Article and Photos by: Michael W. Bright

Louisville, KY- Ethereal is probably overused as a description for a sound or music or a band. Yet here is a band whose picture will, as they say, be in the dictionary if you lookup the word. Experimental, art rock, ambient music, minimalist, are all appropriate descriptions. One Louisville uber fan summed it up best. Sigur Ros performs the soundtrack to the universe, that’s Universe with a capital “U.”

Iceland’s Sigur Ros regularly plays festivals and arenas around the world, so American fans have been thrilled with the group’s theater performances this Spring and coming Summer.  The band can vary in size from the core of three members who played here Tuesday night, to as many as, well, how ever many musicians make up the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who accompanied the group’s three night stand at L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in April.

The brilliant lighting design packed onto the Louisville venue’s smaller stage rivaled the best big rock extravaganzas, but founder and frontman Jonsi’s echoing falsetto, and his iconic bowed guitar was the centerpiece. If you are conjuring the sound of another familiar Icelandic artist, Bjork, there are certainly some aural similarities.

On Tuesday night the Palace was the cathedral, the figurative candles were blazing, and Sigur Ros provided the ambient psychedelic choir. Those who attended the two hour mass left the transcendent performance sanctified, inspired and believers.