Reykjavík Grapevine - 09.04.2010, Qupperneq 34

The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 04 — 2010
22
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KEFLAVÍK
BORGARNES
STYKKISHÓLMUR
SNÆFELLSJÖKULL
DRANGAJÖKULL
FLATEY
NESKAUPSTAÐUR
BLÖNDUÓS
SIGLUFJÖRÐUR
BOLUNGARVÍK
HRÍSEY
NARSARSSUAQ
Greenland
FAROE ISLANDS
REYKJAVÍK
AKUREYRI
EGILSSTAÐIR
VESTMANNAEYJAR
ÍSAFJÖRÐUR
VOPNAFJÖRÐUR
ÞÓRSHÖFN
HÚSAVÍK
GRÍMSEY
KULUSUK
Greenland
Blue Lagoon
AKRANES Geysir
Gullfoss
Jökullónið
Kárahnjúkar
Krafla
Hallormstaður
NUUK
Greenland
ILULISSAT
Greenland
www.airiceland.is
CONSTABLE POINT
Greenland
Inexplicably, at midnight, the bar gets crowded.
There’s no clear reason why. The house lights
have come on and Reykjavik! have stopped play-
ing. By all traditional indications, this should be
the end of the night. But the stairs leading down
into Krúsin are packed and the lobby area that
doubles as the club’s bar is straining to con-
tain the sudden onrush of tall, giddy, grinning
blondes.
As it turns out, this encounter is the ideal pre-
amble to this year’s Aldrei fór ég suður (”I Never
Went South”) festival, a two-day music event
that takes place in the small Icelandic village
of Ísafjörður, located in Iceland’s northernmost
fjords. The following 48 hours would be full of
loud drunks happily trying to cram themselves
inside buildings too small to hold them, all in an
effort to get an earful of a few minutes of music.
an aRT pRoJECT oF a ToWn
The town of Ísafjörður is a visual miracle. Sur-
rounded on all sides by massive, awe-inspiring
cliffs, the village feels like an art project: a bright-
ly-coloured, economically-designed township
nestled dead in the centre of gargantuan natural
marvels. It’s as if someone had dropped it in us-
ing a crane.
Unlike Iceland Airwaves, Aldrei fór ég suður
focuses mainly on local and unknown bands.
Indeed, the biggest international “name” on the
bill is Ólöf Arnalds, and the next biggest is the
festival’s organiser, rock experimentalist Mugi-
son. Where Airwaves usually books a handful
of international bands, Ísafjörður’s festival is
proudly, stubbornly local. It’s also charmingly
and deliberately amateurish. As Mugison said
over a lunch of fish stew before the festival
opened, “No one gets a sound check, everyone
uses the same equipment, and there’s no hier-
archy in selecting the set times” (perhaps as if
to prove his own point, he scheduled himself to
play early on the first night).
The festival’s relentless egalitarianism means
that the musical choices can often be baffling.
On Saturday night, a group called Yxna, com-
prised mostly of men in their sixties sporting
leather jackets and sunglasses, bashed out bar
blues to a mostly appreciative audience. Their
set concluded with a cover of I Can’t Help Falling
in Love With You, sung by Oscar nominated Ice-
landic film director Friðrik Þór in a craggy voice
that would make Tom Waits sound like Celine
Dion.
iCElandERS loVE To puSh and ShoVE
The festival boasted just as much bad music as
good, but that’s somewhat beside the point: the
event’s the thing. Parents wheel out well-bun-
dled infants in strollers, dads hoist excitable four
year-olds up on their shoulders, grandparents
mill around by the hot dog stand. Though the fes-
tival is held in an unheated cement warehouse,
the sheer number of bodies crammed into that
small space provides ample heat. Indeed, the
festival’s biggest drawback is the enthusiasm of
its audience: much like that first night at Krú-
sin, audience members are more than willing to
consistently push, shove and bully their way into
the building.
But there’s no good reason to linger on the
downside. More than anything, the festival
speaks to a passionate and generation-defying
love for and appreciation of Icelandic music.
Where many other festivals come off as a cel-
ebration of song (still others, a celebration of
commerce), the festival in Ísafjörður feels like
a celebration of Iceland. Few of the bands have
much ambition to be successful anywhere other
than their homeland, so it seems petty to call out
the less-than-spectacular.
Especially when the festival offered more
than its share of gems: Ólöf Arnalds, always a
treasure live, deigned to break out the sublime
lullaby Við og Við, a song she has yet to perform
any time I’ve seen her play in the U.S. Reykjavík!,
who are easily as thrilling as any post-punk band
the States has lately produced, hurtled through
their set, a bracing shot of spastic noise.
QuiET Can BE JuST aS Good
The quieter acts were often just as good: Lára
Rúnars offered the kind of cheery, chirpy indie
pop that would make fans of Lykke Li swoon.
The orchestral pop act Hjaltalín was angelic, lac-
ing simple pop melodies with strings and brass
and even an oboe, proving it’s possible to add a
string section to your band and not sound like a
mimeograph of Arcade Fire. That their set ended
with a rapturous cover of Don’t Stop ’til You Get
Enough was merely a bonus.
Often, the bands were harder to pin down:
Biggibix went from approximating the ’80s
nostalgia of the Killers to the ’80s nostalgia of
Daughtry. Still, it was harder to resist his last
number, the broad and soaring Situation (the re-
corded version of which sells it short by a great
deal). A small army of fellow friends and musi-
cians crowded on to the stage—somewhere be-
tween 15 and 20 in all—locked arms and belted
out the song’s giddy, shout-along chorus and,
one by one, the audience caught on and joined
in. In the end, that’s what Aldrei fór ég suður is
about: a community raising cheerful, drunken
voices in song and in celebration.
J. Edward Keyes is Editor-in-Chief for the awe-
some eMusic site. He has been writing about
music since 1997 for publications including Roll-
ingStone.com, Newsday, the Village Voice and
Entertainment Weekly. And the Grapevine!
Travel | Ísafjörður
J. EdWaRd KEyES
Julia STaplES
Cheerful, Drunken Voices In Song And Celebration
Aldrei fór ég suður, for the first time again
What's on for AFÉS 2011? We have no idea, but we hear from
reliable sources that the programme is already being put together.
See www.airiceland.is for schedules and
more action-packed day trips.