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setlist:
heysátan
fljótavik
all alright
njósnavélin
ný batterí
inní mér syngur vitleysingur
hoppípolla
með blóðnasir
við spilum endalaust
viðrar vel til loftárása
festival
sæglópur
hafssól
gobbledigook
illgresi
popplagið
reviews
balmyish, the perfect night really, a couple thousand people gathered in downtown minneapolis to have their minds blown in a language they can't really understand. classily dressed, spending too much on drinks, everyone felt like a spider web woven by thinking people with money, and i was a fly. i became one of them when my parchedness drew me to the counter to buy a bottle of dasani, my least favorite brand of water, instead of going into the bathroom and just splashing water into my mouth with my hand, which is what i would do if i were at school or anywhere else. but here i'd just make a weird mess of myself and be thirsty again in no time.
i wasn't sure how close my seat was, the buying of my ticket a foggy forgotten affair when the weather was still hot. all i remembered was the price, which was enough. handing my ticket to a female chauffeur halfway down the aisle, i had my fingers and toes all crossed that we'd be going closer rather than further from the stage, and that we did. about ten rows back she stopped, looking at my ticket, and my heart sank a little, but then we resumed our journey and she led me to the very front row of the audience proper, the first row after the orchestra pit. you're smack dab in the middle of this row, she said, really quite a good seat. my excited feet hardly kept from tripping over the people already seated as i made my way, excited and a little elated and strangely enjoying being alone in a sea of fashion and brains and mischief. the kids behind me talked about drugs while the seats filled up and i just stared straight ahead and absorbed.
lights darkened and the boys took the stage, all matchy except for the drummer who had on new-wave parachute pants and a plasticy white shirt and a foiled crown atop his head; jonsi had dressed himself in an ancient-looking soldier-looking jacket with tassles and sparkles on the seams, black, also in black pants that became puffy where they met his tall military boots. his shirt was white and protruded from his cuffs regularly with holes for his thumbs. his hair was in its typical fashion except for a thick quoff in the back giving birth to a rattail which would later match the shaking of his jacket's tassles as he violently shook himself about. he was elvis and michael jackson and beethoven, he was none of these.
mechanical candles powered by the instruments was the only illumination for the first song, fljótavik, and i realized i had forgotten the power of this incredible life form as soon as his first note came out, powerful and so loud, an absolute lack of fear, the most fearless thing i've ever seen, maybe other than bjork herself. perhaps they are equals. perhaps they are in cahoots. for a second i thought maybe he might be human when he pressed an incorrect key on the piano, likely because he couldn't see a damn thing whenever the music paused for a second or slowed down a lot because there wasn't any light whatsoever. his face squished right up to the piano, perhaps out of a combination of intensity and difficulty seeing the keys, and in these moments of darkness i felt so willfully alone. i was proven wrong when his voice returned, and knew that i could never ever know what kind of creature this is because it is not a knowable thing.
the rest of the show followed suit, a painfully appropriate mix of their quieter, soothing, teaching tunes and the more grand, sweeping, more violently soul-shaking compositions i gravitate towards out of a natural inclination towards a graspable pattern which has unfortunately been bred into me in all the years i've been alive, and which i am successfully un-learning with their help. but it barely matters; all their songs have the same melting effect that breaks us up, divides our glaciers into icebergs floating into a collective sea of love and pain, turning us fluid, vatnajokull into jokulskarlon. hard to soft.
projections from cameras angled towards the band from the ground played on the screen in an antique, distorted form along with the--of course--incredible projections of braid-headed children and old things and abstract nature scenes.
just as i began wondering if they were going to play my absolute favorite, saeglopur, jonsi got behind the keyboard and those keys were pressed, and the incredible sound was hitting my ears again live, the first time in three short, long years since i saw them in madison for the takk... tour. my spirit was goosebumped and everything felt warm and my life was shaken to its very core. nothing was new or old; everything was floating slowly and freely in a mason jar of stagnant, viscous substance.
a few songs later, gobbledigook was happening and they chanted that very long bridge part of the song, it felt like forever, rhyming phrases in a language i don't really know but can get excited and guess about and not really even care that i don't really know, and before the song was over four beautiful kids came to the front of the stage with confetti horns and blew them and suddenly a sea of dry color was raining down on me. i looked up and there wasn't anything wrong in the whole world and i waved my arms around in the happiness, my headphones having saved my life once again.
(jenna beyer)
