Rufus Du Sol (2021)

One Liner: Good dance house tunes from Sydney

Wikipedia Genre: alternative dance, electronica, house
Home: Sydney, Australia

Poster Position: Headliner
Both Weekends.

Saturday at 8:20 on Honda Stage.

Thoughts: They were last here in 2017 (which is a theme I am starting to notice about a lot of these bands) but were down on the fifth line of the poster back then.  Apparently now they are big enough to be a top 5 headliner.

They were originally known as RUFUS, but in North America they had to go by Rufus du Sol because of some other band who already had Rufus.  Which seems weird, to have one name in one country and another name for the rest of the world.  I've said this before, but if I ask five random people on the street if a band name exists and none of them say yes, then you can't have copyright on it.  The most popular band should always win.

This is three guys making house music to dance to, not the more recently-big EDM sounding stuff, more like the fun house stuff that was big before the Skrillexes and DeadMau5es of the world took over.  They've won a few Australian music awards, including a "Best Dance Release" ARIA in 2015, for "You Were Right."  Their most streamed at 108.5 million.

Pretty good tune.  Here is the thing that confuses me - their Spotify bio says that they were formed in 2010 "when a rain-soaked vacation to Byron Bay turned into an impromptu jam session."  How do electronic artists enter into an impromptu jam session?  Was everyone sitting around with their macbooks on their lap, reading their twitter feeds, when suddenly one of them turned on a sick beat, the other starting throwing in some tight hand claps, and the third one sang a few insane bars about love and peace and the relativity of time?  I can see some guitar nerds having a jam sesh, but I'm not sure I can imagine it with machine music.

Their Spotify streaming totals are actually surprisingly low for a headliner.  Only one song with more than 100 million streams?  Only five with over 50 million?  I'd expect a bigger set of popular songs for a big print band.  Maybe their manager has naked photos of the Charleses from C3.

Three albums from these guys, 2013's Atlas, 2016's Bloom, and 2018's Solace.  Another interesting thing - I'd guess they must be just about to release new music, because EDM seems like the kind of genre where you need to be fresh and can't be only playing old-style stuff.  The majority of their top songs come from the new-er album, with 2 each from the older two albums up in their top ten on Spotify. That earlier one ("You Were Right") is by far their most popular, and their next most listened-to is also off of that album ("Innerbloom" with 80.3 million).  "Sundream," from the first album, comes third on their most popular list, with 49.6 million streams.

I don't know why the word that comes to mind for this song is "smart."  Something about the tune and clean tone of the music makes me think this is smart music.  Weird thing to think, but there you go.  Watching that video though reminded me of being a kid and watching scrambled Cinemax in the hope of catching a little slice of boob through the scrambled picture.  If only that kaleidoscope was a little closer...  In listening through the middle album, I keep getting snatches of Chris Martin/Coldplay in the singing, even if the music is nothing like traditional Coldplay music.  I like some of these tunes. Normally, I wouldn't say that I would go after dance music or electronica, but I've enjoyed listening to these albums for the past day. I guess I like "house" more than "EDM."

The new album keeps using this one BLATT of synth sound that reminds me of something from the Stranger Things opening music.  "Underwater" is the most popular song and has the most streams, from that new album, with 67.7 million.  

Pretty dang catchy.  Again, that doesn't mean I'd actually go spend the time to boogie around to this at the end of a night, but I could imagine that being a fun time.