The Bloody Beetroots at The Olympia Theatre (08/03/13)

It was difficult to know what to expect from the crowd at the Olympia on Friday night- The Bloody Beetroots relatively softer approach on their new material may find a more matured crowd in time, but they were nowhere to be seen here; for the most part, this was the exact same crowd of teenagers that the Beetroots had played to in the Academy three years previously, with the added exception of even younger newcomers to the Italian duo's brand of hardcore electro.

So the audience may have aged since their last outing in Dublin, but had the band themselves? To put it bluntly, no. The Beetroots emerged in their trademark Venom masks to high anticipation from the Irish crowd, and immediately kicked off proceedings with a spectacular light show set to a thumping electro house beat. Sounds good? Well it did for about 7-10 minutes when it suddenly dawned on me that Bob Rifo and co. didn't intend on switching things up for the remainder of their set. Time after time the band cut the lights and turned the tempo down only for the dance-punk noise to pump back in accompanied by blinding lights in a shock tactic move that didn't seem so shocking after the first five times.

Such was the repetitive nature of the Beetroots set that it stunned me they weren't aware themselves of just how methodical it really was. The crowd seemed oblivious too, more than happy to jump around to ''Warp 1.7'' the third time it was played within the hour. Yes that's right, the hour. Having come on stage around the 9pm mark, once the clock struck ten the Beetroots were done, much to the bemusement of the audience who saw their evening cut considerably short. A brief encore did nothing much to convince me and many others in the venue that our 25 euro could have been better spent on something other than one long blur of indistinguishable techno mush for just over 60 minutes.

It's always been a feature of the Beetroots live show that they play with a full band as opposed to hitting a button and letting the audience do their thing, and that's an admirable aspect of their set, but if this is the best they can muster up with or without their own instruments, maybe they'd be better off just pressing play next time.


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