daft punk // wamu theater // 29 june 2007 (more photos of pyramid power [flickr])

We got to the cavernous WaMu Theater (complete with VIP lounge for Washington Mutual cardholders) just as the Rapture were starting and sounding surprisingly great given that they were playing in a giant metal box only half-filled at the time. I’ve seen them several times in venues large and small and have always been impressed with their angular, high-energy dance rock. Tonight was no exception; the band brought plenty of cowbell, but there was really just not enough enthusiasm from the crowd to live up to previous exhaustingly epic performances. As much as I like the Rapture, they’re really not the sort of music for quiet contemplation and the audience makes a big difference in the taking a show from fun to breathtaking.

Here, the crowd was (ovbiously) there to hear Daft Punk and required more convincing than I might have imagined. Although many valiant pockets of appreciative dancing erupted, they just weren’t quite contagious enough to infect the whole room for more than a few minutes. When “House of Jealous Lovers” doesn’t drive the masses out of their collective minds, you know it’s an uphill battle. It certainly didn’t help that the Rapture was stuck on a really dark stage and their repeated requests for more lights were met with feeble efforts from lighting techs who may have been surprised that there was an actual band onstage with people and instruments playing music. By the end, they got a few more spotlights and maybe a few more fans, leaving with good natured waves and “Over and Over Again”.

By the end of their set, several people in aluminum foil, masks, neon jumpsuits started to filter in while Kavinsky spun pulsing beats under the uncharacteristically bright house lights. Perhaps the venue was trying to fend-off a transformation to a rave? In addition to the few costumed revelers, there were a shocking number of people with crutches, some adorned with glow bracelets and held in the air. (The healing power of music? An exceptionally jock-infused crowd? or the refusal to miss a rare Daft Punk appearance despite injury?)

Each teasing pauses on the soundsystem only further heightened the anticipation for the headliners, and each hint of their impending appearance was skinny fists raised like antennas to heaven in pyramid formation. At last, the lights fell and the giant pyramid with its two robotic pilots appeared in a silhouette of blinding lights and the chanting sounds of “Robot Rock” and was met by a sea of bobbing tiny LCD screens to meet their master’s powerful onstage gaze. Daft Punk’s set was immaculately structured, both musically and visually, with relatively simplistic light and sound arrangements gaining complexity through the imperative-filled “Technologic” to an amazing free-wheeling mix of “Around the World” (or maybe a crazy collage of several entirely different tracks with samples from “Around the World” thrown in? Does it matter?)

For the tremendous bulk of the show it became increasingly unclear and irrelevant to say when one song ended and another began. The intensity peaked and mellowed perfectly with familiar lines emerging regularly to send the whole audience into a unified bouncing mass of happiness, with occasional mellow breaks against scrolling star fields. It was only much later, during the “red section” and its industrial heft that I started to feel a bit like poor Carl on LOST being brainwashed in a compound by the Others and wondered if this was a subtle warning of the consequences of disobeying the robots otherwise unabashed sentimentality and pausing to wonder exactly what it was they were doing up there behind their shiny masks. I imagine that it’s quite a lot.

Along the way, they hit most of their singles, with the blissful centerpiece being “One More Time”. In parallel, the light show became dazzlingly effective as the simpler spots, words, and scrolling LCD grids, gave way to the pyramid erupting from solid glowing colors, to line art, wireframe animations, and finally giving way to gorgeous astronomy porn and rapid fire slideshows of human faces and anatomical diagrams.

By the end, I was thinking that if only the Cylons had thought to use dance music and flashing lights to conquer the twelve the colonies, Battlestar Galactica would have turned out a whole lot differently. The pair closed the set with applause for their fans and disappeared into the bowels of their magical pyramid.

Though I’m usually weary of encores, I couldn’t help but be thrilled that the howling of the crowd summoned Daft Punk back for another round — the back wall reflecting their hopeful romanticism with flashed of “Human” and “Together” before another pass, appropriately enough, of “One More Time”. In the midst of the finale, their costumes suddenly shifted to red outlines, sending gasps of delight and amazement through the hall before sending us home to bed or out to afterparties with proclamations of “best show ever” on our lips.

For my part, I agreed that it was a fantastic experience. But just to be a little jaded and say that if Daft Punk has a spot on my mantle of favorite concerts of all time, it will have to be their 2006 Coachella show, and instead close this the Rapture’s succinct and effective summary: “Whoo! Alright! Yeah Uh-Huh!”

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After you’ve sorted through your photos and videos to compile the ultimate fan archive of the show (surely someone got better pictures of their red outlines than the one accompanying this post), I think that you should probably watch this music video from Flight of the Conchords. [itunes]