The Chainsmokers allegedly make dance music, but the illusion evaporates in 3-D when you find out that these guys can’t dance. Maybe dancing is no longer the point. Early in the duo’s concert Friday night at a sold-out Merriweather Post Pavilion, Drew Taggart, the group’s lead singer and main mouthpiece, quipped, “I’m out here trying to make people think we’re serious musicians!”
That idea — the facade of craft standing in for actual craft — helps to explain why the Chainsmokers are so widely despised. After launching their career with a series of novelty tracks, the pair — singer-producer-DJ Taggart, 27, and producer-DJ Alex Pall, 32 — have repeatedly stumbled into the Billboard top 10 with high-sheen hits about romantic regrets. They seemed to be living a charmed life until September, when Billboard magazine published a profile of the duo in which Taggart and Pall bragged about their anatomy, cited "Entourage" as an influence, and generally came across like oblivious dirtbags.
So in April, perhaps as a form of damage control, the duo released its debut album, "Memories ... Do Not Open," doubling down on the overblown sentimentality that made them famous. And while albums are things that "serious musicians" make, the songs themselves sound like the inorganic progeny of Owl City's "Fireflies" and LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem." Feelings in the front, party in the back.
On Friday night, the Chainsmokers' inexhaustible young audience knew exactly how to lose themselves in these songs, but the performers did not. Skipping figure-eights across the stage, Taggart would often gesticulate to the beat with twitchy hands, or by slapping ghosts across the backside. Pall, often tethered to a workstation, appeared to have no physical connection to rhythm whatsoever. During the digital avalanche of "Don't Let Me Down," when the twosome flung their limbs around in a leaden, poorly rehearsed choreography routine, it was as though they were channeling the aggrieved spirit of every bro who has ever been forced to dance at a wedding reception against his will.
Not quite as wince-worthy was Taggart's guitar playing, or really, his guitar holding. His strums during the nostalgia trip of "Young" and the sugar-rush of "Last Day Alive" were barely audible and entirely for show. "Some guy on Twitter said DJs only press play," Taggart explained at another point in the set, clutching a miniature keyboard. "So I'm going to play this to prove them wrong." Really? He had 19,000 kids hanging on his every decibel, but he needed to prove his worth to a random Twitter egg?
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While Taggart was tapping out who-knows-what on that little synth, he was hopefully keeping his eyes locked on Emily Warren, a guest vocalist who showed up to steal the show with "Don't Say," the only Chainsmokers song where the remorse in the lyrics feels somewhat tangible. Warren's voice was plaintive and present, and when she floated into the song's chorus — "Don't say you're human" — it felt like a phantom rebuttal from the choir of women who have been treated so poorly on the adjoining pages of Taggart's lyric book.
And you didn't have to use your imagination to hear the teenage choir assembled up on the venue's lawn, pouring their lungs into the nifty quarter-note refrains of "Roses" and "Closer." Taggart and Pall seemed to vanish completely in these euphoric singalongs — meaning they either need to try a lot harder or maybe not at all.
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