CALGARY -- Going to see the Chemical Brothers in Calgary on Monday night was one of the most pointless things I've ever done. First of all, driving six hours to be subjected to one hour of sonic torture is crazy. Then again, this British dance duo is supposed to be on the forefront of the trendiest trends, the cutting edge of the very edge, appallingly up to date on the latest fad of music sweeping the world. Calgary was the only Alberta show. I was curious. So now I know. I'm afraid this is going to make me sound "square" - club culture probably has a more modern term - but the Chemical Brothers suck. I'm serious. It was the most godawful thing I've ever heard. Imagine being slowly pulled into the engine of a 747 while someone hits you on the head with a rubber mallet at 160 beats per minute. Meanwhile, you're blinded by epileptic fit-inducing images from the mother of all colour organs. At least it wasn't boring - but neither is having nails pounded into your ears. By the end, I wasn't raving. I was drooling. Arriving at the Max Bell Arena at 9:30 Monday night, I see the parking lot is jammed. Cars are double-parked, triple-parked, parked any old way. No signs or attendants can be seen. The Chemical Brothers are due on at 10 and the building is already pulsating. Some DJ is on stage working feverishly behind his console. I'm pretty sure it isn't the Chemical Brothers since it's only one guy. The beat he spins is insistent, repetitive, tuneless, chordless. There are no vocals aside from some occasional guttural spoken word and no melody except atonal computer noise. It's like Kraftwerk, except not as interesting. The smell of marijuana is thick. More than 5,000 white teens and twentysomethings, garbed in varying levels of rave fashion, are dancing by themselves, each in their own little world. For the first time in what I imagine to be several hours of the same beat, it suddenly stops. Cheering erupts. Movie screens strobe a cryptic message: "Hey girl, hey boy." Numbers and equations rapidly flash on the screens as a cacophonous screech fills the hall. The Chemical Brothers are in the house. I think. I see a couple of guys moving around on a stage that looks like the bridge of the Death Star. The guy with glasses and long hair twiddling knobs on his synthesizer could be Tom Rowlands. The other guy, I presume, is Ed Simons. They're not just performers - in fact, they're not performers at all. They are the gurus of dance club culture. All hail the Chemical Brothers. Then the bass kicks in. Oof! Oof! Oof! Oof! It isn't just loud, not merely deafening, no piffle of permanent hearing damage. Oh, no. It's excruciating, hurting not just ears but one's internal organs as well. I stumble over something, looking for a way out. Pardon me, miss, is that your spleen? What sounds like 10 fire drills howling at once rises in counterpoint to the relentless rumble of low end. I hear a helicopter, a squeaking door hinge, a piece of sheet metal being cut, a machine gun, animals burned alive, you name it - all at about 120 decibels. As ravers rave around me, oblivious to the pain, I realize to my horror that I'm caught in the middle of the "Function 1 Ambisonic Sound Field," the Chemical Brothers' custom-made six-way speaker system. There is no escape. Five minutes in, I'm desperately ripping pages out of my notebook to use for earplugs. It didn't help. This sound cuts straight to the bone. The "songs," each of which would typically start, stop, start up again and then devolve into a chaotic blast of pure noise, segue together like cars in a freeway pileup. The kids continue to dance like puppets. In perfect time to the pounding, squealing, gibbering, bleeping mass of sound, the strobing images on the Chemical Brothers' "Vegetable Vision" complete the psychedelic experience. It's about when the dayglo robots show up that the Ecstasy kicks in, so I ... whoa, like, what am I saying? Did I say they sucked? The Chemical Brothers rule! Just as I begin to gain some dim understanding of what's going on, it's over. Aren't raves supposed to last eight hours? This was just over one hour. I snapped out of the trance and was thankful for a merciful end to this aggravated auditory assault and battery. Rowlands and Simons came out from behind their noisemakers and, with a wave to the crowd, they were off. The earlier DJ took over again. The beat was exactly the same as it was before. I was out of there so fast I didn't even bother to remove the flyers advertising future rave events from my windshield. They blew off somewhere on Barlow Trail. I got home at 3 a.m., put on some Mantovani and thought about a favourite old saying - disco sucks.