Caribou live at the Glasshouse review – symphony hall rave is a dizzying delight

Caribou’s club-focused house music proved to be a winningly unorthodox match for the refined Glasshouse concert hall, convincingly turning the auditorium into a euphoric nightclub complete with a spectacular light show. Dan Snaith’s live drumming propelled his best songs to new heights, but his more light-footed electronica tracks felt a little bland by comparison.

I’ve been dazzled at the Glasshouse before. I was dazzled during Víkingur Ólafsson’s sublimely tranquil piano encore, and dazzled too when Isata Kanneh-Mason launched into the finale of Beethoven’s Eroica, as well as when Ichiko Aoba unleashed her flamenco guitar masterpiece Kikaijikake no Ucyuu. But I’ve never been literally confronted with an arsenal of white lights the length of the stage beamed straight into my irises at full power, so bright it overpowered my phone camera and left behind optical artefacts in my photos. This is Caribou, the Canadian electronica producer and DJ known in daylight hours as Dan Snaith whose club music is about as far removed from civilised Beethoven as it gets. Standing at the barriers in full view of those blinding tractor beams, there was a faint feeling of being sucked up into an alien spaceship at the start of this gig before being whisked off to another universe.

Caribou’s music might not quite qualify as other-worldly – most songs stick to the positively terrestrial paradigm of four chord loops and pop-like song structures – but tonight’s concert did indeed feel like a coherent musical journey, each song blending seamlessly into the next, with only occasional breaks for Snaith to soak up his deserved adulation from a lively Geordie crowd. Dance music gigs are always obliged to try harder than others when it comes to visuals, with the main star often tied-down to esoteric electronics rigs, but tonight Snaith is already onto a winner with the surroundings of the Glasshouse, a sleek, wood-pannelled auditorium that lends gravitas to his art just as it did for alt-rockers Black Country, New Road in September. A venue clearly thinking outside the box for ways to tempt a younger audience into their more routine Royal Northern Sinfonia offerings, Caribou makes for a fabulously forward-thinking and unpretentious booking.

Tonight Volume is the scene-setting opener before the real party starts with Climbing, a swirling Italo disco number that simply climbs and climbs, each sonic summit revealing another summit just around the corner. It all leads to a positively Bach-like knotty synth solo from Snaith, before he takes to the drums (sat opposite his other drummer Brad Weber) to bring the track to its logical extreme – namely a splashy thrash-fest that threatens to implode into a wall of noise at any moment. It’s only song two, but Snaith’s performance is so committing he finds himself triumphantly launching his drum sticks into the crowd after the song anyway. If I’d have tried harder in PE perhaps I wouldn’t have fumbled the catch, but instead a stick shatters on the ground by my feet. Me and a friend settle for a three inch long shard between us.

Tracks like Climbing and Come Find Me are straightforward feelgood numbers, but over the course of the next 60 minutes Snaith’s set takes a steadily darker turn. Gritty Odessa, probably the funkiest earworm Caribou has ever put to tape, is unleashed early and fills the room with shimmering tambourine and cowbell undercut by a beast of a bass line. Facilita, a haunting recent collaboration with dance music’s it boy Fred again takes things darker still, literally – the retina-burning blasts of stobe lights are so short and sharp that most of the performance happens in pitch black darkness, my frazzled eyes unable to make out even the audience members around me between each flash. It’s a fittingly disorienting effect for the most musically daring song in the set, Menor Tetu’s Portuguese vocals warping into strange shapes over a rampaging synth bass.

Tonight’s apex is Sun though, an unassuming enough track on record that’s refashioned into an enthralling 15-minute odyssey in Gateshead, Snaith’s fuzzy synths veering towards techno territory as Weber gets to work testing the tensile strength of his snare drum. Sun also features the best of a series of minimalist projections used throughout the show, a pinprick of light (and the only point of stillness in another storm of strobes) slowly growing to subsume the whole stage. When Snaith eventually returns to singing the song’s one word hook it’s remarkable to reflect on how much mileage he’s squeezed out of Sun from such humble beginnings.

It’s such a monumental rendition that Snaith seems to struggle to know where to go from there. The crowd’s attention noticeably sags a little in the second half as the unfocussed disco of Over Now and generic house of Never Come Back overstay their welcomes. Caribou’s most recent record, Honey, drew some sharp criticism for its use of AI to conjure up fake vocalists based on Snaith’s voice. In particular turning his voice into a cutesy girl persona for Broke My Heart feels a little queasy tonight, even before we get to the song’s craven interpolation of Tom’s Diner in the chorus.

Luckily Snaith gets the crowd back on side before the end with Honey’s title track, a surprise Ibiza-grade club hit from a DJ whose left-field tendencies and PhD in Pure Mathematics has always given him an air of sophistication that seemed to render radio hits unlikely. A walloping, dubstep-style synth bass riff is no doubt the key to Honey’s success, and its long-trailered arrival is greeted with loud cheers in the Glasshouse. Snaith is a DJ well versed in dance music’s usual turns of phrase – builds, drops, breakdowns and cross-rhythms – but also with a more uncommon ability to know how to break the rules. No drop tonight pans out quite as expected, Snaith preferring to pull the rug from under us with percussive handbreak turns and bass line switcheroos. That said, Honey’s all important final drop, and the pivotal moment of this concert, turns out to be the sort of finicky construction that only makes proper sense when you hear it back for a second time.

Can’t Do Without You closes the set and adds a rare moment of lyrical poignancy with Snaith and the audience singing the title to each other and acknowledging their mutual dependence and love of music itself. For the most part, though, Snaith had let the music do the talking for this set, plotting a succinct musical expedition through his back catalogue with such attention for the bigger picture it felt more like a meticulously sequenced studio album than a gig. It’s safe to say I’ve never seen a spectacle like this before at the Glasshouse and – after exposure to those alarmingly bright stage lights – it seems I may never see anything like it again.