Review: Empire of the Sun at Merriweather Post on Sept. 4
Last Friday, Australian EDM pair Empire of the Sun (EOS) performed at Merriweather Post Pavilion with openers Polo & Pan and Midnight Generation. Said openers eerily matched the vibe of the main act; they branded their performances with the same idiosyncrasy that EOS has cultivated for the last nineteen years. Both groups eased the crowd into a night full of electronic mixing paired with entrancing light shows, keeping the crowd lightly jiving for two hours. However, the excitement wildly ramped up once EOS took to the stage.
Armed with an intricate stage setup and two dancers, the duo quickly established the concert’s surrealism; it was to be the kind of night that would only make semi-sense on shrooms. Put plainly, these veterans, with almost two decades of performance experience under their belts, have built a platform on being really fucking weird. Their stage was a dismembered head on one side with what seemed like its body on the other. Their album concept contains a celestial, almost dream-like quality. I could try to play their eccentricity as a very meta conception of their creative process, one that only true creatives can harness and understand. However, I liberated myself when I stopped trying to analyze and comprehend the deeper meaning behind everything. Instead, I made peace with the fact that some things simply can’t be explained. Arguably, the only people who understand what (and why) they produce are the artists themselves, who also only really get it when they’re high enough to be on another planet.
Because of EOS’s enigmatic eccentricity, I was surprised to see such a wide variety of age demographics at the show. From pre-teens to adults well into their 40s at the show, it seems that the duo’s reputation of having multigenerational appeal remains intact. Despite this diversity of age, the racial breakdown was much simpler—most of the audience was white, a relatively unsurprising observation. Past the ages, races, and metarealism of it all, EOS proved that they know how to entertain a crowd. With entrancing visuals and a pavilion perfectly suited for people to both roam and dance, Empire of the Sun allowed the audience to experience a long-standing titan in the EDM sphere. I realized by the end of the night that it doesn’t matter if the audience “gets it” or not. Rather, if concertgoers can take it all in, throw away judgments, and accept the craft, they will be welcomed under the Empire of the Sun.
Minhal Nazeer is a junior in the SFS studying Culture and Politics and minoring in Statistics and Journalism. She was not on enough drugs to understand this concert.
Comments