Rolling Stone Goes Native at Icelandic Airwaves Music Fest

Icelandic singer-songwriter Mugison already has a reputation abroad for bleak magic, on record and in solo appearances with acoustic guitar and laptop. But in his headlining set at the Art Museum, he came out swinging like a country-blues Led Zeppelin, armed with a muscular backing band of electric bass, pedal steel guitar and cannon-fire drums. Introspection from Mugison's earlier records, such as "I Want You" and "Poke a Pal," was pumped up with a volume and grit evoking John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band album, while a cover of Tom Waits' "Little Trip to Heaven" -- which appears on Mugison's latest album on the 12 Tonar label, Little Trip -- rattled with a backwoods worry that Ryan Adams would envy.

A 7:30 PM set on October 19th by the young instrumental quartet Miri, at the small, upstairs club Grand Rokk, confirmed the virtues of hitting the pavement early. Miri, who come from west Iceland, only had time for two pieces. But the first was twenty minutes long -- a winding road through double-guitar motifs closer to the Texan space-rock of Explosions in the Sky than the glacial concertos of Sigur Rós, with the bonus of a distinctly Beatle-esque clang. One segment was built on a church-bell power chord that sounded like a bright chip off the one that opens "Getting Better" on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Miri's self-released debut EP, Fallegt Thorpe, is a rougher draft of what I saw. But the promise is unmistakeable.

Another band of local tearaways, simply called Reykjavik!, proved the wisdom of giving first impressions a second chance -- and also that size matters. When I saw them go wild at the dancehall NASA, Reykjavik! looked and sounded too unhinged for their own good. Vocals were way out of tune; the songwriting seemed like more bluster than bullets. But the next day, crammed into a tiny performing space at the 12 Tonar record store, Reykjavik! earned that exclamation point with more contained and addictive abandon, like a Nineties Sub Pop version of the Dead Boys -- with their own crowd-surfing Stiv Bators in singer Bóas Hallgrimsson -- in both the cover mayhem of David Bowie's "Changes" and the shredded-Cheap Trick original "All Those Beautiful Boys." Reykjavik!'s debut album on 12 Tonar is called Glacial Landscapes, Religion, Oppression and Alcohol -- a concise description of what it's like to be teenage here and why so many bands sound so good.

Of the international attractions, the Kaiser Chiefs were the most professionally exciting, cheerfully blasting through songs from their forthcoming second album, although none had the punch or iron-hook chorus of the band's breakthrough hit "I Predict a Riot." Tilly and the Wall looked more eccentric -- with a tap dancer in majorette spangles, Jamie Williams, in lieu of a drummer -- that they sounded, which was at once vintage and original. Singers Kianna Alarid and Neely Jenkins harmonized like an indie-rock Shangri-Las, while Williams punctuated the sugar with flamenco-like gunshots.

But for lasting magic, there was no beating the afternoon recital, at the downtown church Fríkirkjan, by composer-keyboardist Jóhann Jóhannsson. Two nights earlier, as part of the Apparat Organ Quartet, Jóhannsson showed there was little distance between the minimalisms of early Seventies Philip Glass and anytime-anyplace AC/DC. In front of an altar, accompanied by a programmer and string quartet, Jóhannsson celebrated the release of his new 4 AD album, ibm 1401, a user's manual, with an hour of devotional simplicity -- elementary organ and piano patterns -- that slowly mushroomed to explosive joy, framed by swooping strings and atomic-insect electronics. The final piece began as a buoyant organ phrase that sounded like the keyboard-solo section of Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida," then swelled into a booming circular rapture with strings and digital percussion, like a techno version of Terry Riley's In C. It wasn't "rock." But like the best of everything else that weekend, it rocked me.