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| Chemical Brothers,
Brixton Academy |
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| Live,
Martin Algesten,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F4
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Generally, Chemical Brothers is a band with more hype than substance. Their music consists of quite boring loops and dull acoustic sounding percussion, arranged in something that is close to but not really funky. In my opinion, almost no song deserves more than average rating. "My opinion" is of course the result of listening to them on my stereo, Walkman or car audio equipment. A live concert is something else, which this night clearly proved.
The place is Brixton Academy and the concert is the second of three sold out evenings in a row. When the brothers enter the stage, closer to midnight, we have already been warmed up by some of their special guests. They kick it off with their latest hit ‘Hey Boy, Hey Girl’, a song I always thought of as really boring, and now suddenly it rocks. The reason is clearly the huge amounts of audio equipment currently fitted in this room. The sound cannot be defined as anything else but massive. All the registers are well balanced, from the squeaking treble to the kicking bass. You can feel that particular edge in the lower frequencies that makes you unable to stand still. And all of a sudden, I realize that this is what Chemical Brothers is all about, their music requires these extremities in audio. Suddenly the beats are funky, the sounds are cool and the loops hypnotizing.
Now all I want to do is to go bananas, jump around, feel the beats, become one with the musicÂ… And if it weren’t for all the people around me standing around like stiffs I probably would have. Now this is a typical problem for many dance oriented concert events of today. Chemical Brothers is the stereotype of a modern dance band. They have almost no public contact whatsoever, except an occasional waving now and then. They compensate with giant video projectors and light shows, which in this case I have to admit, were very good (The videos made an excellent complement to the music instead of trying to take over the show). But still, the brothers would benefit from having a smaller crowd with space to dance.
In the end, it was a very good concert. A massive sound system playing all the hits made for a brilliant occasion.
03/12/99
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