Housse De Racket – live

Housse De Racket @ The Lexington, London

12th August.

Duo. Pop. Epic. Indie. Synth. French. Tennis whites.

That’s the short version. The long version sees HDR returning for a headline show in London, having played supports to bands like Delphic in the past, and the visibly heaving room attests to their prowess on the stage for making utterly gobsmacking, synth led pop furies. Victor le Masne (drums) and Pierre Leroux (guitar/keys/vox), dressed in their tennis whites, make more noise than any five piece band. The instrumental build of ‘Forty Love’ is the sound of Giorgio Moroder and Daft Punk caught in a sonic blast, the first thump of bass exploding from the speakers to sweep their audience off their feet.

They sing in their native tongue so don’t ask for the underlying meaning of their lyrics but their music bristles and glows with an acute pop sensibility that trancends translation. Their professed love of pop stalwarts, like Prince and Michael Jackson, can be felt on record but live HDR are more demanding; Victor is an eye-catching, charismatic drummer and he hits damn hard, while Pierre’s beautiful white Flying V is given a gritty workout that nicely downplays its flashy appearance.

This aggressive musicianship is balanced by the duo’s cool, even shyly endearing, demeanours as they chat in between songs and the range of their writing is expansive, skipping from the joyous candy sweet jangle of ‘Oh Yeah’ to the funk-laden Sunday vibes of ‘Sur Le Papier’. They indulge themselves on occasion, subtly adding tweaks and twists, feeding the songs until they are barely contained to the stage and every foot and shoulder in attendence is bobbing and tapping with abandon. They don’t have an encore, they don’t even have more than seven songs on their setlist, but it’s forgivable. ‘Synthetisuer’ is the glittering mac daddy of the evening- a guitar riff that heralds imaginary pyrotechnics and has its own dance moves, lashings of vocoders – smashing through cymbals and piling in on itself until virtually exploding with a Queen inspired orgiastic finale.

It’s some time since being this entertained and uplifted solely by beats from a stage without the presence of a constructed show but Housse De Racket are a small, precise tornado of rhythms and complexity. It’s dance, it’s pop, it’s dancepoprock on meth and it should make the likes of LCD Soundsystem and Calvin Harris writhe with jealousy.