NIGHT ONE
LCD Soundsystem: Crowd goes wild, Murphy goes bashful, both are right. Brilliant.
Mika: Clothes make the man, but are no substitute for sincerity.
Yeasayer: Best described as “yowling”, but in a very good way.
Miike Snow: Absolutely storming live but suffering from extremely poor sound mixing.
Die Antwoord: Fun, but still no idea how they got so successful.
Gaslamp Killer and Gonjasufi: Did Gonjasufi even show up? Limited tolerance for knob-twiddling.
NIGHT TWO
Atari Teenage Riot: “I’m getting too old for this shit.” This isn’t music.
The Horrors: Speak up man, nobody can hear you if you mumble.
SARS: Singalong magic, local crowd loved every moment, foreigners were puzzled.
Moderat: Cruel bass, beautiful visuals, epic gig – “dance music” done right.
Juvelen: Channelling Prince is always a good idea, so I danced.
Does It Offend You Yeah: “Alternative,” but didn’t hold my attention longer than ten minutes.
South Rakkas Crew: Bounce out turntables and crowd-pleasing MCs = best end to night.
NIGHT THREE
Klaxons: Still look like student band who can’t believe their luck.
Royksopp: As rocknroll as electronica gets, but was there some lipsynching?
Papercutz: Lovely songs destroyed by another poor sound mix. What’s happening?
Missy Elliot: Some misunderstanding – we were expecting actual “songs”. Good dancers though.
Tesla Boy: Back to the 80s? Fine for some dancing, but little longevity.
NIGHT FOUR
Pendulum: Once again I can’t hear anything except this ridiculous bass.
Faith No More: Musical man-crush on Mike Patton, but trust me – amazing live.
We Have Band: Clearly making it up as they go, but fun dancing.
The Chemical Brothers: Whatever they paid you, it was too much. People left.
Bambi Molesters: Last song of last night was Croatian surf rock. Bizarre.
It goes without saying that we saw some other stuff as well, but these stood out the most. You’ll notice that not many DJs feature on this list, for two reasons: one, reviewing DJs is a waste of everybody’s time; two, the Dance Arena felt like an execution pit and was generally an unpleasant place to be. Even the Moderat gig was quite suffocating when you kept looking around for machine gun emplacements along the perimeter. Bonus information: Novi Sad is really lovely, and Serbian Railways are so bad they would be comical if you didn’t feel like crying the entire time you were on their trains.
