Live Review

Deadmau5 – Brixton Academy, London

• 5th May 2010

I have yet to be converted to the hau5 of mau5 but when the opportunity to get along to Brixton Academy for the third of Deadmau5’s trio of late night club shows arose I wanted to see first hand what all the fuss was about.

To an uninitiated and barely inebriated witness it was difficult to tell if I was watching a glorified DJ set or something like an Ableton assisted rendition of his own work, or most likely a combination of the two, but it’s the bank holiday weekend, it’s late, most people here are well oiled by now and the atmosphere is infectious.More drinks are consumed, hands are raised in the air and the party is truly kicking in the guise of a dance music spectacle when Deadmau5 takes to the stage a while after midnight.

With squidgy electro beats, masked music mashing an inventively lit stage production it seems an easy reference point to mention Daft Punk in comparison. The ambitiousness of the visuals seemed to only stretch to blinking neon primary colours in the early part of the lively set and seemed no competition for Daft Punk’s world conquering performance pyramid.

But everything was kicked up a notch when the giant stage construct flashed up a notorious blue screen of death, leading Deadmau5 to be rebooted as his whole mask lit up and displayed synced images with the rest of the stage setting before hurtling into ‘Sometimes Things Get, Whatever’, during which things got more surreal as an animated face loaded onto the mask and mouthed along with the creepy and repetitious refrain that echoed around the Academy with the techy glitched beat backing it.

By far the most recognisable and rejoiced moments of the gig were clearly the vocal flourishes of recent singles ‘Ghosts N Stuff’ that was teased into the set and allowed to build, and the Kaskade collaboration ‘I Remember’ that prompted friends and strangers alike to embrace as the pace momentarily slowed.

But after the brief but blindingly brilliant one-two of the haunting’ I Remember’ chopped and segued into the dark and pounding ‘FML’ it seemed as if we had all become trapped inside a Deadmau5 workout DVD as the music that followed bore a dreary four to the floor beat that plodded along unfaltering as if we were now in the cool down section to bring our heart rates back down to normal and see us through to the end of the set at 2am.

Perhaps the massive anti-climax was a done as favour to the DJ lined up to follow with the job of keeping the hardcore dancing til 3 in the morning, but for most people it was time to call it a night as a crowd bearing glo-stick mouse ears filtered out to the cloakrooms and back out into the early hours of a chilly Bank Holiday Monday.