Deadmau5 brings down the Hau5

By Joe Dwyer     11/12/09 6:00pm

As with the majority of the music in my iTunes library, I first discovered electro house artist Deadmau5 (pronounced "dead mouse," born Joel Zimmerman) while playing video games. His remix of One + One's "No Pressure," featured on Grand Theft Auto IV's ElectroChoc FM radio station, originally got me hooked on his driving bass beats and smooth electronic melodies. And when I found out a few months back that he was going on tour for his new album, aptly titled For Lack of a Better Name, I was pumped. Swinging through Houston's House of Blues Sunday as part of the North American leg of his For Lack of a Better Tour world tour, Deadmau5 played to a house brimming with electricity. Some folks even went so far as to build their own mau5 heads, some with glowing lights for eyes, and one father had dressed his young child in the bedsheet ghost outfit from the latest Deadmau5 music video, "Ghosts N Stuff."

The opening DJ, Burns, warmed up the crowd for nearly an hour and a half. Once fully into the evening, Deadmau5 took the stage to raucous applause, kicking off the set with "FML," the opening track from his new album. It's difficult to describe just how tremendous the bass at this show was, but if you can imagine it being strong enough to vibrate the video projectors on either side of the stage as well as the keys in my pocket - which it did - you can begin to understand.

Deadmau5's "FML" bled straight into "Brazil," a track from his previous Random Album Title album, which drove the audience into a dancing frenzy. The show proved memorable because it wasn't just a rehash of all the songs that everyone has already heard from the various albums and singles. Deadmau5 mixed and mashed together songs not only from across his discography, but from video games, too, like the theme to The Legend of Zelda - complete with a cute little eight-bit mau5 animation that scurried across the front of the DJ booth - and the classic Super Mario "game over" jingle.

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The lighting of the show was spectacular, using nearly a dozen vertical LED posts flanking either side of the DJ booth and an LED flatscreen display, at least 60 inches in length, to play various abstract animations and designs to the music's beat, while strobe lights popped and flashed in the background. The show was clearly not for the seizure-prone.

The highlight of the show, unarguably, came when Zimmerman took off his Deadmau5 head and hopped down into the audience to grab a fan's custom-made one, which he then donned for a couple of songs before making a show of struggling to take it off, signing both ears and handing it back to the lucky fan. Throughout the show, Zimmerman was grinning, smoking, even conducting the crowd's movements at one point. It was clear he was having just as much fun playing the music as the fans were listening to it.

After closing his set with a tweaked version of "Moar Ghosts N Stuff" and a remix of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," the audience clamored for an encore, which Deadmau5 gladly delivered by launching straight into "Not Exactly." Yet even as the encore wound down, Deadmau5 had one last trick up his sleeve, playing himself off with the meme-riffic Keyboard Cat, the feline of YouTube fame, and signaling the end of the show with Super Mario's "game over" ditty.

All in all, it was a fantastic show, and while I was initially confused at the amount of older adults littered throughout the crowd, I realized that they were just as entitled to see a kickass DJ play some awesome music as I was.

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