The renowned Icelandic band, Of Monsters and Men, arrived in Portland for the December to Remember concert series hosted by 94.7 Portland alternative radio, held at the Crystal Ballroom. Other acts in attendance included Phantogram (photos available here at Music, Why Not!), Catfish and the Bottlemen, and Vampire Weekend, to name a few. This means this show wasn’t included in a tour, but with the turn out of hardcore fans, it might as well have been their first show in Portland in numerous years, when in fact they were here just six months prior. Nevertheless, they gave our city a show to remember, starting with a banner on the stage of the album artwork of their newest album, Fever Dream.
The banner was hanging far earlier than when the band came out, but what really got the crowd going was when the lights went down and the stage lights began to flash on and off in a line, slowly speeding up and slowly building until the quintet took the stage, opening with “Alligator”, a powerful track that builds and builds into a growling chorus, and also happens to be the newest album’s lead single AND has already amassed close to 14 million streams on Spotify. It’s safe to say this was the perfect track to open the show with. The band continued the show with big hits like “Dirty Paws” and “Mountain Sound”, and of course their biggest song “Little Talks”. To talk numbers, the song’s music video has a little over 280 million views on YouTube, and the song itself has close to 440 million streams on Spotify. Can you imagine? That’s more than the population of the United States! Of course, I am a little hurt they didn’t play my favorite song by them, “Silhouettes”, which was on the soundtrack for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, but I’ll recover.
Unrelated, allow me to step back for a moment to highlight a key member of this group that may go unnoticed at times. Yes, we have our iconic vocalists Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir and Raggi Þórhallsson delivering show-stopping vocals, while Brynjar Leifsson and Kristján Páll kill it on the guitar and bass (respectively), but our unsung hero is Arnar Rósenkranz Hilmarsson, our group’s drummer and the BACKBONE of the band. Percussion, in general, is often overlooked in how vital it is to make a great song. Rósenkranz definitely embodied the spirit of a December to remember, playing with such passion and putting in a noticeable effort to rouse the crowd even though he was in the back part of the stage. This, combined with the high energy of the rest of the band, and a fiery crowd, made for a night we soon won’t forget.
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By: CJ Hueso | Exclusively for @Music, Why Not!
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