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Last night was Hadouken!’s first ever American show, where they played at Mercury Lounge to a crowd of less than 30 people. It was honestly kind of surreal. Hadouken! as a band have fairly large cultural cache’ in the UK, playing festivals, large venues, and enjoy popular music press and mainstream press backing. Early releases were championed by NME and perhaps more importantly by influential DJs considering the dance music background of bandleader James Smith. Yet the small turn out of the faithful audience didn’t deter any member of the band as they put 100% of themselves into the performance and led to the communal feeling that we the audience were sharing some hidden experience.

My own experience with Hadouken! comes from back when they were called Hadouken Sound System and a Scottish Internet acquaintance emailed me asking “Oh my god, have you heard this?” with a link to a rough mix of “That Boy That Girl”. The aggressive bass line, accelerated tempo, intense rave hoovers, and lyrics about youth culture that had been largely ignored in America melded a lot of my musical interests into one three minute activating pleasure centers that would normally have to be culled from several different tracks. I immediately tried to push it on many people, but they largely didn’t grok to it then. It wasn’t until NME started to push “Nu Rave” (fuck you, music journalism) and we started to get Shitdisco, Klaxons and the like that the people I was with started to really grasp onto it.

As Hadouken! had been around for so long, I was really surprised to find that they’d never played New York, or even America. I would have thought that some enterprising promoter would have tested them out as they seemed to click perfectly with what New York and Philly Electro DJs were doing at the time. Though perhaps the fact that their album didn’t release until two years later is what killed their chances to really take that subset of dance culture by storm so early. Though dance music is still Singles based, it seems that we’re back to requiring albums to push any sort of legitimacy to the world at large, which runs counter to what I’d expect, what with IPod having “killed” the album.

That may all change for Hadouken as they have been slotted to play Coachella this year and as James told the crowd last night “they have some other things coming up” which makes me wonder if their label isn’t trying to push them to the forefront with the release of their newest album For The Masses. I haven’t had any time to spend with the new album, but the singles have all been amazing. I was eager to see them at last and translate that snarling bass and groove energy to a live show.

The first act on was Last Year’s Model, whose lead singer greeted people as they came in by passing out a free EP of New Order covers and remixes, which should give you an indication of some of the band’s influences, but certainly not all of them. The easy and lazy way to describe them is “Math The (Full) Band,” that is if the spazzsynth electropunk sounds of the Rhode Island duo had expanded adding a drummer and another keyboardist. Fast tempos, more complex than expected guitar elements, synth as bass, and a commitment to putting up a wall of noise that sees a real drummer complimenting frantic drum patterns. Maximalism. Lyrics shouted rather than sung with a kind of nasal quality that says “don’t take this too serious, just move” as Model 01 does a clockwork herky-jerky dance that’s one part robot, one part animatronic clockwork device and one part poorly animated Saturday Morning Cartoon. He seemed to have two modes, dead stop and a hundred miles per hour with no acceleration between the two. He was seemingly not affected by friction. The guitarist, Model 3, was constantly in motion, jumping and dancing and shouting out words to the audience, and his guitar matching keyboard’s arpeggios with sweeping tremolos that built the energy of the individual tracks. It was good, technically interesting music played a million miles an hour. I should have bought their CD last night, but I didn’t. Thankfully I have a copy of the EP containing their amazing cover of New Order’s “Ceremony”.

I’d been waiting four impatient years for last night, and Hadouken! was amazing. All the energy of the music was translated to the stage presence of vocalist James Smith, the nonstop movement of bassist Chris Purcell and the blistering breakbeats of drummer Nick Rice. The complex bass and sampling seemed to necessitate keyboardist Alice Spooner stand still and they had a new tour guitarist using sheet music as regular guitarist, Daniel Rice had Visa issues.

Opening the set with the first track, “Rebirth”, off of the new album provided a relatively low-key opener, before launching into the assault of “Get Smashed Gate Crash”. The second song set the crowd off and the dance floor threatened to turn into a mosh pit at times as the infectious energy carried over to those of us on the floor. Frustratingly, then the music stopped, as you can see in the shot of the set list to talk to us. James told us that this was their first ever American show, again something I didn’t know walking into the venue, and then he talked a bit about how they were tapped to play Coachella and how he asked for our help by buying the album, only to tell us moments later that he didn’t care if we stole his music because we were there to support them live. These chats were a bit informative as he spoke briefly about a sample used coming from a Garage song and about how Garage originated at New York’s Paradise Garage but then was stolen by the UK, like Hip Hop. He didn’t mention that the sample he used came from a remix by an American, but then it wasn’t like he was giving a history of Garage music lecture. Though in retrospect that would have been pretty cool.

The rest of the set list consisted mainly of the singles from the previous album and the new album, bookended by some outliers of the style. It was definitely aimed at making people dance as James Smith launched himself into the audience and the threatened mosh pit turned into a real one. The set list was great, but unfortunately it was largely performed more as a dance concert than as a dance set, each song was individually delineated for the most part though “Mic Check” did lead directly into “UGLY” only to have the momentum again stopped by another chat before the set wrapped up through big bottomed bass lines and soaring synths coupled with manic drums and James pulling people on stage to dance through the final song of the night, an “epic trance” song , Lost.

As this was an early show, I can’t really say how much of this was standard for their live sets rather than having the looming deadline of the next acts. There was no encore. There was no merchandise. But it didn’t matter, because it was everything I could have wanted in a Hadouken! show, raw, energetic, with any sort of pretention and spectacle stripped away giving the faithful in that room exactly what we’d been waiting four years to see.

Category : Show Review