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Franz Ferdinand Warms Up
Glasgow’s rock quartet Franz Ferdinand, responsible for imprinting the auditory canals of millions of people worldwide with their trademark disco rock sound, have come to Iceland (and the inevitable Blue Lagoon) for the first time. The Grapevine spoke to guitarist Nicolas McCarthy,…
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Cynic Guru – Iceland
Roland Hartwell is a violinist for the Icelandic symphony orchestra and the frontman of Cynic Guru. As their debut single demonstrates, Hartwell has an impressive vocal range, and a great ear for pop—he seems to blend later Beatle melodies with Depeche Mode,…
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Hjálmar is the Stuff
Thick fog is closing in on the road down to Hveragerði. The car in front of us is moving at 20 kilometres per hour, and there’s no way of passing. Three tipsy Icelanders are trying to calm me down, telling me the…
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Hoffman – Bad Seeds
A tight rock band that respects its grunge… that’s Hoffman. The drumming is as impressive as the genre demands, the vocals are hard to decipher, but often employ the pronoun “we”, which seems appropriate. Of the six tracks on the CD, the…
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Stranger – Paint Peace
The picture on the Stranger cover shows an amiable man looking down modestly. The tracks on this album are also amiable and modest. Singer Hjörvar Hjörleifsson has a relaxed delivery, sometimes delivering higher notes like an early David Bowie. The compositions are…
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Delicia Mini – Skuggi
A Danish and Icelandic band, Delicia Mini present extremely catchy pop rock, in the better sense of the term. You want to sing along to the choruses, even if they don’t mean that much: “Don’t go back to pieces,/ but do go…
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James Apollo – Good Grief
When members of Kimono imported this Minnesota band to Iceland last spring, we thought they were a little cracked. James Apollo play a mix of Texas waltz and a two-step folk that, on first listen, feels thirty years old. The golden voiced,…
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Daníel Ágúst – Someone Who Swallowed a Star
The opening violin chords of Daníel Águst’s CD are extremely promising—somewhere between melodic and hypnotic. These strings come in throughout the album, but rarely do they do more than promise a good song… rarely do they deliver as they do on the…
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sigur rós come home november 27
After five months of outlandishly positive reviews and sold out shows, and after having avoided playing their home country for three years, Sigur Rós will play a homecoming show on 27 November. As of press time, their show with the amina orchestra…
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KIRA KIRAEverything but the Elves
Explosions are one of many things Kira Kira has developed to perfection. Her first solo album, “Skotta”, starts off with a bleep that explodes into electronic music of the charming sort. It is now being released on a small French label and…
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Goodbye airwaves
The Cave is a largish room in TÞM (Tilraunar-þróunarmiðstöðin – a mouthful in any language), an old fish-processing plant on the unattractive side of town that has evolved into a remarkable institution: A haven for teenage bands and concertgoers that not only…
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The Five Impact Moments of Iceland Airwaves on a Visiting Journalist
5 Grand Rokk, Saturday, Oct. 22. Watching tight, bar-burning bands like Tommygun and Perfect Disorder, I was amazed at how much metal culture and cheeseball stage moves these guys have absorbed, and how enthusiastically they spit it all back, complete with native…
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Hera – Don’t Play This
Not since Spinal Tap’s Shark Sandwich has someone lobbed a softball like this to a reviewer—the abysmal cover featuring a smiling, topless girl, (the picture cuts just at the top of the breasts to be playful), does not help the tag line…
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My Summer as a Salvation Soldier – Anarchists Are Hopeless Romantics
From the first harmonized chorus: “After all that we’ve been through/ these are the memories that I will have of you/ when the years are dead and gone, not a single conversation just this song,” singer Þórir G. Jónsson, going now by…
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Five Beers or Better
Trabant -Emotional Worth six beers. Costs four beers. Trabant have captured the energy of their live shows, but, much better, they’ve reinvented the groove that early recordings and shows only hinted at. While vocalist Ragnar is pumped up and charming as ever,…
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Alice Cooper
Funny as it may seem, the self-crowned Prince of Darkness is a huge West Side Story fan. Alice Cooper, (real name Vincent Damon Furnier), claims to have been absolutely blown away by seeing the musical performed on Broadway, and it inspired him…
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Franz Ferdinand – You Could Have It So Much Better
Franz Ferdinand’s debut album was an international phenomenon that used a disco beat to revise rock. The tunes were full of come ons and relationship troubles, with the overall message that rock should be fun and slightly witty again. You Could Have…
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Sigur Rós Album Review
You started to feel bad for the four members of Sigur Rós, watching the international press hound them for the next album, hearing the grumblings over how their third album, untitled, was slowly losing steam. The Grapevine had visited Sundlaug (swimming pool)…
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Live Music Review:Innipúkinn
Cat Power A phenomenal singer-songwriter whose minimalist compositions have sometimes painfully great depth, Chan Marshall was not in good form on this occasion. A lot of this had to do with the fact that she remained sitting near the front of stage…
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Irish Blood, Icelandic Heart: Two Irish Pubs in Reykjavík
According to Oscar Wilde, “illusion is the first of all pleasures,” a cynical but true remark that Irish pubs around the world have to live up to: creating an illusion of Irishness is their trade. The two Irish pubs in downtown Reykjavík,…
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The Grapevine Summer Special
The Grapevine will say good-bye to winter, April 23, the eve of the first day of summer, with a spectacular show at Organ. We have recruited some of the most exciting bands in Iceland to celebrate the coming summer and we invite…
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The Nohito and Other Brennivín Cocktails
Brennivín is a fine hard caraway-flavoured schnapps, traditionally served as cold as possible. So cold that the liquor gels, if possible. To achieve this effect, place the bottle inside a milk carton full of water, and let it freeze overnight. This allows…
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FLÍS: Vottur
There’s usually integrity to any release from 12 Tónar, Iceland’s independent record label that closely resembles America’s Nonesuch Records. The store and the local music scene always have a stake in one of their releases, and even the failures are compelling. And…