Danny Brown at The Academy | Review

Danny Brown at The Academy, 25th of February 2014

Danny Brown hasn’t had the best of times recently. In a series of since-deleted tweets last week, he let everyone know that he was in a dark emotional place at the moment, related to his near-constant drug use and his frustrations at the music industry and fellow rappers. A few disastrous interviews recently have served to highlight this. Understandably, the crowd gathered in The Academy on this Tuesday night wasn’t sure whether this was the best time to catch him in a live setting.

It’s the mark of a real showman however that once he came out, whatever personal matters he was going through weren’t translated to the stage. This was a hyped set from the start, focusing on his more upbeat party tracks. He has plenty of more introspective songs about growing up in poverty and the negative sides of his drug use but nobody in the crowd seemed to mind those songs being skipped over. It was a massively energetic set from the rapper helped out only by his DJ Skywlkr, who made sure the beats sounded as massive as possible.

The set largely focused on his latest album ‘Old’, with opener Break It [Go] setting the tone for things to come. Smokin And Drinkin was an early highlight and Dope Song had most of the building pogoing in unison. Danny is an impressive lyricist, flying through his verses at breakneck speed but he manages to include fairly simple choruses in most of his songs to ensure the crowd get the chance to participate as much as possible.

One thing which was clear from looking around the crowd is that he has a much more varied fan base than the average rapper. There were hip-hop heads dancing alongside dreadlocked rockers here. It shows the unique place Danny Brown holds in the music world. You can tell he’s a bit different just by looking at him and a song like 25 Bucks, which features indie electronic group Purity Ring, shows that he’s not afraid to experiment with different styles.

It’s hard to pick out highlights from the set because it proceeded at pretty much the same energy level for about an hour. There wasn’t much chat between songs although he did acknowledge that he was in Dublin several times, so he might not have been as high as he usually is. Monopoly was probably his breakout song from his ‘XXX’ mixtape and went down exceptionally well. Kush Coma and Dip towards the end finished things off excellently and Danny left the stage without the promise of an encore.

Although nothing too unexpected went down, it was about as good of a show as you could hope for as a Danny Brown fan going in. He must have some sort of affection for Ireland as he is returning in the summer to support Macklemore and Ellie Goulding in Marlay Park in July. It’s hard to imagine too many Ellie Goulding fans getting into this but it would definitely be worth going a bit early to catch him.