To experience Pendulum live is to know how it feels to exist as a mere satellite, orbiting a sun in a singular distant galaxy, in an endlessly expanding universe; or, as a voiceover announces during one part of their set, it is “the sonic recreation of the end of the world”.
The genre-defying Aussie rock juggernaut never fails to impress with their explosive live performances and there was no exception made for Easter Sunday in Glasgow. The band lit up the OVO Hydro with floor-to-ceiling video displays and a dazzling laser light show to match the mammoth scale of their sound, making the arena feel at once ten times smaller and infinitely larger than its physical dimensions.
Igniting the set with unreleased track Napalm was a bold statement of intent and they backed it up immediately and relentlessly, peppering the first half of the night with perennial fan favourites like Propane Nightmares, Blood Sugar and just a taste of their Voodoo People remix. The spectral second movement of Encoder punctuated the shift into a deeper rave that climaxed with the menacing blood-red light and scintillating silent movie gore behind Silent Spinner.
The heavier, synthesised tracks from last year’s Anima EP acted as counterpoint to some of the more ethereal and panoramic moments of 2010’s Immersion, demonstrating how expansive Pendulum’s sound has become and while their style continues to evolve, the energy of it all is still distinctly and iconically theirs.
The surreal contrast of the tiny band members on stage amidst the swelling, pulsing, reverberating and breakneck thrashing of thousands during Watercolour proved definitively that music is more than its component parts, more magical and more transcendent than us mortals can even conceive. And they kindly returned for an encore of The Tempest. You wanted more? Too bad. You are but a speck of dust in the face of a supernova.
Words and pictures: Kendall Wilson @softcrowdclassic