Th. Jóhannesson was actually in the house and enjoying the tunes with the rest of the crowd.
Sigur Ros’s big finale was the feedback-drenched freak-out of “Popplagið” — the band’s usual closer, from the “( )” album — capping off 2 hours of terrific music and a night under the stars that won’t soon be forgotten by these fans.
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