Sigur Ros at the Civic Opera House (Chicago-May 9, 2006)

As an old punk rocker who, in my devolution over the past couple of decades, has developed an appreciation for the more transcendent moments of classical music, I’ve been awaiting the composer who could bridge the chasm between underground, edgy rock ‘n roll and the classical world, for an Arvo Part or a Gorecki to take those ecstatic moments I feel in Symphony Hall and cross the transom to the club world full of kids. But so far to no avail.
I guess Philip Glass came the closest, at least in terms of pop star power. But Glass’s music appeals primarily to aging hippies and East Coast dilettantes. Besides, while he livened up Koyannisquatsi some 20-odd years ago, Glass’ emotional pallet always struck me as rather thin, and he long ago proved to be just another lost opportunity. I admit he brings a modern cadence to classical counterpoint, but that at best makes him a kind of second rate Bach, toiling in the mathematical workshop but lacking the passion and melody that defines almost all great music.
Worse are all the young, mostly privileged phenoms that classical institutions keep foisting on the public. I think the root of the problem is that for the last 40 years, at least in America, the kids who grow up playing classical music are the compliant ones, the kids who do what they’re told, who come home and dutifully practice their Hannon scales, the yawp-less ones unlikely to stir things up or create anything new. You’re not going to get a Beethoven or a Messiaen out of that lot.
I cringe when these young classical musicians try to act hip in their interviews, invoking their love of Frank Zappa or live musical theatre as proof that they are in touch with modern culture. It seems every up-and-coming conductor is a fan of Frank Zappa, which is a crock of shit, first because Frank Zappa couldn’t write a powerful melody or an evocative lyric for all the hash in Humboldt County, and this speaks volumes for the kind of music being favored by these folks, but more importantly because they can’t ALL love Frank Zappa. OK, Jim Zorn probably loves Frank Zappa, and maybe Philip Glass loves Frank Zappa, but pretty soon Frank Zappa quits being Frank Zappa, the overindulgent hippy jam freak, and becomes an icon, a touchstone to prove that you are culturally valid, and it is this kind of paint-by-numbers deference to the accepted esthetic norms that is killing classical music in the first place.
It wasn’t until I was sitting in the Civic Opera House last week listening to Animaa, the opening band on the Sigur Ros tour, that I had the somewhat obvious revelation that the bridge between classical music and rock ‘n roll is being charted by European rock ‘n rollers, in touch with both their culture’s classical roots and the current musical zeitgeist, and not by American classical musicians, who, as a generalization, are in touch with neither.
Animaa is an Icelandic string quartet and a back up group for Sigur Ros. They suffuse their compositions with a hodgepodge of other sounds besides strings, from a vibraphone and a musical saw to a variety of digital samples. At their best, they bring to mind the work of the modern classical composer Gavin Bryars, who will repeat an evocative riff to the point of absurdity, wringing out every possible nuance.
The ways Bryars and Animaa are alike hint at a path for the modern composer of both classical music and electronica, as both genres have shed some of the more annoying aspects of their respective institutions, and both reflect how the notion of what it means to be entertained has evolved.
For 150 years, from the early 19th- to the late 20th Century, classical composers felt the need to vary the pace as a way to keep an auditorium full of listeners attention. So after the andante movement would come the allegro movement. That may have made sense in the old concert halls, but some of these abrupt transitions strike my post-punk ears as unwelcome deviations on a theme. For instance, Richard Strauss will follow a great aria or a memorable, brassy bombast with several bars of goofy tweets and twiddles that sound like background music for a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Back in the day, Strauss was trying to tell a story with his music. But we don’t need classical music to tell us a story; we have film, television, and a host of other media for that. We come to classical music for its unparalleled depth and harmony, among other things, and a lot of these more overeager shifts in tone are, at least to my ears, a distraction. The more consistent cadence found in most music before the Romantic era is something to which many “postmodern” composers, such as Part, Nanes, and Bryars, have returned. Unlike most 19th and 20th Century composers, they do net feel compelled to create opportunities for grandstanding sprinkled amidst their beautiful themes.
The brief history of electronica and its relationship to rock ‘n roll tells a similar story. Rock has historically demanded blood, sweat, and tears (at least one and often more of these) from its stars. Whether it be Elvis Presley, the Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, Bruce Springsteen, or Prince, rock stars are as much personalities as they are troubadours, and the audience expects to see them let it all hang out on stage. Electronica turns this concept on its head, as the performer is there to play music, not to put on a show. Admittedly, this can make for some pretty boring concerts, but it also frees the electronica musician from some of the claptrap that goes with being a rock star; they can approach a live performance much more like a jazz or classical musician might, in that they aren’t compelled to develop some sort of schtick. The trick is how to get rid of some of the sideshow aspects of the rock tour without losing the ability to rock.
It helps if you are Sigur Ros. To write songs that only the 300,000 odd souls who speak Icelandic can understand is a pop death wish, and to record an album in your own invented language of Hopelandish is so obscure as to be absurd, but Sigur Ros burst on the global music scene six years ago, selling several hundred thousands copies of their album “ágætis byrjun”, and they have not looked back. They are currently on an extensive tour of the U.S., with last week’s sold-out show at the Civic Opera House following last September’s date at the Chicago Theatre, and the single “Hoppipolla” off their latest album “Takk” is currently rising up the English singles charts.
Very few rock ‘n roll moments have matched the stunned bliss I felt when I first listened to “agaetis byrjun”. There are times in the dead of winter, late January nights where the mind is so starved for a little light and inspiration that it creates its own, and the most mundane of pleasures can seem profound and perfect, when all of life, seemingly out of nowhere, becomes an ecstasy. On several of these nights, the chorus of “Staalfur” has run through my brain, it’s insensible vocals echoing my reverie while I look out the window at the shadows of the yellow street lights echoing off the snow.
As best as I can glean from the liner art and general tone of the music, “agaetis byrjun” tells the melancholic tale of the birth, travails and triumphs of a fantastic creature, part angel, part alien, part uberman. And that is another conceit of this music that has a lot in common with the great classical composers, that music can tell a tale even if you don’t understand any of the words. Like Beethoven believed that his Ninth Symphony conveyed the strivings of mankind for universal brotherhood, so a rock ‘n roll record could tell the story of the birth of a transcendent being without the listening understanding a single word. From the depths of winter, springs belief.
While “Takk” doesn’t have the same kind of unifying theme as “agaetis byrun”, it probably has a better collection of individual songs, and these songs form the backbone of the current tour. Whereas “agaetis byrjun” is its own beast, on “Takk” you can see how the band is the logical extension of a few fairly divergent rock themes.
For instance, Sigur Ros has broken down the elements of a the 70’s rock anthem and used them for its own devices. I’d say that a song like “Saeglopur” owes a debt to the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” or maybe some of the more magisterial musings of mid-70’s Deep Purple, but really its the other way around, that “Saeglopur” tapped the mother load of arena rock sentiment and brought it to its logical conclusion, that a hundred years from now rock anthropologists will point to Deep Purple and say, “Look this idea finally found its fruition in Sigur Ros, like a soaring bird rising from the ashes of a troglodyte.”
On a song like “Se lest”, Sigur Ros use pretty classical vibraphones and bells, experimenting in the same realm as Tortoise, but once again adding the classic rock riff. If the members of Journey took their coke-inspired melodies, sung them in the language of the Vikings, and then asked Tom Waits to orchestrate the mess, you’d have something like “Se lest”.
The first song on Tuesday’s encore, titled “Daudalagid”, slowed down to the point where it seemed like the entire band was going to freeze in place all together, channeling the 80’s metal band St. Vitus Dance, but on strong barbiturates.
The final encore, “Popplagid”, from the untitled album “()”, captured another vein tapped by Sigur Ros, that of the 80’s industrial band. With the tempo slowly building to a pounding beat, backed by a strobe-inspired video projection, I felt like I was watching classic Ministry, except Sigur Ros have more expensive video equipment and better chops.
It goes without saying that the sound was great at the Lyric Opera House, especially compared with rock caverns like the Aragon Ballroom, but it was also true that it took a few songs for the sound person to adjust the various amplifications to fit the room. So on a couple of the early songs, such as “Saeglopur”, the soaring choruses were hard to hear over the instrumental crescendos. And the band lost it in the middle of “Hoppipolla”, when for several bars it sounded like half of them were playing the bridge while others had moved on to the chorus.
But in the big picture, these were quibbles. On most of the songs, the sound, even from my perch in the lower section of the upper balcony, was crisp, distinct, beautiful. And I don’t think I’ve ever sat with 4,000 fans at a rock show in such rapt attention.
Once, in a another lifetime, during my brief dalliance with the rock ‘n roll bug, I was in a band called The Nymphs that was recording a demo in a studio owned by a member of Bad Religion, who asked everyone in the studio a riddle, which I quickly solved, and I think this ticked him off a bit, because he then dismissively quipped, “What are you doing here? You’re too smart to be playing rock ‘n roll.” Which was probably true for just about everyone in that band, as we were all a bunch of intellectual loners trying to get our shrunken ya ya’s out. But that moment has stuck with me. Was he dissing me for not being cut from the same cloth as real rockers, for in essence being a poseur, or was he criticizing his rock ‘n roll brethren for being a bunch of idiots?
Sigur Ros turn this concept on its head. I guess there have been other rock icons who’ve made smart music for smart people: Brian Eno comes immediately to mind. But most of the “smart” rockers are more along the lines of Lou Reed and Billy Corgan, intelligent guys to be sure, but not too smart, still simple enough to be arrogant and cocksure.
To be in a hall full of hip kids leaning forward in their seats, straining at times to take it all in, was a new experience for me. Like the stories you hear about Mozart being able to raise your baby’s I.Q., Sigur Ros seem to raise the musical intelligence of their listeners, bringing the crowd of mostly 20- and 30-somethings into the realm of the symphonic hall without ever losing the immediacy of the rock ‘n roll moment.