Live review: Empire of the Sun, Rudimental, De La Soul at Sandance Dubai

Friday’s event kicked off phenomenally with De La Soul and did not drop pace with Empire of the Sun and Rudimental following.

American hip hop group De La Soul perform during Sandance at Atlantis the Palm, October 10, 2014. Sarah Dea / The National
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Atlantis Beach has been relatively quiet off late — Friday’s festival was the second, and likely the last, edition of Sandance this year.

For now, though, Friday’s event kicked off phenomenally in style with vintage hip-hoppers De La Soul working the crowd with clinical precision, employing a cheeky use of breakdowns, shout-outs and tease tracks, paying homage from everyone from James Brown to J Dilla.

Old school hits Me, Myself and I and Ring Ring Ring were inevitable standouts, the bass ramped and the rhymes as potent as they were more than two decades ago.

The venue packed from the outset, De La Soul might be the best-received act to play the sundown slot we’ve seen — only the mighty Chic come close.

Boasting an epic, futuristic stage show, Empire of the Sun appeared as a haze of flowing robes, capes and ridiculous headgear, dancing amid an audio-visual overload of beats, lights, smoke (and mirrors?).

Four flamboyant dancers outnumbering just three musicians on stage, the intoxicating effect was as if Prince had swallowed a Star Wars boxset — but it all felt too stylised to be genuinely edgy.

Strafing the area where clubland meets gigland, 2008 hits Walking on a Dream and We are the People engaged the casual crowd, but as the set ended with frontman Luke Steele smashing his guitar before being theatrically lowered beneath the stage, it was easy to feel a case of sensory exhaustion.

The victims of a sudden breakout hit — sun-kissed 2014 smash Rather Be — Clean Bandit seemed comparatively green onstage, peddling their novel brand of dreamy baroque-pop which pits live cello, violin and drums against housed productions and urban rhythms.

The double-barrelled sass of session frontwomen Florence Rawlings and Elisabeth Troy lifted some of the more predictable set fillers, while a cover of Robin S’s Show Me Love thrilled the thronging masses, but jarred uncomfortably with the chamber-pop subtleties of their own material.

It takes a lot to return to a city, venue and festival less than a year after a triumphant performance but, if anything, Brit bass-fusion behemoths Rudimental outshone their own November 2013 Sandance slot.

Recreating the studio-based productions of last year’s Home entirely live onstage, the London quartet lead a huge 10-piece touring juggernaut that is less a band, more a collective carnival celebrating the sheer joy of music.

Listen closely and you can hear gospel, reggae, jugband blues, hip-hop, soul ... a simmering stew of Afrocentric groove-based music that spans the eras, from Basie to Bukem.

UK number ones Waiting All Night and Feel the Love battered the already euphoric audience into bass bliss, the 11,000-strong crowd reduced to a sea of outstretched limbs, before Swedish House Mafia alumni Axwell and Ingrosso took to the decks to finish the job.

There was always a lot riding on this Sandance — many feared for the brand’s future after recent organisational mishaps.

However, on the strength of this convincing musical bill and impressive audience turnout, maybe now, at last, we can draw a line under the past and welcome an old friend back to the UAE concert calendar.

We’ve missed you, Sandance.

rgarratt@thenational.ae