Hypnotic Brass Ensemble at the Sugar Club, Dublin, 3rd December 2014

The Sugar Club is packed and brimming with pent-up energies. People are here to see one of the most captivating live shows of today: Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. Legendary live-act, friends with the likes of Damon Albarn and Erykah Badu, by now everyone’s heard them or heard of them and so Dublin’s bop-inclined arrived to let loose and dance. People are here to get down.

This doesn’t take long. Dublin’s Interskalactic get the show off to a flying start. A joyous and wild performance, they are what it sounds like when Big Band and Jamaican Ska are hurled together at high speed. The result is an energetic display that is impossible to resist. A joy to watch as well as to listen to, the ten members – when not in synchronised bop – hop around and off the stage and give their show an improvisational, manic aspect. The audience is quick to show their appreciation and, before long, people are dancing down the front and in the aisles, particularly on their raunchy cover of Outkast’s Hey Ya.

Eventually strolling onstage to rapturous applause, Hypnotic appear in slightly different incarnation, with a second percussionist and an electric bass. Though at first seeming to pale in relation to the exuberance of the opening act, Hypnotic soon find their stride and from here the rabble-rousing takes off in earnest. Opening with Planet of the Aeps and Rebel Rousin off of last year’s ‘Fly: The Customs Prelude’, the band quickly shift up a gear for a crowd already hyped by Interskalactic.

With the funk-chant of Kryptonite things proceed in earnest, the band dipping back into their older hits between the newer cuts. The beat-driven Menage A Trois, a song yet to see release but hovering in their sets for over a year now, is a highlight of unadulterated funk. It is a testament to Hypnotic’s live energy that half the set was lifted from the band’s smaller releases, with a good many songs yet to have found any outlet at all, and still the crowd is so fully receptive.

The almost meditative groove of Ballicki Bone is followed by the recently Hunger-Games-appropriated War, which sounds aggressive live and gets a big reaction from the audience, its intro sounding not unlike falling bombs. The audience spill to the front bit by bit, the melodies too infectious to keep people sitting for too long. The call-and-response of songs like Party Started ensure both band and audience keep mutually reinforcing each other.

The shift of line-up and the laid back manner with which the show opened may have had some wondering if Hypnotic Brass Ensemble were past their prime, but the set as a whole, and the captivated audience, were a reminder that this band probably hasn’t even begun to reach its potential. Though now featuring extra instruments and ever-more present vocal hooks, the core of what made HBE so initially appealing is still in place; infectious live energy, serious musical chops and buckets of attitude.

By the set’s close, shirts having been removed and tailfeather’s thoroughly shook, both band and dancefloor look wrecked and delighted. Hype and famous-friends aside, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble write great, original music and tour one of the best live shows around. Go see it.

Seriously. Go see it.