When ‘Heima’ came out in 2006 it helped to bring the visceral ferocity of Sigur Ros’ live show into focus and, by focusing on a unique and unconventional tour, it provided suitably lush backdrops for the performances. It is a beautiful film, and one which I can fully commend to latter day fans’ attention, but what it lacked was the overall flow of the Sigur Ros concert experience, with the cut and paste ethos reducing the tension and dynamic of a full performance. ‘Inni’ redresses the balance. A full concert film, recorded way back in 2008 at Alexandra Palace, ‘Inni’ captures Sigur Ros at their enigmatic best – mysterious vocals, hypnotic rhythms and blistering guitars – and throws in a double CD of the concert audio while it’s at it.
There has been much debate over the best way to present a concert in these days of computer manipulation and digital effects. Like some bands introducing the scratchy sound of vinyl into their mixes to make their music sound more… analogue, so film editors feel the need to digitally reinsert images of film strips running out, scratches and blur to give the film a more ‘edgy’ feel (yes, I’m looking at you, Porcupine Tree) which seems bizarre when you consider the amount of time, money and effort that has been spent on the quest for digital perfection. Nonetheless there is a world of difference between the self-consciously old-school ‘artiness’ of some films (shooting half a track in sepia, for example, isn’t art… it’s just damned annoying) and a director treating a piece of film as art and genuinely working hard to make something visually spectacular. Vincent Morisset, who directs ‘inni’, is clearly ambitious. The original film was shot in HD from a variety of angles and then transferred to 16mm, projected and re-filmed through various objects – all of which lends the film a most unusual air. It is not always successful. There is a strong argument that Sigur Ros performances are already powerful enough (something testified to by the second disc of ‘Heima’) and therefore don’t need this crazed visual augmentation. Equally there are times when you yearn for a standard panning shot of band and crowd, if only to break out of the oddly tormented angles which the director does insist on showing. Yet, there are other times when it coalesces and makes sense – when the broken, black and white, obscured visuals make sense and gel with the music and you feel a sense of awe at how Vincent has managed to make the film both claustrophobic and expansive at the same time thus representing the music perfectly.
The sound itself is perfect. The two CDs run for 105 minutes in total and capture the entire event via a pristine mix. The DVD is shorter, although the missing tracks appear as bonuses, at 75 minutes with the sound in a paint-stripping 5.1 mix that is brilliantly judged and balanced. With nine songs in the main feature, along with unexplained archive footage which actually interpolates far better than you might expect, the DVD opens with a stormy ‘Ny Batteri’ and rarely lets up, with ‘svefn – g’ providing rippling brilliance and the utterly scintillating ‘Popplagid’ proving to be utterly devastating as the guitars surge and roar and Jonsi’s voice becomes buried under the tide of feedback and noise. It is at these points, when Sigur Ros start to resemble the crushing might of Mogwai on ‘Like herod’ that you begin to realise that buried deep beneath the placid surface of Sigur Ros lies a solid rock musculature that is frequently overlooked, and the crowd, much like the viewers of this DVD, are reduced to gawping bystanders fixed in the headlights of an oncoming freight-train as the music moves from graceful and melancholic to savage in the extreme. It is a masterly transformation and explains all too clearly why high profile acts such as Metallica felt compelled to express their admiration.
That all this is packaged in a beautiful black and white digi-pack complete with suitably eccentric postcards is the icing on the cake, and for once the record company has covered every angle with a vinyl edition coming complete with the DVD as well as a four disc edition which throws in a Blu-ray as well as the DVD (although why you’d want both is a little confusing). Whichever edition you do choose to go for, however, this is an awe-inspiring reminder of the live power of Sigur Ros and played on a suitably large television screen through a 5.1 equipped DVD/Blu-ray player it’s liable to demolish your house during the louder moments. A fine set from one of the world’s oddest bands.
