Orbital - Olympia Theatre

If Kraftwerk are the creators of live techno music, the brothers Orbital must be the populisers. Venerated as the band that took electronic music from an over-suspiciously viewed genre to the mainstream, they now have the trappings of musical success: a Lollapalooza tour, film scores, critically acclaimed albums and chart placings.

Like the Dusseldorf quartet, they now spend most of their time in their studio, working so meticulously that the forthcoming The Middle Of Nowhere is their first album for several years.

At their Tuesday night gig they showed an almost Wagnerian quality, in that there were several brilliant moments and some tedious half hours. Their building blocks are oft-repeated synthesiser chunks, but these merely emphasised the small scale nature of the music, which becomes a succession of ideas rather than an organised structure.

More serious, though, was the lack of focus to both the show and the music. Was the centre the fancy light show, the two brothers in their trademark torch glasses, the pounding bass, which served to emphasise the common-time feel (the same as any Status Quo song), the overused demoniac intervals or the synthesiser effects?

When music has no foreground or background, the good ideas cannot develop or be emphasised, and the music becomes a stream of cleverness incapable of communication or grand gesture. How fatal this is depends on how important you think the grand gesture is in pop, but this was one gig that left a young-fogey Irish Times distinctly under-whelmed.