Django Django

The Django Django seem to have forged a special bond with Paris by now. After the opening show of the run supporting their third album "Marble Skies", and a second date out in the banlieue in January, we find the English band once again treading the boards of the French capital, right in the middle of their tour promoting the new record. This time the chosen venue is La Cigale, a small, elegant concert hall in the Pigalle district, that has been operating in various guises since as far back as the late 1800s: after a brief stint as an adult cinema, for more than thirty years it has hosted everything from theatre and variety shows to jazz, singer-songwriter, pop and rock performances, by niche artists and internationally successful acts alike.

The ground primed to let Django Django's sonic kaleidoscope bloom is prepared by the acidic, hypnotic rock of Man of Moon, the Scottish guitar-drums duo who have already had the honour of opening for The Phantom Band and The Twilight Sad. Their spacey, kraut-tinged post-punk wraps the venue, already overheated and packed, in a fittingly psychedelic haze.

Indeed, to describe the musical offering of the London-based quartet, one key word is precisely "psychedelia". But a psychedelia neatly packaged into fully-formed song structures, able to reread fifty years of pop with an encyclopaedic range that belies its own lightness of touch, bending every sort of burlesque sound effect to the service of melodies as singable as they are askew.

And here they are, then, Django Django: they walk out onto an almost completely dark stage, to thunderous applause. The set behind them shows three rotating arched doorways, lit up red, while the musicians take their places amid the steady pulse of a sequencer, soon swallowed up into the intro that kicks the show off. Sci-fi keyboards, epic in stride, lead into an acceleration of electronic pulses that dissolves into "Marble Skies", the opening track of the new album of the same name: a synthetic gallop that duly announces the decidedly danceable nature of the show.

Without a break, the drum roll paves the way for "Shake And Tremble", a remarkable single from "Born Under Saturn", a perfect example of the band's miraculous fusion: singer Vincent Neff hops around everywhere strumming fifties-style guitar chords, bassist Jimmy Dixon's plucking precisely traces freeze-dried dance grooves, while Tommy Grace untangles himself from a thicket of synths, turning rock'n'roll reminiscences into futurist sabotage. Behind the kit, David Maclean, brother of the John who served in that Beta Band to which Django Django have so often been compared, holds the reins of an almost ceaseless rhythmic deluge.

In the same vein comes the following "Tic Tac Toe", the first single lifted from the just-released record: the band members are as playful as their music, and their enthusiasm on stage is met by a crowd that doesn't stop dancing for a second. After that, the synth arpeggios and vocal harmonies of the splendid "First Light", which stretches out into an extended electronic finale, have just one flaw: they mark the end of the setlist's contributions from the band's second album. The underrated (but, in this writer's opinion, excellent) "Born Under Saturn", long and substantial, which had added further complexity to the songs of their hugely successful debut while failing to replicate its success, seems to be deliberately set aside at this stage of Django Django's career, as the band have consciously opted for a more concise comeback.

Then, after the percussion improvisation that even Neff and Dixon throw themselves into during the finale of "Surface To The Air" — which, for all its intrigue, confirms itself with its dancehall stride as the weakest track on "Marble Skies" — it's time for the band to revisit their debut: we move on to the bubbling "Waveforms", while the backdrop with the three portals fills up with flickering sine waves. The bridge between past and future is drawn: a rave-like close, in which even the guitarist and bassist have fun manipulating synths to intersect electronic hammering, gives way to the new album's second single, "In Your Beat", without the join ever being noticed. The irresistible little keyboard line that punctuates the spacey chorus launches us straight into flight, spinning along with the images scrolling on the screen, a paradoxical collage of neoclassical busts and multicoloured spheres colliding, while the pink lighting picks out the brightly coloured jackets of the unstoppable musicians. And suddenly it all clicks into place: bassist and guitarist shimmer like paint-coloured figures in a comic-strip painting à la Lichtenstein, art-pop becomes pop art, and the musical pieces shuffled by Django Django reveal themselves as nothing more than the ingredients of an irreverent postmodern blender, kept under control by no ordinary compositional mastery.

There's then room for some more reflective moments: first Neff switches to acoustic guitar for a "Further" that crosses country, boogie and synth gusts, then the rhythm section (temporarily) disappears for the piano-led opening, bathed in dazzling yellow light, of "Sundials", a little Canterbury-style gem in 7/8, proof of the sheer variety of inspirations feeding the omnivorous Django Django.

Just as the landscapes behind the doors keep changing, so do the sonic settings the band sets up: the Middle Eastern-tinged synths of "Skies Over Cairo" transport us to the Middle East, the inevitable "Default", their biggest hit single, layers clownish mumbling, a pounding kick drum and disturbed radio frequencies, "Life's A Beach" oscillates between surf-music and swirling keyboards, until "Wor" brings the main set to a glorious close: western-style epic sweep, battle-cry choruses and a percussive interlude of maracas and cymbals, against a blood-red backdrop. Neff even allows himself to lead the crowd in a ritual dance, before thanking everyone and disappearing backstage with his bandmates.

But it's precisely by repeating the chorus of "Wor" over and over, to the point of exhaustion, that the crowd calls Django Django back onto the stage. The debut album takes the lion's share in this final stretch of the show too: only "Champagne", with its bassline climbing in Japan-like figures, interrupts the continuum between "Storm" and a magnificent closing "Silver Rays".

Keeping up, right to the end, the playful attitude of a band that doesn't take itself seriously at all, the four of them leave us like this, still itching to keep dancing, eyes and ears flooded by a whirl of colours and rhythms, still caught up in their flawless, good-humoured game of assembling and dismantling pop stereotypes.

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