Alex Metric
Hoxton Bar & Kitchen, London
09/09/2010

The very idea of having a warm-up for a festival that takes place in particularly arctic environs might seem a tad on the perverse side, but that’s exactly how Iceland’s heroically overstaffed Retro Stefson are treating this pre-Airwaves appearance. And that kind of playing-to-thousands-more-than-the-venue-can-take mentality leads to a performance that’s all learn-the-words! this, join-in-with-the-none-too-taxing-dance-routine! that, and see-how-we-rejig-faintly-obscure-Eurodisco! (ATC‘s long-forgotten-but-still-fearlessly-fromageous ‘Around The World’, to be precise. Cripes!) the other. Frankly, we were half expecting them to be more yee-ha than ha-ha, but they take their good timery very seriously; roaring gleefully from the bossa nova at a beer festival likes of ‘Medallion’ to the Italo house as played by The Rapture dervish ‘Senseni’ and the persuasively percussive, somewhat post-post-rock, and decidedly slippery avalanche of ‘Kimba’ with a rather casual air of conquest. And their refusal to acknowledge even so much as the concept of a pigeonhole, while sadly doubtless destined to be their commercial undoing, is a classy, even courageous step.

Tonight’s headliner, meanwhile, feels like he really ought to be bringing plenty further reasons to be cheerful to the party; Alex Metric, after all, has released a series of EPs, most notably last winter’s not inconsiderably warming ‘It Starts’, that are, frankly, no end of dff-dff-bash-thwock joy, which seems practically custom-built to complement the Stef’s efforts. However, having presumably noted the panache with which the likes of Timbaland and Mark Ronson have been able to shake off their just-doing-the-twiddling shackles, he’s elected instead to reinvent himself as more of a renaissance pop star. Which might be fine, of course, except that he resembles nothing so much as Paul van Dyk grasping feebly for the lotharian lizardry of Chilly Gonzales, which we suppose is at least trying to put the disco into discomfort, and vocally he’s got all the character and charisma of, say, The Script‘s rhythm section. Sure, ‘L.O.V.E.’ might provide a welcome oasis of euphoria, but someone ought to have told him techno was never meant to be this, well, tasteful, and, as a result, we’d take the Retro revelry over Metric‘s misfiring modernism any day of the week.

Iain Moffat