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setlist:

svefn g englar
vaka
sé lest
við spilum endalaust
góðan daginn
hoppípolla
með blóðnasir
fljótavík
suð í eyrum
olsen olsen
inní mér syngur vitleysingur
heysátan
gobbledigook
all alright



review

they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but my pictures don’t do the beauty of sigur rós justice, so here’s a thousand words (okay, five hundred). you see, like life-changing news and intimate conversations between friends, a sigur rós performance is best taken sitting down. that’s because the moment that organ stirs, the strings swell, that falsetto awakens with absolutely nothing false about it – you’ll feel the goose bumps prickle along your arms, the blood rush to your brain. this is where the sitting part comes in, as you might lose control of basic motor functions and possibly the use of your legs. at times, as happened to me more than once thursday night, you might lose your mind.

some bands don’t translate to a live setting. many times that’s because the instrumentation, the production, the album’s “sound” was commissioned – constructed. now consider sigur rós. how easily they could have been one of those bands trying, and failing, to recreate that stadium-ready sound. but this is not the case. with many times thirteen musicians onstage at once – string and bass sections along with the band’s four core members – their shows become not reenactments but enactments. the music comes to life so beautifully, the band’s insular rock so fully rendered, that when i first saw them live, i swore they were lip-syncing (and playing) along to a recording. but no. the band is simply a singular, mesmerizing force.

thursday’s kansas city show was a markedly lower-key performance – fans of ( ) unite! – but what it lacked in boisterousness, it made up for in beauty. while the set was a little shorter than usual (my only complaint), it seemed far more crafted from when i’d seen them on the takk tour. in every way, this was a performance – from the elaborately planned blocking, to the five-piece horn section trotting across the stage at the end of “sé lest,” to the confetti soaring through the sky during closer “gobbledigook.” what an audience to witness the performance too. the sold-out crowd sat enraptured, hanging on jonsi’s crystalline vocals as if they could discern them. (for the uninitiated: sigur rós sings in icelandic and sometimes hopelandic – an invented language – though the band’s new album features its first english recording.) there is simply not another contemporary rock/pop concert where you will see such reverence, such awe-inspired silence, as if this were a group of classy opera patrons and not, you know, people like you and me. jonsi and company must have been similarly impressed. at the conclusion of the show, the band lined up on stage to applaud the crowd raucously applauding them, right before taking one long deserved bow.

just before the show that night, loved ones warned audience members of an approaching tornado. “it’s coming through de soto now,” a friend texted me. people started getting anxious. were they in danger? would the show go on? (should it?) when someone finally announced the show would continue as planned, right there in that beautiful little storm shelter of an amphitheater, i know i wasn’t the only one to think, “okay, i could die at a sigur rós show and be happy.” and i wouldn’t have been wrong.
(nicole pope)

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