Desertification Way Up North

As an avid Kyuss fan, I went to Cafe Amsterdam with mixed expectations this evening. On the one hand, I was looking forward to see a particular member of the group playing live; but then again, disappointment is never far away when you enter a show with such high hopes. Fortunately, everything went fine.    Let’s start from at beginning: the opener of the night was Krummi (Mínus) and Daníel’s (GusGus) new band, Esja. Their bluesy Western sound fit very well into this evening’s desert rock line-up that practically forced people to come in with cowboy hats and spurs. Esja’s powerful beginning of their driving set started off well for half an hour. However, after that the set seemed to lose its way with dreary mid-tempo songs.     When Brain Police started, the room was packed. The band was already being celebrated before they even began playing. Their show thrilled the frenetic crowd, sometimes a little too much (did that girl in the first row really lick the singer’s sweaty belly?). They served amazing 45 minutes of billowing vapour of sound. The whole place was vibrating during their set; I don’t know if it was their guitar and bass sound that caused the window next to me crack, but surely, it could have! As a bow to Brant Bjork, they played Kyuss’s “100 Degrees” as the penultimate song, which brought the euphoria in the audience to its zenith.    Brant Bjork and the Bros. did a rollicking good job headlining, as their dusty 70s rock was a gnarly hybrid between hypnotic stoner tunes and harder Jimi Hendrix-style riffs which led one patron to become the first stage diver I have seen here in Iceland. Okay, it was his third try and he got carried out of the venue after he had fallen off the stage when he tried for his fourth drunken time; but still, I will remember the third! BBB even came back for an encore after their one-and-a-half hour set. So in summary, everybody had fun.