Jon Hopkins, Röyksopp, Fever Ray, and Lambchop

Jon Hopkins

I didn't recognize the name of the opening act, but we realized later we knew some of his work in a roundabout way. Jon Hopkins was one of the producers on Coldplay's Viva la Vida: "The Escapist" is a reworked "Light Through the Veins".

Hopkins laid down some serious beats, and while his album is measured and melodic, his live music is powerful when backed with a concert sound system. "Wire" and "Vessel" rocked serious socks and the whole set made me think Brian Eno had decided to take up glitch and IDM.

He has a few tracks on his MySpace page that are worth checking out.

Röyksopp

Röyksopp opened with "Röyksopp Forever", a surprisingly chill number after Hopkin's hall-shaking bass. They played a mix of older songs (the opening to "Alpha Male" was fantastically uplifting), a few tracks from their latest album Junior ("Tricky Tricky" hit all the right notes), and a new unnamed song. Most were given a strong club treatment.

Anneli Drecker was on the tour, and her costumes and dance moves were awesome, if entirely quirky. Joe, who apparently keeps up with the female Norwegian eurosynth vocalist scene more than I do, noted Drecker wore masks for all of the songs originally sung by Karin Dreijer; The Knife, sibling duo Karin and Olaf Dreijer, usually perform with theatrical masks. Very cool.

A few songs fell flat for me. "Eple" took on an experimental vibe but only felt dissonant and uncomfortable in the end, "Vision One" lacked all of the moments and tones that made me fall in love with the song in the first place, and the harder club style throughout meant a lot of Röyksopp's subtleties were lost underneath occasionally overbearing percussion. But overall the show was solid, the dance-heavy mixes were refreshing takes on old favorites, and the evening's "Poor Leno" will never be topped.

Fever Ray

Between acts the house played a vocalist that sounded suspiciously like Dreijer's work with The Knife. Thanks to the help of someone sitting behind me who noticed my failed attempts to tag the music with Shazam, I learned about Dreijer's solo project, Fever Ray. (Thanks, guy!)

It's The Knife-ish, but with a lot less pop. Very good stuff.

Lambchop

On a completely unrelated note, and in a completely unrelated genre, my coworker Greg introduced me to Lambchop last week. I picked up their Live at XX Merge album, which starts out slow and then builds to the amazing "Give It (Once in a Lifetime)" Talking Heads cover. Absolutely brilliant.

It's been a damn good week for music.