Sigur Rós at the Midland last night: spectral post-rock or whale song for millennials? (Both)

When Sigur Rós announced its 2016 tour — “An Evening With,” went the billing, with no opening act and no supporting musicians onstage with the trio — the Reykjavík band said on its website that it was excited about shows that would recall the “seat-of-the-pants feeling” that attended gigs of more than a decade ago. “Seat-of-the-pants” being a relative notion for a highly deliberate outfit born of the aurora borealis, the Katla volcano and the Casio calculator watch. The feeling last night at Arvest Bank Theatre at the Midland, where Sigur Rós played to a sold-out crowd of more than 2,000 people, was more head-off-the-pillow-to-look-at-the-alarm-clock-and-then-back-down-on-the-pillow-to-keep-dreaming-for-two-hours.

In a good way. Who doesn’t love seeing that another couple hours of sleep can be had?

So who can’t love at least a little Sigur Rós? The band makes music for atomic-powered sleep machines, an oceanic sound conveyed via exotic dreamscape waveforms. On disc, the results are enveloping, provided you’re in a yielding mood. Live, the sound is trebly immersive, both serene and sternum-vibrating. It also slips toward risibility if the spell isn’t cast right away. The mallets-on-toms drum sound and the bowed guitar and the avalanche-courting vocals and the prison-break bursts of light can invert toward self-parody, toward prog survivalists playing their own proggy tribute show.

Ten years ago, I saw Sigur Rós at the Uptown, and I remember leaving in a fog of enthrallment. The phrase “Sigur Rós at the Uptown” operates as a kind of password even now among fellow travelers, those of us who crave vintage Brian Eno and state-run health care. This market can go long stretches between stagey pop performances designed to hypnotize smaller venues, and Sigur Rós is unabashed in its desire to leave you blissed-out and blank-eyed. For which it deserves thanks — even when the trick doesn’t quite work.

Last night, I was too aware of wanting that 2006 feeling to get very near it. The band, static as stage presence but dynamic as live sound — loud and soft and loud and … less loud … and … soft — was professional. Amazing recorded sonics were cannily reproduced, with a clear and well-defined mix, before visual displays that were obviously of appropriate “An Evening With” expense. It was a big show. It was a gorgeous show. And it was, at times, a silly show, if you let yourself hear new-age whale song in singer Jónsi’s keening falsetto. If you thought about all the little massage-oil thumbprints on countless copies of Ágætis byrjun around the world. If you let the ugly brown moths of taste-doubt gather around the bright light of this singular-ish band’s two-or-three-times-in-a-lifetime stage show.

It wasn’t you last night, Sigur Rós. It was me. But I have all the albums, and I’ll keep playing them, and I’ll try again next time you inexplicably trek all the way into the U.S. interior (instead of driving slowly around the homeland) to attempt your awesome geothermal alchemy.

Photographer Zach Bauman took the above pictures, and I’ll give the rest of his images the last word on last night: