Sigur Rós, O2 Academy Brixton - music review

The Icelandic trio treated the crowd at Brixton Academy to the highlights from their 19-year career
p44 SIGUR ROS..BRIXTON ACADEMY..LONDON..7-3-2013....PHOTOGRAPH BY: ANGELA LUBRANO.
livepix.biz
11 March 2013

Their music has been used in the background of countless films and advertisements but last night Sigur Rós proved that they were more than capable of taking centre stage.

Performing in London for the first time since the release of 2012’s Valtari, the band’s sixth album of ambient post-rock, the Icelandic trio treated the crowd at Brixton Academy to the highlights from their 19-year career.

While string and horn sections added an extra sense of grandeur to the music, the focus remained the voice of Jónsi Birgisson, whose eerie, extraterrestrial tones cast him as the unlikely lovechild of Thom Yorke and ET.

As if that wasn’t remarkable enough, he spent the majority of last night playing his guitar with a violin bow and singing in “Hopelandic”, a made-up language known best to himself.

Beside him, Orri Páll Dýrason’s dynamic drumming and Goggi Hólm’s supple basslines gave these ethereal songs a welcome amount of muscle.

The crowd — mostly male and over 30 — was in raptures throughout. Indeed, on hearing the opening bars to E-Bow, the gentlemen next to me felt compelled to tell me that it was “one of the most astonishing pieces of music of all time”. That’s slightly over-selling things, of course, but it was another sprawling, sonic adventure.

Elsewhere, Vaka had an ambient, womb-like quality, before veering left into guitar-driven post-rock, and Hoopípolla built to a gloriously uplifting crescendo: little wonder that it’s been used to soundtrack everything from the BBC’s Planet Earth to the FA Cup Final.

The pleasures were visual as well as aural. A giant projector behind the band shone images of forests, galaxies and otherworldly creatures, while lasers danced above the crowd.

Sigur Rós saved their best moments for the end. Olsen Olsen — the closest thing to a single on show — built from a two-note bassline to a horn-propelled crescendo. If you were planning on having a water birth, there would surely be no better song to have it to than Starálfur.

And when the world does finally come to an end, chances are that it still won’t sound as epic as last night’s closing number. In a word: sensational.

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