Majesty. It’s a more difficult word to decipher than you might think. The American Heritage Dictionary labels the word as a noun, which is odd. Majesty can’t be named, located or touched.
Fortunately for those poor lexicographers, the Icelandic quartet Sigur Rós took the stage at the Orpheum Theatre Tuesday night and bailed them out. The group’s performance was a definite thing, and that thing was very close to the embodiment of majesty. In fact, the performance created an astounding parallel of two quintessentially majestic images: the rising and setting of the sun.
Shrouded by a semi-transparent curtain that covered the audience’s entire field of view, the quartet floated onto the stage as shadows in the darkness. The group’s first song was an appropriately sparse, ethereal number, anchored by Georg Holm’s bass and Kjartan Sveinsson’s thoughtful synth touches.
For the second song, the curtain was raised, but all onstage had vanished, leaving Jóónsi Birgisson (guitar, lead vocals) standing alone, a solitary light shining on him. Over the dissonant sounds of a violin bow against his guitar, Birgisson’s voice rang out in an otherworldly falsetto that sounded as if someone grafted both Bjork and Joni Mitchell’s vocal chords onto his own.
By song’s end, the remaining members materialized from the shadows. Blue lights flashed in time to Orri Páll D×rason’s driving drumbeat, illuminating the entire band as well as the string quartet that joined the band onstage.
Precisely halfway through the set, magenta lights exploded in all directions around the then-octet as they pushed out sheets of sound with almost telepathic unity, creating a triumphant climax and eventually fading into a gorgeous string arrangement to end it.
Then, like the sun, Sigur Rós slowly began its descent back into darkness, finally performing the encore behind the same curtain that originally shrouded the members. And, though it was the most aggressive, dissonant song of the evening, when it was finished, they faded back into the shadows from which they came.