Sigur Ros' Gorgeous Noise Brings Audience to Tears in NYC

A mist hung in the air in the Manhattan Center's Grand Ballroom before Sigur Ros took the stage for the first of three New York shows this week. It wasn't your average smoke machine fog — the band is far too refined for that — but rather a delicate haze, as though the main event would emerge from the cloud like they had just been delivered from Brigadoon.

With the help of a string quartet, a five piece marching band and some stout songs from their just-released album Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, Sigur Ros delivered a set full of womb-like hums and great oceans of white noise. Frontman Jon Por Birgisson treats his guitar like an intergalactic oddity, regularly shredding it with a violin bow and singing his ethereal falsetto into the pickups.

The crowd, some in fancy dress who took the "ballroom" part of the venue name pretty seriously, hung on every note, sometimes singing along to organ hums or xylophone solos and roaring with approval whenever the band hit a climax. Following a confetti-filled encore, a handful of fans were so moved by the spectacle that they actually wept.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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