Live Review: Jagwar Ma, NO ZU

Mac2 is surprisingly packed tonight, despite it feeling like a new ice age has arrived outside.

Main supports NO ZU bring their bare-chested-maraca-shaking-go-go-jungle-party dance package and they sure know how to make the kids get off. Their AV show is slick and features fashionable plants such as Monstera Deliciosa; currently being sold in department stores such as Freedom and IKEA. They're talented musicians, all of them, and they appear to be delivering a perfectly honed performance package to us. It's so perfect in fact that it could be part of an 'edgy punter starter pack', complete with velvet headband and portable quinoa puddings. "AQUARIUS! PISCES! SAGITTARIUS!" they keep yelling at us. "Why are you this doing me?!" I think. The faux mystical journey they invite us to embark upon, sadly falls flat because there's no musical meat between their bio-dynamically sprouted bread slices. The reason we're all here tonight is to experience music on a deeper level. Right? Right, guys?! No, I've clearly missed something and I won't be getting it back tonight. NO ZU get everything right except for the fact that the music just refuses to evolve, repeating itself ad infinitum. All the other elements are there - reams of talent, good looking conga guy, two female frontwomen, sax player in sunnies. Kudos to them for actually rousing the crowd to dance though.

Jagwar Ma don't manage to do this, instead plunging the audience into a vacant head-bobbing paralysis for the remainder of the evening. Cool visuals and a laser light show can make any band seem powerful on stage, even if they're offering the same music we've heard for the past ten years, repackaged as something that's now aesthetically relevant. Despite a strong opening with What Love from their 2013 album Howlin', Jagwar Ma's set ultimately flatlines in a repetitive Bobby Gillespie-esque vocal maelstrom.

I guess it depends what you're looking for in a live gig, but tonight felt like an episode of 'Gigging For Tweens'. Perhaps also influencing my experience were the aggressive dudes shoving people around in the line for the bar and the women holding each other and crying in the corners of the venue by 9.30pm. I suspect that the evening had a placebo effect on the rest of the crowd because they wanted to think that they were having fun and had paid a lot of money to do so. And maybe that's ok? I probably just needed to take more drugs but from where I stood, the evening acted as a sobering reminder of the ongoing machinations of the music industry, rather than an exploration of music as an art form.