Earlier tonight I was at a huge FREE outdoors concert in the Laugardalur park in Reykjavík, Iceland. The concert was held to increase enviromental awareness, especially regarding smelter factories and power plants in Iceland. About 30.000 people were at the concert.

The line-up for the concert was as following:

Radium - soundscape project with members from Ghostigital (including Einar Örn from the Sugarcubes)
Ólöf Arnalds - female folk artist
Sigur Rós
BJÖRK


I was there the whole concert, except I missed the last two songs from Björk... She closed the set with "Declare Independence". In retrospect I would have liked to see her do that song, but me and my friends decided to skip the massive queues from the parking lots and left early and got ourselves some shawarma.

Here's my short review on the two main acts at the concert:

Sigur Rós were really, really good tonight. The last time I saw them (incidentally, at another free outdoors concert in 2006), their setlist was too loaded with really long epic songs, but this time they mixed it up. They started off with two epic songs from Ágætis byrjun, "Svefn-G-Englar" and "Ný batterí"... but they also played a lot of songs from the new album, mostly the more up-beat stuff which kept things interesting during their set. The highlights of their set are their performances of the 2 first songs and their performance of "Gobbledigook" featuring Björk - on DRUMS!

Björk started things off with a blast - after a short film about the enviromental issues in Iceland was shown on the projector and a brass intro of the old Icelandic song "Brennið þið vitar" (apparently this is the regular intro of her Volta shows) she kicked off with "Earth Intruders"... other songs she played included Hunter, Unravel, Pagan Poetry, The pleasure is all mine, Joga, Army of me, I miss you, Bachelorette, Wanderlust, Hyperballad and Triumph of the Heart. Björk and her band were in good form tonight, although she complained that she had a bad cold. I really couldn't notice it affecting her vocals, except that she avoided a few high notes in the later songs, including "Bachelorette". The highlights of her show were in my opinion her performance of "Triumph of the Heart" and "I Miss You" which featured Sugarcube Einar Örn on trumpet.

All in all an excellent show, except maybe for the supporting act, the cheesy folk singer Ólöf Arnalds.

The show was webcasted live on the National Geographic website.... I read somewhere that they will offer the show on-demand for the next few weeks.


Here I have some photos from the concert I've found on various Icelandic websites.... I didn't bring a proper camera to the event so unfortunately I didn't take any pics there.. but anywho, enjoy!










[Edited 6/28/08 19:22pm]

Thank you SO much for this purplehippie. It would have been Heaven to have been there. Triumph of the Heart . What a fabulous setlist from my favourite artist ~ Bjork. I've seen Sigur Ros in concert and it was completely mesmerizing (that is an understatement). One day, I hope to see them perform together.

MoonSongs said:

I know what you mean. When the intro to Svefn-G-Englar started I looked at the crowd closer to the stage (I wasn't very close to the stage) and the weather, the crowd, everything fitted for THAT moment.... it was really magical.
One other bit from concert I remembered:
Björk used the opportunity between songs to joke about her bad cold....
she said something like "I'm starting to sound like Johnny Cash over here" and then did a "Johnny Cash" impression.

so about 3 words total will be understood?




no really, I heard sigur is great live

i love when bjork wears her strawberry shortcake meets george clinton outfit!

and it breaks my heart that i missed a chance to see her playing drums for sigur ros, in one of my favorite places ever.

thanks for the report!