Live Review: Major Lazer

Air horns and arses, for roughly two hours. There is no subtlety at a Major Lazer gig, just epic spectacle and rivers of sweat. The Lazer collective takes to the stage led by super-producer and ambassador of electronic dancehall, the inimitable Diplo. Alongside MCs Jillionaire and Walshy Fire, he looks like an uptown Reservoir Dog, slick in a designer suit and skinny black tie, clutching a boomstick that will shortly rain confetti all over the crowd. The crew mounts the skyscraper-esque lighting rig while a ragga remix of Lorde's Royal shudders bass-heavy through the speakers. In a short lull, Walshy asks if we're ready, and a well-oiled crowd roars its reply. The house is ready to burn, shake to pieces, and Major Lazer is the lightening rod.

This is a tightly orchestrated show. The floor-to-ceiling video wall alternates between patented Lazer graphics – animations, slogans, calls to arms – and a live footage mirror of the audience. Dancers Mela and Lafayette pummel their fists, hips and rear ends in an endless, jaw-dropping dancehall/crump routine. Their psycho-sexual athleticism is mind-blowing. The lights flood in confectionary colours: pink, yellow and blue beams erupting in staccato bursts overhead; strobes and machine gun flickers; skittering patterns on the video screen. There are props, too: a giant plastic bubble that Diplo enters to surf across the crowd, smoke guns, flags, Major Lazer incarnate as a giant military puppet. All this noise, all this action, set to the incendiary reggae/dancehall/trap/electro fusion that is the singular Major Lazer sound – a sound made, per the title of their last album, to Free The Universe.

In a rolling tag-team effort, Walshy, Jillionaire and Diplo work the desk, strut across the wall of video screens, cajole the crowd and dance, leading us through the now well-known cues for audience interaction. “Shirts off” we're instructed before Jah No Partial kicks in. “Everybody in the front, you better be the nakedest,” Walshy says. By this time he, Jillionaire and super-buff man meat Diplo are bare from the waist up and swinging their shirts around their heads. The song peaks and a room full of shirts are tossed into the air. Later, to the tune of Express Yourself and Bubble Butt, a host of ambitious young female fans mount the stage and give us their best attempt at twerking. One wildly self-confidant girl breaks away from the pack, ties her dress up around her ribcage and proceeds to shake the mother-loving Christ out of her mostly naked arse. Instantly, she becomes our hero – so lunatic, free and careless that she cracks the yoke of the dirty male gaze. She remains on stage for most of the night.

Major Lazer steer a room full of people to the right side of the room, then back over to the left, down on to the floor, and back up into the air, fists pumping and arms waving in raging, euphoric compliance. They joyride us through hits such as Get Free, Pon De Floor and Watch Out For This; tease us with reworked hits from House Of Pain, The Prodigy and Blur. Major Lazer do not pause and we, with the attention span of ecstasy-fuelled toddlers, roar louder and louder with each new cut. This show is calculated and brash, repeated ad infinitum through every stop of the Major Lazer world tour. But it is irresistible. This is Major Lazer. This is where the party's at.