Sigur Ros Lives Up to Its Press, and Then Some

For a band that is receiving truckloads of media attention, Sigur Ros creates a sound that’s unusually placid. The Icelandic quartet, whose sublime new album, “Agaetis Byrjun,” has sold an astonishing 20,000 copies in the U.S. as a word-of-mouth import (spurred in part by endorsements from such patrons as Radiohead’s Thom Yorke), is more interested in nuance than bluster.

Sigur Ros’ music is a series of subtle, intimate gestures, and the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre was an ideal setting for the band’s Los Angeles debut Tuesday. Under a celestial landscape that was frequently disturbed by a police helicopter, the group sculpted richly textured soundscapes that held the crowd in a velvet-glove grip for nearly two hours.

The band inverted all of the tenets that live rock bands hold dear, replacing velocity with its own unhurried, insistent momentum. All of Sigur Ros’ compositions were a slow teasing out of the sonic possibilities of simple melodies; any hard edges or major shifts were arrived at over time. Tonal variations came slowly, but packed a potent charge.

The band’s lead singer, Jon Por Birgisson, bowed his guitar for the duration of the set and sang in an otherworldly falsetto that had the spiritual surge of Baroque madrigal; keyboardist and guitarist Kjartan Sveinsson created epic grandeur from simple, processional chords, while drummer Orri Pall Dyrason tapped out tribal patterns with brushes. The overall effect was coolly evocative, hypnotic and frequently transformative.