Dada Life Live Review - February 10th Portland, OR

I now know what it truly means to Do the Dada.

Was it amazing? In some ways, but mostly it was exactly what I expected it to be – two hours of hard electro bass, plenty of champagne and a LOT of bananas!

Red Cube went all-out on this one and converted one of the Bohemia Warehouse's large rooms into a respectable main stage, complete with plenty of lasers, lights and a few scantily clad GoGos, for the Swedish duo to tear up. An adjacent room housed a smaller visual set up, but had some huge eardrum-rattling subwoofers for a nights worth of bass music capped by EDM mogul Dieselboy.

Main Stage Setup

I arrived in the Dada room around thirty minutes before they came on and it was already packed to the brim. By the time they were ready, the room was wall to wall as a massive crowd anxiously awaited the first burst of bass from the speakers. Seconds later, the hook from Kick Out The Epic Motherf***er filled the space, slowed for effect, and built into the namesake sample that was the signal – along with a champagne eruption from Olle Cornéer – for the whole place to go absolutely INSANE! Keeping the energy high, they transitioned next  into their remix of Afrojack & R3hab's Prutataa and then, to give everyone's vocal chords a rest after screaming “Woo!” with Pruntataa, they completed a trifecta of their best and brought in the instrumental mix of Happy Violence.

At that point, even though the room was well ventilated by the open warehouse doors, I was getting quite claustrophobic so I decided to check out the third room of the venue which offered a projected image of Dada's stage, good sound and a much less packed area to dance like crazy. There I watched the rest of the set, which was a well mixed collection of the hottest Electro House tracks from Tommy Trash's Cascade, to Hardwell's Spaceman and Zedd's Slam The Door. All Dada's hit tracks were present and the set even included a few live mash-ups such as their Cookies With A Smile vs SHM's One and Steve Aoki & Laidback Luke's Turbulance vs Cotton Eye Joe. 

Like any Dada show they were sure to bring their whole live experience, minus the 25 piece marching band they brought to EDC, including plenty of bottles of champagne, at least a hundred bananas, and giant inflatable versions of both – all of which was shared with the crowd. 

Banana Dance Party!

After almost two straight hours of bombarding everyone with bass, Dada decided to give the crowd what they wanted and closed out their set with the vocal mix of Happy Violence and White Noise / Red Meat. During this finale, they began pulling anyone raging in a banana suit up onto the stage and the whole room went wild as a giant banana dance party took over the stage. 

All and all, Dada Life brought an energetic, unique and reasonably diverse performance that was a real crowd-pleaser. I'm not sure I'd see them again because I got a bit bored with two hours of club-centric Electro and House, but as I said, it was exactly what I expected and I highly recommend you go check them out if they come back through town!


All Photo Credit - Merc Photography