The seat next to me had been occupied by at least four different people, all of whom had danced in and then danced onward. An appearance by David Guetta reminds us that it could be much worse, and an excursion into klezmer techno on Valodja briefly threatens to be interesting but in the main, Swedish House Mafia reduce hedonism to pure function, a facsimile of ecstasy that winds up grim, joyless and oddly sexless. Scales are climbed repeatedly but the melodies fail to take the listener higher. Their own music pounds ceaselessly behind it all, consisting mostly of shrill, over-compressed blasts of sound and blocky beats.
They eschew both subtlety and shame in their determination to convince the world theirs is the craziest party ever - their idea of a twist is to chuck such underplayed obscurities as You Got the Love or Satisfaction into the mix. S wedish House Mafia are not the first DJs to think they're rock stars they're not the first to do anything, really.
