Given that its homeland is facing an economic crisis that outstrips even that of the U.S., there was something poignant about seeing Iceland’s Sigur Rós divested of strings and horns at the Chan Centre on Tuesday, as if the band was on an austerity program. Boiled down to its four core members, the critically adored experimental rockers still produced an incredible amount of mysterious noise with a setup that didn’t include much more than guitars, drums, keyboards of various types, a xylophone, and guitarist-vocalist Jónsi Birgisson’s unearthly falsetto. After watching the four of them at work on “Glósóli”, it’s doubtful any of us is closer to understanding why it sounds like the song is going backward. Equally puzzling was how Birgisson gets his rig to produce that baleful but impressive metallic screaming noise, as in “Ní Batterí­”. It’s the kind of sound you might hear if you were lowered far enough into an active volcano.

The two-hour-plus show had its share of spellbinding moments, most memorably when the band froze for 30 seconds during “Vií°rar Vel Til Loftárása”, leaving the audience to contemplate a silence so vast you could hear the krona plummet. Mercifully nobody coughed, giggled, or screeched “Play ‘Free Bird’!” during the interlude, after which Birgisson led the band back in with a heart-rending noise that might have been a sob. Sigur Rós’s facility for creating melancholy on such an overwhelming scale is something that leaves the audience either richer or poorer, depending on what you have invested in this type of manipulation. This was a sold-out-for-weeks show, so it’s not like the crowd was merely curious. It was awestruck, happily giving itself over to an aesthetic that demands total submission. But it takes a certain endurance to get through something like “Festival”, which is five minutes of funereal moaning from Birgisson followed by another five minutes of repetitive postrock on a beyond-epic scale. Resist such blatantly emotive art and you might doze off after the first hour and a half of a Sigur Rós concert, or about a third of the way through sparser lamentations like “Heysátan”.

As such, some of the best moments of the evening fell on the less-cathedral side, whether it was the straightforward almost-pop of “Vií Spilum Endalaust”, given a decisive and thumping backbeat by drummer Orri Páll Dírason, or the sight of Birgisson and keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson sitting beside each other for “Inní­ Mér Syngur Vitleysingur”, both of them banging merrily away on keyboards and sharing vocals. When openers Parachutes marched on-stage dressed as Imperial Stormtroopers for the set-ending “Gobbledigook”, the band broke into the “The Imperial March” from Star Wars, which was cute. And of course, you can’t complain about confetti cannons (unless you’re the cleaning staff at the Chan Centre). It was all very fun in a low-key Icelandic way, but the best sight of the evening was probably the lone beer held aloft during the monstrous freak-out that rears up toward the end of “Síglópur”. There was something reassuring in the fact that at least one slob rebelled against the infinite tastefulness of Sigur Rós by smuggling in a tall boy.

Georgia Straight, October 2008