M83

The first time I heard M83, I was thirty thousand feet up in the air, peering at a flood of clouds beneath me, rising on jet engines and M83's turbocelestial sound. On record, it's weightless. It's like sonic Maltesers. Yet tonight they sound like they're trying to drill for oil using a screwdriver. It's massively disappointing; clumsy, basic, every ounce of the records' birdlike beauty swallowed up by muddy, ineffectual bass.

Questions must be asked. What does M83 mastermind Anthony Gonzalez want to create? On record, it seemed clear; the now one-man outfit was about ideas - great big skyscraping ones that shot up into the air before even figuring out how they were going to get down. "Epic", "cinematic", "euphoric" - listening to them, such words sprang readily to the tongue. Tonight, either reproducing those ideas is proving acutely difficult, or Gonzalez has decided to change tack completely and fill the set with booming three minute dance-pop segments with very definite spaces isolating each one uncomfortably. The resulting hotchpotch lacks the experimental flair of M83's studio sound, and the precision and flamboyance of a great pop gem. The atmosphere that M83's reputation is built on hasn't even bothered showing up tonight.

So, we get a series of half-formed vignettes and trigger-happy stop-start bursts punctuated by awkward silences. 'A Guitar And A Heart', in theory a swandive of supercharged Formula One guitars, is an unimaginative bumble of drums and bass, with little of the promised guitar - or indeed heart - involved at all. The wealth of technological goodies piled across the stage is impotent, their output trodden matter-of-factly underfoot by the mass of shapeless rhythm. Ironically, their spoken samples are the very soliloquys from the record, replicated and pasted between songs, the only accurate representation of M83's recorded ideas, and they show up the comparative heavyhandedness of the music's rendering to embarrassing effect.

Having not seen M83 before, it's hard to know who to blame. Gonzalez? The other musicians onstage with him? The sound engineer? Technical difficulties? Is it always this bad? It's hardly M83's first stab at playing live. The intros are recognisable, but it might as well be a different band. All of M83's wonderful, winged ideas are felled before they even get off the ground. It's an awful showcase for such a genuinely talented artist.