Frenzied loops of sound and fury

Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons don't look half as scary as Keith Prodigy, but their ferocious dance sound can quite easily rip your…

Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons don't look half as scary as Keith Prodigy, but their ferocious dance sound can quite easily rip your insides out. The Chemical Brothers don't need to strut about the stage like wild animals - they just stand behind their decks and calmly dissect the senses with a mixture of panic-button beats and paranoid samples.

The crowd at the Point greeted Tom and Ed like rock messiahs, and the pair responded by cleansing the congregation with washes of white noise. Then, suddenly, the duo launched a flaming fireball of compressed sound, signalling the earthshaking, acrobatic loops of Elektrobank. As the track approached its final high jump, The Chemicals stopped suddenly short, teasing the crowd with a quick swerve into left-field.

As the sonic pressure built up, an old-fashioned gas gauge appeared on the giant twin screens, and the disembodied, dismembered voice of Noel Gallagher came rolling over the beat of Setting Son. Chemical Beats came close to blowing its top, but the pair held back until the encore, letting all hell break loose on The Private Psychedelic Reel. The didjital sound of a didjeridoo swelled across the venue, followed by some weird eastern melodies, and then those beats tumbled in like stormtroopers crashing through the doors of perception.

Tom and Ed gleefully dragged out the song to its ear-splitting finale, while images of stained-glass icons flashed like shards from the screens. The Chemicals left their disciples with a buzzing in the ear and a simple, three-word message onscreen: Love Is All. Dead deep, that was.

Kevin Courtney

Kevin Courtney

Kevin Courtney is an Irish Times journalist