Soulwax
Live In Milan, 18/10/2004

LA RECENSIONE

The fucking Dewaele Brothers were raised on music and bread. I can imagine them, little Stefan and David, surrounded by their father Zaki's (a Belgian radio guru) thousands of vinyls, smiling as they nibble on the cover of the White Album and bend the Can record in half...
Now they're here on stage in front of me, Stefan and David with their Soulwax, and it seems that their smile is exactly the same as they flood the Rolling Stone with decibels.

Their sound, live, is just as I expected, saturated with electricity and silicon. What I didn't expect is Stefan's skill at the microphone; his taut and expressive voice, which quite reminds me of the flavors of Antwerp (they’re from just a bit further: Ghent), manages to fill even the slightly empty moments of the show, which, coincidentally, correspond to the tracks from the latest album, Any Minute Now.
Yes, because after their experience as 2 Many Dj's, it's clear that a piece of their heart was left there on the dance floor. The alienating two-tone striped set design hints at this, and the "eighties" makeup of the songs screams it in everyone's face, but - alas - nothing stays with us; the Depeche Mode, though frequently cited, certainly wouldn't be happy.
The older tracks are better: the healthy (strange?) energetic whine-rock from the Much Against Everyone's Advice era emerges from David's guitar (Conversation Intercom above all) with much more personality compared to the thousand layers of noise spilling out from his "magic box" effects machine (the exception goes by the name Slowdance and sounds like what the Chemical Brothers should be doing now...).

Moral of the story: the fucking Dewaele Brothers, raised on music and bread, have plenty of talent to offer; and it's a talent that is much more colorful than what they wanted to sell us during the barely 50 minutes of the concert.