Part of the Weekend Never Dies

Photo: Courtesy of World’s Fair

The tour documentary has finally found its way to dance music, making a better match than one might think-—this one passes on a love for the music and captures a little zeitgeist, too.

Great taste and a talent with machines drives the Benelux dance-rock juggernaut Soulwax. The influential outfit from Ghent has spent most of the last few years relentlessly touring as Radio Soulwax, an event that features the band performing its remix album Nite Versions live, deejaying as the famed genre-hopping 2ManyDJs and hosting its favorite DJs and bands in between—for a marathon night of lively and debauched punk-rock electro that’s been universally hailed.

This DVD follows a now-familiar tour-doc format as it bounces among banal but beautiful travel footage (marvel at the porta-potties backstage at a Japanese festival); effusive praise of pals and peers James Murphy, Justice, the Klaxons and Erol Alkan; and testimonials of the raving lunatics at Radio Soulwax who love them—spiked with a police search, babes on the bus and snatches of on-the-road lunacy.

Soulwax is no ordinary band—it’s probably the most thrilling live electronic dance act on the new scene—but 2ManyDJs bring the party to its peak and Weekend ultimately validates the DJ format. It also delves deeper into a dance act than you thought possible, unearthing a quiet balance between the brothers Dewaele that keeps the project on track and revealing that, in fact, Daddy was a DJ. The DVD extras are as generous as the band itself—54 minutes of rock and dance exploding under strobe lights at Fabric and 120 other venues.