Sigur Ros at the United Palace Theatre

Last night on 175th st, in what is virtually the remote north of Manhattan, at the unheralded but profoundly beautiful United Palace Theatre, my heart flailed and fluttered and dipped its broad spoon into the many wells of the music and melodrama of Sigur Ros. The concert began with a series of older familiar tunes that procured special reverberations I've held dear in listening to their albums over the years. The early stuff is a lot of soft melodious bowed guitar and piano swells sprinkled with bells and chimes and occasional interruptions of hard charging drums. There was a feeling of being pushed gently along by a series of slow, saline tides, and behind the music, on a projection screen over twenty feet all, there reeled a series of vintage montages of choir children singing along in the middle of a meadow, smiling, whistling, dancing. The grainy, black and white footage, cut and stunted here and there, provided an eerie sense of place to the solemn dramatic soundscape.

Deliberately, the show moved into territories of newer music, which the audience en masse seemed to be more excited about. Their more recent work is a little plumper and more fit to pop sensibilities. The song structures are less like braids of steam, more like a hundred armies thundering across the face of a new planet. Jonsi Birgisson's typically melancholy, elemental falsetto is used more as an engine for busier melodic compositions. Still, fluid and lovely, the bands recent work is certainly more fit for mass consumption. This could explain the numbers in the thousands situated quietly and attentively in their rows upon rows of theatre seats.

The night ended with a raucous ever climbing climax of a song that seemed like a volcano that would never stop erupting. After two hours of all that gorgeous noise, we, the audience, shaken and awestruck, most of us speechless, were moved to a point of a silent filing out.