Flume - Eprom - Lovelife - Philip Goyette -- U Street Music Hall - Apr 3 2013

Flume, Eprom, Lovelife, Philip Goyette -- In the never ending quest to challenge myself into trying new things, I decided to try a mixed DJ and band show tonight. This is not completely new to me but the DJ/Dance scene is just one that I have never felt apart of and really do not know what to make of it beyond the obvious. If you are here to dance, cut loose with friends, meet vibrant young people, then this is the place to come--and even on a Thursday night, the line went into the streets past 11pm deep into the show. Do people do ecstasy any more? It is quite a wholesome crowd and I do chat with some young people who are courteous in the extreme. Well, calling on my keen grasp of the obvious, I see some of them still do glow sticks.

A DJ was greeting people into the club with his gear set up on the stage. He made way for an English band called Lovelife. They had drums, keys, a lead vocalist, and a guitarist. The guitar may as well have been a synthesizer as I could not detect any plucked string sounds in the lush pop melodic lines that the band put out. The vocals were good and these guys do the romantic pop sound proud. A guy next to me showed me a phone with a description of this club and its fabulous sound system that people rave about. True, I have heard that, but then why is this sounding so muddy? It may be a spa-grade mud, but everything was fuzzy with annoying buzzes on vocals and slight volume increases. It got a little better, but I've seen portable PAs operated by the bands on stage deliver better than this.

Without pause, things shifted from the stage to the large DJ booth at the opposite end where the DJs took over. Things kept moving and the crowd was having a good time, although the dancing still was a bit restrained as it so often seems to be in this city. But, again, this is not my area and I'm comparing it to the dancier rock/pop shows that I frequent. The music did have decent percussion and a nice sense of pace and control in a more simple Germanic mode, than the thick wall of noise that usually turns me off. And the sound was more in line with the raves that this system receives. Although not confident of the genre, I still could sense a quality tonight that the crowd understood and enough of my electronic buttons were pressed that date back to the Germanic days of the 1970s.

I am happy to try out new things to try to stretch my genre boundaries, but like so often happens, I end up getting pulled back to the safe familiar grounds of old. But every time I stretch, I pull back somewhere further along than where I have been. So I may do this again some day. With luck, I will be able to write a proper review.

Quote of the Night - a partial answer to the above question overheard from someone in the crowd... "I ate too many valiums."