POSTED: Tuesday, May 4, 2010, 9:32 PM
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| Photo | John Vettese |
Last night's slowest tune is the end of the end.
Credit where credit is due: without his ambidextrous, multi-instrumental touring band, Jónsi Birgisson's appearance at The Electric Factory on Monday would not have been. Period. On tour in support of his solo debut
Go, the Sigur Rós singer-guitarist was backed by a four-piece ensemble: Birgisson's partner Alex Somers on guitar, Úlfur Hansson on bass, þorvaldur þorvaldsson on drums and Ólafur Björn Ólafsson on piano. Those assigned duties did not last long.
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| Photo | John Vettese |
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| Photo | John Vettese |
Hansson traded off between bass and xylophone; Ólafsson played bowed bells and swapped his piano bench for guitar. Somers added shakers, while the Bic-headed þorvaldsson was a percussive madman, Mr. Clean with an insatiable rhythmic mojo. When he wasn't thrashing out anxiety-laden beats like on "Animal Arithmetic," or getting in on a full-band glockenspiel jam center stage, he was standing directly behind Birgisson on an untitled new piano number, tapping on toms and rattling hand percussion because, well, it's what he does. I'll hand it to Jónsi – he's got incredible focus to play with so much sound swirling around him. But it's all that extra sound that completes the scene, creating a robust, resonant core of music that not even the Factory's notoriously hollow acoustics could dampen.
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| Photo | John Vettese |
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| Photo | John Vettese |
This isn't to downplay Birgisson's role in his own concert. He's the celebrity, obviously. He's the one with the limelight, the breathtaking falsetto, the masterfully crafted songs. His solo work seems to go to the extreme ends of Sigur's more centered post-rock approach – quieter than its slightest moments, more turbulent than its loudest. But he isn't singlehandedly carrying this production. The ensemble was integral in those songs' dramatic translation to the stage. ("Dramatic" is an apt word, given the very theatrical setup – it looked like the band was playing in a shattered greenhouse, while animals frolicked, floodwaters raged and Narnia circa The Last Battle played out beyond the broken glass.)
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| Photo | John Vettese |
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| Photo | John Vettese |
Take the closing "Grow Till Tall" – with the visual cues suggesting some sort of fire-and-ice cataclysm, the band's sound slammed into in a coda that intensified louder and impossibly louder still with each repetition. Strobes flashed and projected snow fell sideways, quickening until it was a stack of white parallel lines spinning to an impossible loud catharsis. The scene was literally physically disorienting, in the most exciting way.
Again, without the ensemble, this would not have been. All we would have been left was a guitarist-pianist in a heinous raggedy outfit stolen from Adam Ant, a pointed fauxhawk, and a series of powerful songs he had no hope of doing justice to on his own.
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| Photo | John Vettese |
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| Photo | John Vettese |
