The Glitch Mob brought their most ambitious live outing
yet to The Royal Oak Music Theatre on Wednesday Night with openers Chrome
Sparks and The M Machine. Their current tour in support of this year’s release,
Love Death Immortality, takes a much
more dramatic visual approach than their previous productions. With assistance
from their new stage design, “The Blade”, band members EDit (Edward Ma), Boreta (Justin Boreta),
and Ooah (Josh Mayer) worked the crowd into an
all-out frenzy. When we walked in we noticed that there were signs stating that
there would be “heavy stroke light usage” during the show, and even that warning seemed like
an understatement. The pulsating lights, strobes, lasers and bass had the emotional
audience members dancing, screaming and jumping throughout the evenings incredibly high-energy set.
There tends to be much
criticism over how live electronic music performance loses its instrumental elements. To
help change that stigma, The Mob utilize large illuminated, programmed pads during the
show, almost akin to a Simon Says game, to be able to modify their sounds as
they perform. It’s rather astonishing to watch them work through their sounds
as they progress through the show. Their set this evening included a cover of
local favorites, The White Stripes, classic “7 Nation Army” that solicited one
of the biggest responses from the audience from the evening.
Their live spectacle
features the multimedia sensory overload referred to as “The Blade”, a
breathtaking state-of-the-art visual feat created by the same design team that
has created legendary staging for Daft Punk, Kanye West, Deadmau5 and Kaskade.The
dramatic performance looks like what I would envision a villain’s lair to look
like in a superhero movie. Due to the proximity of Halloween, much
of the crowd donned costumes propelling the audience members into an unbelievably festive evening. After seeing this current tour of theirs one
thing is certain. The Glitch Mob are on course to becoming one the most groundbreaking and in demand live electronic performers around.
