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Cut Copy’s Dan Whitford, the most unlikely unifier of the masses since Bobby Gillespie, sends each line out to the audience along his outstretched arms, like a schoolboy leading his comrades up a hill into some imaginary battle, this one being waged in monster dance jams. It’s a move that doesn’t really get old (sometimes he mixes it up with a little fist pumping) and that never failed to rouse First Avenue’s teeming, sweaty hordes into a swirl of activity last Saturday. Whitford was always equal to what he and his band had unleashed, his voice gone high-pitched and nasal (but lovely as ever) in its struggle to be heard over the drums, the synths, and the rapturous reception from the sardine dance party below.
Quite conspicuous in the center of the bright vaulted heights of First Avenue’s stage was a sort of techno-monolith, somehow serving as both a door for the band’s heavenly entrance, and later as a screen for all sorts of confounding think-pieces, some more translatable (a series of opening doors leading to a large eye, and then closing again, recalling the deepenings and vanishings of love that are the band’s chief lyrical concern) than others (stacks of indefinable household items being blown apart). I hadn’t seen anything of its kind since the Pet Shop Boys toured in 2006 with a massive evolving cube dominating the stage, and Cut Copy, not even so much for their music as for their belief in love action and their weird conceptual conceits, seem ideal recruits to the league of synth-pop masters.
The techno-monolith’s images of exploding ergonomic utensils put me in mind of Erasure’s Chorus, and the admonition of its title track—“Go ahead with your scheming and shop at home / You’ll find treasure while cooking up bones”—which to me always seemed to suggest that an emphasis on home economics will save us from extinction. Also pulsing in the ether was Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s Dazzle Ships, which found a way to stitch the mundane and the transformative together into an aural playground, where clocks, toys and images of war tell the story of modernity.
Cut Copy are exactly that, the mundane-transformative, and seem to finally realize, with the new Zonoscope, that they make better dance songs than the hitmakers and don’t need celebrity to convince anyone of the fact. They perform with the sort of fire you can find in early live footage of OMD, and really seem to believe the silly things they sing (“It’s funny how illusion and life can sometimes be confused,” etc.), because the monolith in the music is so persuasive. The codas on Zonoscope (see: “Need You Now,” “Take Me Over,” 15-minute workout/rave-up “Sun God”) are long for a reason, giving band and audience alike time to get lost in something, even if they fail and stay in one place.
But something transcendent was implied, I believe, in the night’s most interesting visual element, more transfixing even than all the bright lights: the slow soaking with sweat of Whitford’s button-down shirt, turning dark outward from the armpits until no dry spot remained…
I hate to knock the professionalism of openers Holy Ghost, but they struck me as proof-by-contrast of Cut Copy’s greatness, brandishing all the tricks but none of the magic, stuck in a workmanlike realm that hasn’t yet edged over into pure unthinking inspiration. To dance is to emote, but they left out the emotion, and when they came back to DJ through the night after Cut Copy’s set, I’m sure there was plenty of good dancing to be had, but I had already cut my winnings and gotten lost.
Setlist:
Visions
Nobody Lost, Nobody Found
Where I’m Going
Alisa
So Haunted
Corner of the Sky
Lights and Music
Take Me Over
Pharaohs and Pyramids
Saturdays
Hearts On Fire
Sun God
Need You Now (Encore)
Out There On The Ice (Encore)
