Sigur Rós played delicate, graceful music Friday at a sold-out Chicago Theatre that could have been plucked from a mobile spinning over a child’s crib. The Icelandic band also conjured ferocious thunderstorms, instilling songs with bursts of disorienting distortion and crackling percussion. However disparate, tranquil and violent episodes often existed side by side during the two-hour concert. But rather than exploit traditional contrasts, the trio explored what can happen in the gray areas between the extremes.
Nearly two decades since capturing international attention, Sigur Rós remains committed to experimentation. As much a long-running art project as a band, its lyrics are sung in an invented language called Hopelandic as well as in the members’ native dialect. Such relative unintelligibility places the focus on the collective’s orchestral-sized arrangements, with vocalist/guitarist Jónsi Birgisson’s falsetto warbling serving as both the emotional lynchpin and human component in a parade of alien atmospherics.
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The extraterrestrial feel extended to the mystical production befitting a major theme-park attraction. Lighting towers and trusses complemented mobile projection screens, illuminated partitions and flashing metal grates. Images of stars, landscapes and geometric patterns pulsed in the background and at the sides of the dimly lit stage, appearing to trap Sigur Rós in a digitized Tron-like prison. The effect escalated when the group began its second set behind a semitransparent LED curtain and performed “Á,” a new work drenched in modulation and static.
Fortunately, Birgisson and company didn’t stay concealed — or away from their bowed guitar, bass and drums — for too long. Performing without an extra keyboardist or accompanying string and brass section for the first time in years, Sigur Rós accentuated tonal dissolve on slow, meditative pieces (“Ekki Múkk,” “Samskeyti”) and sharpened the edges of heavy, blustery fare (“Ny Batterí,” “Saeglópur”). Mellow ballads telescoped fever-dream restlessness via desolate, deceivingly relaxed settings. Marches turned into ominous threats by way of tribal rhythms and squealing feedback.
Mystery, and the allure of the unknown, dominated every composition. A combination of gradual drama, stately piano-based melodies and ghosts-in-the-machine sound effects helped a few songs come across as sci-fi television-series soundtracks in-waiting. Birgisson’s glossolalia deliveries further intimated an otherworldly spiritualism at hand.
Occasionally, Sigur Rós got lost amid the grandeur and dry-ice fog. The coda to “Smáskifa” drifted toward excess. Several moments would’ve benefited from extra urgency. The band’s relatively introverted presence projected an unintended iciness. Yet when the trio let loose, particularly during the last third of the show, the art concept evolved into something more vulnerable and immediate — and less impossibly futuristic.
Bob Gendron is a freelance critic.
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