I felt let down. That year’s album, Valtari, was a pale imitation of former glories and that tour saw them content to languish as the Icelandic band that soundtrack David Attenborough documentaries.
Two minutes into tonight’s O2 gig, their biggest Irish headliner outside the festival circuit, my worries are dispelled, to the heavens. Opening with ‘Yfirborð ‘, from current opus Kveikur, it’s impossible to tear your eyes or ears away. There’s a huge white sheet covering the front of the stage, which we’ve seen before. But rather than simply acting as a receptacle on which to project shadows, it’s also a screen for weird and wonderful images, inter-cut with the musicians’ profiles, via-a plethora of fish-eye lens dotted around the stage. The result is an audio-visual feast that’s equal parts hypnotic and amniotic.
It’s followed by the majestic ‘Glósóli’, from 2005’s Takk, and it’s already clear that we’re in for something special. The now three-piece of Jonsi, Georg and Orri (following the departure of Kjartan earlier this year) are joined by no fewer than eight other multi-instrumentalists, including a string and brass trio, an occasional second drummer, and even at one point a flautist, to create a tsunami-esque mountain of noise that wallops the audience like a snowstorm in the kisser. It’s enormous, it’s emotional, it’s as genuinely thrilling as music gets. And it’s only the beginning.
The veil falls after three songs and the band are revealed for the first time. It’s almost disappointing: you mean they’re not 12-foot tall aliens?! With or without the screen, however, the light-show remains nothing short of spectacular. It’s the perfect complement to the audio, whether it’s the throbbing, squelchy low-end of ‘Brennisteinn’, the floaty tinkles of ‘Sæglópur’ or the elegant ‘Varúð’. It remains impossible to listen to ‘Hoppípolla’, the closest they come to a three-minute pop song, without smiling, and ‘Festival’, which closes the main set, sees Jonsi lung-burstingly holding a note for what seems like forever.
The encore perfectly encapsulates their career, moving from the elegiac ‘Svefn-G-Englar’, through this year’s insistent ‘Rafstraumur’ and finishing on the gob-smacking sensory overload of ‘Popplagið’, which leaves an awestruck O2 on its feet, mouths agog and fists a-pumping.