Live Review: Darkside, Movement

When DARKSIDE's album dropped last year it felt like the logical endpoint for music's sudden fascination with nocturnal sounds. The xx's slow minimalist dreams, The Weeknd's lascivious crooning, and Nicolas Jaar's midnight experiments all felt like different rooms in the same dark house, and it was the latter artist that finally cracked the code, and, with the help of krautrock guitarist David Harrington, the result is the definitive word of dark, introverted songwriting for the digitally enhanced restless masses. The effortlessly soulful sounds of the record, Psychic, were blown out to widescreen proportions for their debut Australian show at The Hi-Fi, and with the help of a fiendishly simplistic lighting set-up they burned into the memories of the sell-out audience.

Sydney's Movement opened the show with a good performance of their suave but rote post-R&B material. Despite the slick presentation there was something shallow about the songwriting that revealed itself as their short set wore on. They have an admirable handle on restraint and subtlety, but there was no tension, which is what this sort of music thrives on. Final number Like Lust was good, however, and they deserve the praise being heaped on it.

One way to fill a full length set with only one album's worth of material is to tease everything out, and DARKSIDE did it well. While the show couldn't boast the same impressive amount of detail as the album, it did find some great moments of inspired experimentation, and the combination of blues guitar and abstract synth-grinding was rich and compelling. The large silver disc that spun slowly behind them caught the various points of light from around the room and threw it out in amazing displays across the crowd, who were dancing through thick clouds of smoke. It was a memorable combination of light and sound that cemented DARKSIDE as end-of-year-list frontrunners.