Band of ice and snow
Icelandic group Sigur Rós return to New Zealand in July, bringing the otherworldly approach to rock music that has made them cult stars and soundtrack regulars.
Icelandic group Sigur Rós returns with the otherworldly approach to rock that has made them cult stars.
Even after 20 years of performing their unique brand of soaring, epic, visceral postrock, the three remaining members of Sigur Rós still see themselves as something of a high-wire act. Seven albums down, with another on the way, they have a host of side projects from soundtracks to curating their own festivals – even appearing on The Simpsons and Game of Thrones. But the Icelandic trio are intent on keeping the excitement and expectation levels high, not just for their global army of fans but also for themselves.
Bassist Georg Hólm says their latest show – billed as “an evening with Sigur Rós” as opposed to a more familiar albumspruiking tour – purposely takes them out of their comfort zone.
“We don’t just want to go on tour and do the same as we’ve done for the past 20 years,” he says. “We wanted to do something new and exciting for us.
“You want a spectacle – you want a man walking the wire and the excitement of something maybe going wrong and the excitement of something new and impressive or something just really loud … that’s the purpose of a live show, we think, and we enjoy it a lot to create that.
“We want everyone to walk away from the show thinking, ‘What the hell did I just experience?’”
Just deciding to tour and play tracks from their back catalogue is a balancing act in itself. The 2013 departure of keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson led to the complete rearrangement of many of their better-known tracks to suit the strippeddown act.
It’s no surprise that most reviews of this latest tour have highlighted frontman Jón Þór “Jónsi” Birgisson’s juggling act of combining his mesmeric vocals, cellobowed guitar (and occasional drums) with Orri Páll Dýrason’s double duties of drums and keys.
The band have made the decision to keep to their bare minimum of performers instead of inviting along the brass and string ensembles familiar to live shows since 2005, but Hólm says the new arrangements have breathed fresh air into old tunes and seen them revisit forgotten tracks – even playing Starálfur from 1999’s Ágætis byrjun live for the first time.
“The three of us started thinking, ‘What would be the single most difficult song to play?’, and we’d never played Starálfur before, because it’s basically strings and a piano and none of us play cello or violin, so we asked ourselves, ‘How do we do that?’, and rewrote it for our instruments,” Hólm says.
The last time Sigur Rós were in New Zealand, for a 2006 Easter Monday show at the St James in Auckland, their hypnotic mix of blistering sound and angelic vocals sung either in Icelandic or Birgisson’s own made-up Hopelandic, was delivered as a kind of musical equivalent to a Rothko painting: huge swathes of abstract art on which the audience could project their own emotions.
In that show, they appeared on stage behind a gauze screen, shimmering figures fading in and out of the backdrop as the
music took centre stage. This time, the band’s much-vaunted visuals and light show are intended to eclipse the band members, again inviting the audience’s own interpretations of songs.
The band members often shy away from talking about intent and purpose – even narratives – in their songs, but it’s clear they’re very keen to put on a show that really stirs the crowd.
“We do like it that people put their own interpretation onto the music and a song becomes really meaningful to them for their own personal reasons,” Hólm says.
“We just make the music because we like to write it and to play it, and when we’re writing a song, if we don’t get some sort of image or feeling, then we think maybe we’re on the wrong track.
“And when we play it live and you have a really good show, then you get lost in it.”
As part of this tour, Sigur Rós are also road-testing new tracks for a follow-up album to 2013’s Kveikur, and although Hólm admits the recording process is taking longer than expected – “the energy levels are a little bit lower” – they’re sounding a little more like “older Sigur Rós stuff” compared with the more industrial Kveikur and they’re enjoying adding them to the set list.
“At the moment there are three new songs and we have more coming – we just have to work out how to play them.”
An evening with Sigur Rós, Spark Arena, Auckland, July 21.