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Thursday, April 10, 2003 Kick Out the Jams
Sigur Ros at The Joint, April 5 Oh, the shock and awe: a rock concert where the underfed hipster mopheads actually shush each other into silence and remain politely installed in their seats. What is this, a movie theater? It might as well have been. Saturday's show by Icelandic dream-rockers Sigur Ros was as much about narrative as music, and the story lies somewhere in witnessing leadman Jonsi Por Birgisson publicly shamble up and down the stairs of joy and grief. This gaunt kid with a kewpie-doll haircut houses an inhuman voice that soars above the heavily textured musical fuzz that seems woven from dreams, and on Saturday night, the would-be art-rock prophet confirmed, if nothing else, a flickering belief in the beauty of the senseless and the senselessness of beauty--all to neatly seated rows of muss-haired mallsters. Look mom, no pit: Rock has finally accomplished what generations of worrisome parents never could--it's tamed The Kids, with nothing less than New Age music. In the end, that's what Sigur Ros plays. The difference is that while much of the genre trafficks in cheap escapism and peel 'n' stick fantasy, Sigur Ros' brand of the stuff really does make you look inward. Sigur Ros plays womb-music, the lovably demented tunes of broken toys, the sound of clouds resolving themselves into the recognizable. It's truly a solace, but there's nothing narcotic about it. After all, the band's songs have no titles, the lyrics are in some imaginary language burbling in Birgisson's head. The onus is on listeners to make something of all this mad beauty, and in that sense this concert was just the first phase of the experience. No doubt many fans are still digesting Sigur Ros's roughly two-hour performance that could drill through the most jaded of ironic sensibilities. Birgisson, attacking and caressing his guitar with a violin bow, led the band through a series of songscapes that generated their own energy until they blossomed into cathartic crescendoes that married noise and melody. Silence was as much a musical tool; in one song, 30 seconds of it sat square in the middle like a sudden death. Invariably, the crowd filled in with cries of "wooo!" and even, inanely, "We love you!" It was easy to be peeved about it at the time, anyway. Now that I've digested the show, I welcome the response. What if no one said anything? It would mean Sigur Ros was dealing in musical downers, and I suspect the last thing they want their art to do is deaden us.--Andrew Kiraly |
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