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Wednesday, September 7, 2005
Sigur Ros
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Icelandic quartet Sigur Ros requires an unusual amount of patience. For starters, there’s a language barrier — the band’s lead vocalist, Jonsi Birgisson, has built his reputation singing in a piercing voice and delivering his lyrics in Icelandic or a made-up language called Hopelandic. Then there are the songs themselves, sweeping affairs designed to move glacially toward transcendent beauty.
They don’t always get there. But when they do, when Sigur Ros’ songs finally peak, the sound is unlike anything else in contemporary pop music — it’s a swelling shriek that turns drones, plinks and crashes into something magnificent.
Tuesday night’s sold-out concert at Symphony Hall forced fans to wait long stretches between episodes of magnificence, but the episodes did eventually come, and they were enough to peel a person’s scalp.
The show began with the band performing behind a screen, an effect that threw the musicians’ bodies into silhouette. The curtain eventually raised, but the band remained emotionally partitioned from its audience. Fans were rarely acknowledged and, in fact, were occasionally abused — from time to time, the band blasted light into the crowd, making the performance literally painful to watch. In any case, the fans remained extremely well-behaved throughout the night, staying as quiet as mice until the songs’ conclusions, then ripping into applause.
The band sold out the 1,750 seats available at this show, the first of a national tour, in less than a week, a fact that’s all the more impressive considering that the group won’t release its potent new album, “Takk,� until Sept. 12. But you don’t go to a Sigur Ros show to hear the latest catchy single. You go to let the band’s sound wash over you.
And so it did. With a string quartet providing backup, the band explored the outer reaches of rock. They played the electric guitar with a bow and the bass guitar with a drumstick. Singing approximated feline mewling. Drumming broke tension with cymbal attacks. Songs went on and on, sometimes sounding like bad Pink Floyd and other times (especially toward the end, with an encore from the beloved album “Agaetis Bryjun�) elevating the music to that rarefied zone where noise becomes art.
