Red-hot Icelandic blues-rock band Kaleo rolls into town

Aug. 28, 2017 1:46 PM PT

How hot is Kaleo? So hot that this blues-rocking band from Mosfellsbær, Iceland, has relocated to Austin. So hot that its music has been featured in the hit TV series “Orange is the New Black” and “Suits.”

And so hot that - soon after tickets went on sale - its Tuesday concert at House of Blues was moved to Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre at SDSU, a venue nearly five times as large.

Unlike such fellow Icelandic stars as Björk and Sigur Rós, Kaleo happily embraces rootsy American music influences. True, this four-man band’s songs evoke the Black Keys and the Black Crowes more than, say, Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters. But Kaleo’s sets sometimes include the folk ballad “Vor I Vaglaskogi,” which the group proudly sings in its native Icelandic.

Kaleo, with The Shelters and Wilder: 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. Cal Coast Credit Union Open Air Theatre at SDSU, 5500 Canyon Crest Drive, San Diego State University. $36-$55. (800) 745-3000 or ticketmaster.com.

Music

George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 and 2023 San Diego Press Club awards and a double first prize-winner at the 2022 and 2023 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”