Friday night was the much-anticipated Reykjavik Calling showcase of musicians from Iceland (and the Faroe Islands, this time around) playing with Seattle musicians. (If you missed the free show, here’s a little video preview courtesy of KEXP.)
Neumo’s was already jammed when I arrived–too late for the first set, thanks to electrical gremlins in Skillet‘s wagon–despite the night being rainswept and cool. Icelandic weather, in other words. (Seattleites who visit Reykjavik find it very familiar, climate-wise, and vice-versa.)
Maybe the most successful cross-cultural meeting of the night was between Grand Hallway‘s Tomo Nakayama and the Faroe Islands’ Gudrid Hansdottir–they seemed really to have clicked, temperamentally. Hansdottir sang a song about fog; Grand Hallway has an album called Winter Creatures.
David Bazan and Snorri Helgason also seemed to get along famously, but Bazan seemed to determined to play what he called “bummer” songs, and it was a mood hard to square with a Friday night with sidewalks filled with people in costume. I wanted to put on headphones and hang on each word. Helgason, not to be outdone, sang an old folk song, “Butcher Boy,” about a young girl who, seduced and abandoned, hangs herself. He also played the more uptempo “I’m Gonna Put My Name on Your Door,” in honor of a new acquaintance’s engagement.
For Sean Nelson, relationships may not go together like peanut butter and chocolate, at least to judge from a few of the songs he sang. Happily, he knows that a spoonful of waltz-time helps the medicine go down. He’s another lyricist who stretches what you think of as popular music–one song is about neurophysiology and perception. Another, “Advance and Retreat,” is about a prototypical ambivalent attachment. I was taken by the Wordsworthian triplet in which he says that when two clouds collide, you expect rain, but also that the rain will subside.
Ólöf Arnalds reminds me of someone’s favorite aunt, grown-up but game for just about anything, including singing late before a restive, partly soused Neumo’s audience. She opened with a cover of Nirvana’s “Polly” (the concert closed with a messy, all-hands version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), talking about how she’d learned guitar by playing Nirvana songs. This song has just four chords, she thought to herself, I can do that! However, there are five, and that fifth one is a nightmare. She invited the crowd to sing along with the chorus to “The British Army.” Then it was time to attempt to tune her armadillo-backed ukelele.
This brings up the moral dilemma of Reykjavik Calling: Do they have to go back home? Why can’t we keep them?