songoftheweek

Jónsi - Go Do

Jónsi Birgisson recently announced that he has placed his band, Sigur Rós, on “indefinite hiatus”. The ostensible reason was that several members of the Icelandic group now have young children, but it appears equally pertinent that their vocalist and guitarist is eager to pursue solo career opportunities.

Go, Jónsi’s debut album under his own name, seeks to translate Sigur Rós’s elegiac, symphonic soundscapes into something approximating pop music, and is a qualified success. The material works better live, where a five-piece band – including Jónsi’s partner, Alex Somers, on guitar – and spectacular visuals by the theatrical design company 59 Productions combine in a truly hypnotic performance.

The evening starts slowly, with Jónsi’s keening, ethereal vocal over the humming synths and throbbing guitars inspiring a distracted reverie. Audience attention focuses on huge LED screens around the band, where, at one point, a cheetah pursues a gazelle in phantom, slow-motion x-ray vision.

As the pace quickens, the intensity picks up. The pounding yet fragile Tornado sounds like a cut from Thom Yorke’s solo album The Eraser, while the gloriously overwrought single Go Do finds Birgisson transported among spirals of delirious guitar, radiant synths and animal drumming. Both Around Us and Go Do seem set to drift into Coldplay epic-intimacy territory, but ends with Birgisson on his knees, testifying in a laser-beam falsetto over hiccuping, mesmerizing glitch-pop. This album is equally as mesmerizing as their live shows.