REVIEW: Krewella at Royale push EDM envelope to promising heights

I’ll be the first to admit that I know next to nothing about electronic dance music (EDM) — the closest I had come to immersing myself in the genre is blasting Daft Punk’s catalogue while writing papers. As such, I’ve never really had much of an opinion on its merits or lack thereof as a musical genre. However, after throwing myself (somewhat ungracefully) into the scene at Chicago-based group Krewella’s show at Royale Wednesday and supplementing the experience with a lot of blog-scanning, I think I have a better grasp on where the genre stands in the scene today, as well as where Krewella falls within that genre.

I’ve never really bothered with EDM for one main reason — 90 percent of it seems highly impersonal. Between the drops and the wub-wubs and the record scratches, many tracks I’ve heard seem nearly indistinguishable from one another. Bassnectar, Avicii, Swedish House Mafia, insert-Ultra-headliner-here — I couldn’t pick them out of an auditory lineup if you paid me.

I’ve always measured good music the way I measure good literature: If a song or artist can emote and communicate a highly specific feeling and transport the audience to that emotional place, it’s effective. This is not to say that I only listen to sad-sack singer-songwriters and Taylor Swift, of course. When I say emote, I’m talking about hearing the angst in Craig Finn’s snarl, or the soulful melancholy of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, or the flippant arrogance of a Kanye West verse. But when it comes to EDM, I’ve always felt disconnected.

Krewella’s live act, therefore, came as a welcome surprise and something of a redemption of the genre to me. The group is made up of vocalist sisters Jahan and Yasmine Yousaf and producer Rain Man, already a break from standard in that it’s a group and not a dude with a laptop. Krewella writes original material, which they perform using live vocals with sampling in a DJ set. The overall effect proved itself to be one of the more exciting DJ sets I’ve seen.

The use of the sisters’ vocals throughout most of their catalogue brands Krewella as distinct from its mainstream EDM counterparts. When you hear a Krewella song, there’s no mistaking it for anything else. Perhaps the only other mainstream EDM artist who can make the same claim is Skrillex, and therein lies the key to his success.

Is Krewella emotive? Their lyrical content is rudimentary dance-music standard at best, but without a doubt, as I looked around the Royale and saw hundreds of people not just aimlessly dancing, but singing along with all the songs passionately, it became clear to me that this group might just have something that much of the rest of the genre doesn’t. It’s not completely robotic or computerized, something that EDM trailblazers Daft Punk criticized about the turn the modern movement has taken in a recent interview with Rolling Stone.

There’s a human element to Krewella, and that human element will always be my most important measuring stick in judging what’s good and what’s not. It’s not about the machine versus the guitar, it’s about what lies between those bars that stick with you when the show’s over. That being said, if Wednesday night was any indication, I think we’ll be hearing a lot more from Krewella soon enough.