EVENT REVIEW: Above & Beyond at TLA Philadelphia February 10th, 2012



Above & Beyond swept into Philadelphia this past Friday on their next-to-last stop in the Group Therapy 2012 tour, with a show that was sold out weeks in advance. The “Pride of Anjuna,” their well-worn Group Therapy tour bus, was parked on 3rd Street in downtown Philly next to the Theater of the Living Arts. TLA was a simple venue with a reasonably large main dance floor, and extra bars & VIP areas on a second level that overlooked the main stage, but every single square foot was crowded. It was absolutely no surprise that it sold out so far before the show, since TLA couldn’t possibly have fit everyone who wanted to attend. As Above & Beyond themselves—or, rather, Paavo and Jono, once again the 2/3 of the trio who toured here—later commented on their tour blog, the venue was incredibly hot with all of the body heat. Coat check was closed and full early on, tended by a couple of extremely bored-looking attendants with a remarkably small closet, given the number of people who were packed into the place—it was full from wall to wall, back to front, every inch occupied with screaming Anjunafans.
 
This second round of Group Therapy continues from the same album that Above & Beyond toured for in the spring of 2011, where they made stops across the country through March and April, but the set composition was slightly different. Through the night, it was studded with Anjunabeats releases from the latest compilation, Anjunabeats Volume 9, as well as remixes of Group Therapy album tracks. The epic orchestral album track “Filmic” filtered quickly into the Norin & Rad remix of “In and Out of Phase,” a triple-threat collab between American artists Andrew Bayer, Matt Lange, and Kerry Leva; meanwhile, the first A&B original to drop was the Maor Levi mashup called “Breaking 2Night,” with Oceanlab’s Justine Suissa-driven a cappella pitted against an Eric Prydz instrumental. Meanwhile, 2011’s ubiquitous Anjunabeats collab (I’m talking about “Rebound,” of course) was replaced by its equally-catchy successor from the same Mat Zo/Arty team that had everyone talking, “Mozart”—and the crowd was singing every note so faithfully that Paavo commented cheekily, on the display screen behind the decks, “Sounds like you guys know all the words!”
 
Soon enough, the Group Therapy tracks came out in full force, starting with the Club Mix of “On My Way To Heaven,” another heart wrenching performance by Richard Bedford that wasn’t featured in the last tour, and going to crowd favorite “Thing Called Love” in short order. Zoe Johnston’s appearance on “You Got To Go” played out in the Kyau & Albert remix, and another new-to-this-tour treat to hear was the Myon & Shane 54 remix of “Every Little Beat,” also with Richard Bedford. “Bloom” from rising favorites Norin & Rad was an unsurprising feature—A&B have commented that they’re supporting the track vigorously. 
 
A high point of the set for the crowd was A&B’s own bootleg mashup of Kyau & Albert’s “Be There 4 U” against Daft Punk classic “One More Time,” which delighted longtime EDM fans and newcomers alike. The personal highlight of the entire set for me, though, was the spine-tingling, timelessly wonderful Cosmic Gate remix of Oceanlab’s “Sirens of the Sea”—I didn’t expect to hear that at all, and I was completely glad to be wrong. But the set wrapped up in short order with the Arty remix of Ferry Corsten’s “Punk,” which I must have heard at literally every single 2011 event I attended, and ever-present uplifter “On A Good Day vs. Metropolis”—still, the crowd was positively roaring by this point, and thus A&B accomplished what they set out to do.
 
The guys came back one more time to encore with “Tokyo,” their moving tribute to the Japanese earthquake & tsunami tragedy in early 2011, and—reminding the crowd once more via screen that “Life is made of small moments like these”—left a mark on their adoring fans as always. Was this the best A&B set that I’ve seen? Probably not. Their set composition has remained about 2/3 consistent since Trance Around The World 400 late last year. But is it always a total delight to experience the energy that Above & Beyond bring to every performance, and the way they can manage to interact with their fans and play to the crowd’s dynamic very effectively, proving that there doesn’t always have to be the stereotype of a distant DJ who merely plays tracks? Absolutely yes.

Review and photos by Lira Yin for ElectronicNightLife.com

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Posted by Zaneta Ortiz at 2/14/2012 9:59 PM
Categories: DJ, Dates, Review, Trance, Events
Tags: Above and Beyond Philadelphia TLA Trance Review Event Event Review
 

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