Dance music duo spends big on scene
The Chainsmokers at the Air Canada Centre, May 30
(out of four) The Chainsmokers are an interesting case study, if nothing else.
As “EDM” DJ/producers or as a rock band or as 21st-century pop stars or whatever else you might want to call them? Not that interesting. Resolutely uninteresting, in fact. Maybe even stridently uninteresting. But that’s why the Chainsmokers are an interesting case study.
The New York duo of Alex Pall and Andrew Taggart played to what must have been very nearly a full house at the Air Canada Centre on Tuesday night despite embodying several strains of All That Is Wrong With Popular Music — at least according to critics like me — at once.
Bass-farting, big-build, lowestcommon-denominator dubstep? Check. Booming bastard-“rave” siren stomp, 25 years too late in the game? Check. Overwrought awful American modern-rock in the Imagine Dragons vein? Check. Earnest “emo” bleating of the sort that turned “emo” into a dirty word? Check. A dance-pop collaboration with Coldplay even more limp and calculating than that Avicii one? Check. A woeful electronic-meetscountry duet with Florida Georgia Line? Check.
All of this is stuff people love to loathe, and consequently the Chainsmokers now have the distinction of being a sort of Nickelback for the dance-music world: a hugely popular act with an endless stream of inescapable radio hits capable of headlining festivals and filling arenas that nevertheless no one, it seems, will actually admit to liking. But clearly people do like the Chainsmokers. They filled the Air Canada Centre after all, and their monster single “Closer” — featuring Halsey, one of numerous guest vocalists (like Coldplay’s Chris Martin) only making the rounds with the duo on their Memories . . . Do Not Open tour in disembodied form — is only the second song ever after Drake’s “One Dance” to hit a billion streams on Spotify. Someone’s listening to them, even if they won’t talk about it.
And hey, the Chainsmokers aren’t the worst. They’re just kinda ordinary, whether they’re laying down carpets of low end and throttling “bro-step” beats on dance jams like “The One” or doing the band thing — with the help of an actual three-piece band that would periodically appear onstage Tuesday — when Taggart would step to the fore to sing on more traditionally “rockist” songs like “Break Up Every Night” and “Don’t Let Me Down.”
There’s nothing terribly offensive about any of it, you’ve just heard it all before, and over the course of a twohour set that yo-yos back and forth between goonish pop-EDM and straightforward pop-rock it becomes clear the Chainsmokers aren’t innovating much within those templates.
Fortunately, they’ve brought along a wealth of bells and whistles on this tour to keep things popping along even when the music gets tired. Blazing pryo, firework fountains, steam jets, confetti cannons, lasers, garish LED animation, layered special-effects scrims, trapdoors, a levitating DJ booth — no expense has been spared on production, which is perhaps why Emily Warren is the only one of the Chainsmokers’ many guest vocalists who actually appears on this tour from time to time in human form to sing “Don’t Say” and a couple of other tunes.
Anyway, Taggart and Pall are personable enough performers and balls of energy onstage, forever leaping on and off of gear and in and out of openings in the stage. And their affection for Toronto — which, it must be said, the youngish crowd frothing madly away on the floor returned in droves — seems genuine enough. This was a big gig for them, after all. As Warren put it when she first walked onstage: “This is the most people I’ve seen, ever.”
“It’s crazy to be in this room right now. So thank you, guys, we don’t take this for granted,” concurred Taggart, who referenced past gigs at the VELD festival and lamented the loss of Bathurst Street nightclub the Hoxton, which they would play “back when nobody cared” and “used to be our favourite spot.”
If you were one of the 15,000 or 16,000 souls who admitted your Chainsmokers fanhood and purchased a ticket for the ACC gig, chances are you were pleased with the results. And at least the duo is somewhat honest about its ordinariness. Taggart called up a few tunes from his iPhone playlist to sustain the crowd while something was rearranged onstage. Among them were songs by Papa Roach and Journey. That tells you everything you need to know about where the Chainsmokers are coming from.