Live Review: Soulwax @ Double Door 9/17/06

You know, the last time I saw a band perform dance songs with live instruments, I thought it was the most godawful thing I'd ever heard. Fortunately, Soulwax came out on Sunday night and shattered my impression that playing dance music with live instruments is a failed concept. To be honest, I've never really been that big of a Soulwax fan and wasn't completely sold on their new album Nite Versions, which is a reworked version of their previous record, Any Minute Now. Seeing it performed live, however, I was totally impressed. These skinny Belgians are the real deal and know how to throw a good party. I think the key was that it didn't explicity feel like any sort of live gimmick. It just sounded like really solid dance music, with the live performance factor probably adding a bit more punch. Never seeing these guys before (as Soulwax or 2ManyDJs), I thought maybe the live dance thing would certainly bring with it a little bit of a cheese factor, but that wasn't the case at all. I don't want to call it "intelligent" dance music (anybody remember "IDM"?), so let's just say you didn't have to be stupidly drunk or high to enjoy it. Maybe not quite as cerebral as say Ellen Allien matched up with Apparat, but suprisingly it wasn't that far off, either.