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Concert reviews Music

Lunice plays the showman at Velvet Underground

LUNICE at the Velvet Underground, Saturday, February 27. Rating: NNN


Montreal producer/DJ Lunice has been closely associated with the rise of festival trap, despite his objections to being lumped in with that EDM reinterpretation of Southern rap production style. Even though he’d rather be considered a hip-hop artist, you can’t separate the trend from the pioneering work he did with Hudson Mohawke as TNGHT, which helped shape the sound that pushed dubstep off big festival stages over the last few years.

Trend watchers have noted for a while that the EDM-trap sound has probably peaked, and you could hear at Lunice’s Red Bull Music Academy show the Velvet Underground on Saturday night how he was trying to break out of that mold.

He just finished doing some opening dates with Madonna, and he’s definitely got stadium-level showmanship down. Half the time he wasn’t even at his laptop – he was running around stage lip-syncing and hamming it up to the songs he was dropping. The show was somewhere between a DJ set and a live performance, although the crowd reacted stronger whenever he played songs by big-name rappers like Kanye West, Chief Keef and Travis Scott, than they did to his live remixing.

Occasionally he’d bump the tempo up into house territory, which boosted energy, but he didn’t quite seem to know where to go from there and quickly cut back down to the half-time trap tempo. The handful of songs he previewed from his upcoming debut album 360 were promising though, and their uptempo hip-hop feel went over well with the room.

benjaminb@nowtoronto.com | @benjaminboles

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