Sigur Rós review: Avant-garde rock theatre wins out in a gig of two halves

Earlier this week, Icelandic rock band Sigur Rós compared curating a newly announced hometown festival to compiling a fantasy football team. So it made an odd sort of sense that this live return to the capital — the first of three nights at the Eventim Apollo — should feel like a gig of two halves: glacial, challenging and tricksy at the beginning, energetic, urgent and utterly electrifying by the end.

To be fair to them, this was very much by design. Having downsized to a three-piece since the 2013 departure of founding member Kjartan Sveinsson, the band who occasionally sing in the made-up dialect of “Hopelandic” have billed this stripped-back tour as “an evening with Sigur Rós”.

Instead of travelling with a support act or their usual accompanying orchestra, bassist Georg Hólm, drummer Orri Páll Dyrason and frontman Jónsi Birgisson have elected to perform two distinct “sets” with an interval in between and immersive, noise-reactive light design.

Things got off to a striking start, as discordant new song Á rumbled to life and a thin screen showed a kind of shifting, time-lapsed aurora borealis. Soon, the insistent bassline of Glósóli — from the poppy 2005 crossover album Takk — was drawing whoops from the rapt crowd. But forward momentum seemed to be almost wilfully curtailed as the trio patiently experimented their way to halftime without once addressing the audience.

Pleasingly, the second portion of the gig — which started suddenly, as plenty were still scrambling back from the bar — was a different story. Dwarfed by increasingly complex digital constellations, the band married magisterial showmanship (Birgisson held a high note for an unfathomable amount of time) and surprisingly riffy spectacle (Dyrason ended the set shirtless and sweat-slicked). Two West End-worthy bows in lieu of an encore hammered the point home. This was avant-garde rock theatre with a sting in its tail.