The weather was all over the board – drizzling, then sunny for 10 minutes, then dumping rain again.  Repeat every 20-30 minutes and you get the idea.  After breakfast, followed by pastry and coffee at Sandholt bakery, we headed over to Lucky Records where my main man Ingvar hooked me up with some sweet vinyl – 1980s Icelandic punk and new wave.  From there it was off to the aptly named Burgerjoint for lunch (care to guess what we ate…?), then back to the apartment to hang out for a while and drink some authentic Czech Budweiser.  

The music day started in the afternoon with a cancellation of an outdoor off-venue show – kind of hard to do a set outdoors in the rain.  Instead we popped over to a techno house party that was, literally, in someone’s house.  We only stayed there for a few minutes before finally making our way to Bar 11 to catch a quick band, then headed over to Shalimar for a great Pakistani dinner.

For the on-venue schedule we planned on hanging out all evening at the Art Museum, the first time we’d seen a show there.  It was a solid card, and included an amazing performance by one of our favorite Icelandic bands, Agent Fresco.  The headliner was a band called HAM, that was one of the first punk/metal/industrial bands in Iceland back in the day.  They recently got back together and put out a new album.  Their show literally had the crowd in a frenzy, with full-blown moshing and crowd-surfing in effect.  By the time the finished and everyone left the building, the main floor looked like a war zone of spilled beer and crushed cans.  On the way out I managed to score a poster for the night’s lineup from one of the bartenders.

Holly here, for the fashion portion of blog:  skinny jeans and Converse continue to be all the rage here; they have the best outerwear – architecturally interesting, if that makes sense; and everyone, and I do mean everyone, has a scarf of some description. Speaking of scarves, mine was a casualty at Amsterdam last night. It got attached to someone squeezing their way through the crowd and I wasn’t able to catch up to it. Luckily it wasn’t a hand knit one, nor the one my Mom just brought home from Croatia; i bought it here last year at Sputnik and I think I can replace it.

Dinner at Shalimar never disappoints.

Tonight’s venue: Reykjavik Art Museum. This area is a long thin hall with a tarp roof (no joke!). We were perched on a glass-walled, 2nd floor walkway across the back of the venue.

De Staat, a decent Dutch rock outfit.

Agent Fresco rocked, as always.

HAM, an old-skool Icelandic metal band. These guys were huge. HUGE! The mosh pit was HUGE!

More HAM. As the last band of the night, we were treated with an encore.