There’s two music genres that get most of my time. The first is film scores, which admittedly gets 95% of my music focus. The second is electronic music. While I’m a bigger fan of some of the earlier electronic music artists (Jean Michel Jarre, Vangelis and others), there are a number of modern artists/groups of which I’m a big fan. Near the top of that list is The Chemical Brothers (along with Crystal Method, Orbital, Juno Reactor and others). I have little interest in actually going to a Chemical Brothers concert (not a fan of the crowded festival style concerts and what-not), I did want to check out this concert movie (which played just the one night theatrically). I’ve seen plenty of videos of The Chemical Brothers’ concerts over the years, as well as their music videos of course, and this full length version is an evolved version of what came before.

Put simply, their concerts are designed for people on an acid trip. They are not, however, designed for an epileptic. The non-stop, constantly mutating progression of their music and visuals (there is only one very brief moment in the entire film that has no music – nearly the entire thing is one mega-mix), set to the very well done video light show surely must be mind blowing to those on a drug high. I have little doubt that a significant percentage of attendees are just that. What makes this full length recording of the concert that much better is that it was filmed in Japan. I don’t know why, but the far-out conceptual and visual oddity of much of their concert just plays much better in the context of being viewed by thousands upon thousands of tripping Japanese people. The trailer sums it up nicely:

Sure, I could have done with less hand held shakey-cam, but overall it was a fun concert film. The frenetic chaos of it does get broken up by some more well composed shots. It doesn’t destroy the production and make it completely unwatchable (like, say, the recent Prodigy concert disc, which is insufferable in filming, performance and sound recording). Not all of Don’t Think works perfectly, but much of it works very well, and when all the elements come together perfectly on occasion, it’s fantastic. I definitely look forward to the hopefully inevitable blu-ray release. It was an interesting and unusual experience seeing something like this in a dark theater with a number of other audience members. It was particularly interesting during the trippier segments.