Django Django at Vicar Street, Dublin, 1st December 2015

On the geometric sleeve notes on former-Edinburgh art schoolers, Django Django’s self-titled first album, the band thank a list of people, predominantly acts. They span across hundreds of different musicians from Cypress Hill to The Stooges to Franz Ferdinand. They’re audiophiles.

Indeed the Scottish quartet capture the BFFness of hip-hop collectives, bouncing off each other perpetually, the bluesy riffs of Iggy, the earworm Indie of FF, the harmonies of The Beach Boys and bombastic Middle-Eastern synth work not too dissimilar to something that could be heard from Diplo, all glued together by the warped genius of Tommy Grace, maintaining flow and remaining unpretentious and endearingly idiosyncratic throughout.

For a still relatively young Indie band, this was a show that was far much more of a spectacle than it had any right to be, their performance self-assured from the charging melodies of Hail Bop to the euphoric refrains of Silver Rays. There was a grandiosity added to the set, the raucous extensions to the former and Waveforms sending the crowd into delirium.

There were also twists and turns from every angle from the descents and releases on First Light and Reflections to the piledriver riffs on Storm and Default to the hypnotic spiral on Skies Over Cairo. And by the time the sirens on Wor call, Vicar Street is ready to explode. Frontman, Vincent Neff’s cadence too swerves from what you expect to hear from the albums, somehow not compromising the tune of their tracks bringing a further subtle effortless unpredictability to the set. The visuals were equally as perfect, the light show sparky and punchy, complementing the show’s relentless energy.

Vicar Street is a venue suited to Django Django, the simplistic, grimy décor bringing out the colour in their set. Mind you, knowing the band’s strengths having toured extensively for a while now, the quartet could easily turn any relatively intimate surrounding into one hell of a party.

This is an intelligent and collected band. And the scary thing is, they’re still learning – they haven’t yet reached their peak. Given how eclectic they are, it’s amazing just how rhythmically in sync they are. They take meticulous care in their work. No instrument gets left behind.