Gig review: Django Django, Edinburgh

“I KNOW it’s a school night, but thanks for coming out,” enthused Django Django singer Vincent Neff through the sweat-fogged air of the Liquid Room, his group’s enthusiastic Sunday night crowd utterly unconcerned about whatever they were up to in the morning.

Django Django

Liquid Room, Edinburgh

****

It’s been three years since the quartet unleashed their eponymous debut album, attracting critical acclaim and a Mercury nomination, and they’d chosen home territory on which to launch the follow-up. Although they are now London-based, this brief mini-tour brought them back to Edinburgh, where they first met at the College of Art.

Within 24 hours of this show they’d announced a longer series of dates in May, including Aberdeen and Glasgow, and the title and tracklist of that second album, Born Under Saturn. Bedding in gently, only three songs from it were played here: the sun-kissed, swirling electronic pulse of First Light, the vaguely New Romantic house croon of Reflections, and the rave-infused carnivalesque of Pause Repeat.

Where these new songs are inflected with a different, more subtly reserved kind of energy, the material from their first album swaggers more than ever, from the beatific club breakdowns of Waveforms and WOR to Skies Over Cairo’s mischievous arabesque and Default’s bouncy electro-pop interpretation of the Spaghetti Western sound. Their fusion of the electronic and the organic, typified by Tommy Grace’s banks of synths playing off against Dave Maclean’s loud but fluid drumming, was all the more pleasing for its lack of self-consciousness about bringing the two areas together in glorious fashion.

Seen on 15.02.15