Sigur Rós

Hollywood Bowl - October 5, 2005

Live Review by Adam McKibbin

During many, many opportunities—sometimes beset by various combinations of fatigue, boredom and chemical excess—I have fallen asleep precisely once at a concert.  The year of my slumber was October 2001, and Sigur Rós were only beginning—albeit rapidly—to make an impression on hipster enclaves and KCRW subscribers.  The scars and scares of 9/11 were not even a month old.  Safe and warm and dark inside the Wilshire Theatre, faced with this inscrutable and exhilarating band from Iceland that sang in a made-up fairytale language, my body decided it was time to power down.  The time away was brief, but, scored by the dramatic Agaetis Byrjun, it also made for a very unusual experience:  a profound nap.

Four years later, beneath the stars and spotlights at the Hollywood Bowl, I again felt that pull toward surrender.  Perhaps the majesty of the songs is overwhelming, especially when combined with a big-time visual effects show.  Perhaps it’s Pavlovian conditioning after being serenaded to sleep many nights by Agaetis Byrjun and ( ).  Regardless, it’s an unusual response, and yet one that many claim to share.  It’s never meant as an insult; one of the great things about a Sigur Rós show is that there is never a forced audience clap-along or pandering banter offered up for cheap cheers.  They were clearly a band humbled by their situation—the 17,000-odd seat Hollywood Bowl presented the site of their largest non-festival headlining gig to date—but they don’t seek out validation by measuring the crowd’s reaction.  One man’s passage into sleep is another man’s dance down the aisles (okay, so there was none of that).

Joined on stage for most of the night by their friends and backing string band Amina—who also put on an inventive opening set of their own—Sigur Rós painstakingly recreated the intricacies of many of the highlights from Agaetis Byrjun (still the crowd favorite), ( ), and the newly released Takk.  The images and videos behind the band added to the ambience without pulling focus, although some of the images seemed either recycled or barely changed from the 2001 edition.

Jonsi Birgisson is an otherworldly vocalist, and the Sigur Rós live show proves that all of those seemingly superhuman spikes and peaks are really his own; there is very little studio trickery necessary to get him to fly so high.  He strains with effort throughout the show, sawing away on his guitar with a bow (a staple of the band’s sound and presentation) when he’s not busy at the microphone.  The set is tightly controlled in order to be coordinated with the visuals, but the songs are never allowed to go cold, even on the rare occasions when they meander a bit formlessly.  The Bowl was a good venue for them, even if they found that they aren’t quite ready to stuff it full.  Their music is right at home in nature.  Given a choice, though, a fan looking for full immersion would want to seek them out indoors and in at least somewhat more intimate surroundings.