Gig review: Sigur Rós - Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

SIGUR Rós’s new film is a very different creature to 2007’s Heima, which followed the band as they played a series of homecoming shows around Iceland.

If Heima was a rare, up-close encounter with an often enigmatic band, revealing their nervousness at playing intimate gigs for friends, Inni director Vincent Morriset prefers to make them enigmas again, transforming his HD footage into blurry, grainy black- and-white by projecting and refilming it, often to the point where the band become ghostly apparitions, barely identifiable.

Inni was filmed at London’s Alexandra Palace, but the footage suggests it was filmed in a vast cave or on the Moon. You can see why the band wanted to show it to people on a big screen in a concert venue (you can also see it on 1 November at Oran Mor in Glasgow). The best way to experience the film is to focus on the music, and experience the visuals as an abstract living painting – which looks beautiful on a big screen – rather than trying to figure out what’s going on.

After 70 minutes of this, some human interaction was much needed, and a solo set by singer-songwriter Dan Willson (aka Withered Hand) was a counterintuitive but inspired choice, Willson winning the audience over with charm and daft jokes (getting the first laugh of the night by introducing No Cigarettes with the words “This song’s called ‘No Sigur Ros’.”). The evening finished with Meursault, now a confident, muscular rock band rather than the folk/electronica crossbreed they began as. Sigur Rós fans might just be the perfect audience for them, even if the context wasn’t ideal for music that’s best experienced standing up.

Rating: ****