Truck 2010 Saturday Pt 2

We decide to watch Thomas Truax in the Rapture tent instead of the main stage, as there’s a something wonderfully intimate about his music, behind all the carny Meccano band schtick, and it’s nice to sit close enough to see the manic madness in his craggy eyes. A young lad of about eight leaps up to take a photo of mechanical drum machine Mother Superior with the same excitement most boys would reserve for David Beckham, so we conclude that the nation’s future is safe. The music is wonkily great as ever (clunk click, every trip), but his cover of the Eraserhead theme is like an ice cream van in Hades, which is just about perfect.

The name Man Without Country sounds like a Truck billing rebellion, and they also sound great on paper, but they’re running late and Bellowhead are starting early, so we never find out what they actually sound like. Bellowhead don’t get mentioned often when people compile their top local acts, but they should: find an act that can mix musicianship, melody, arrangement and danceability together anything like as well, we dare you. Everything about their big band folk concoction is amazing, and if our notes are illegible it’s because we were trying to write them whilst dancing like a stevedore on annual leave in a Threshers warehouse. Bellowhead have thrown so many ideas at the wall they’ve had to build another wall, but what’s astounding is how well it all works, and how much fun it manages to be underneath all the musical cleverness. Reassuringly extensive.

After that Lau are a let down, which is harsh because they’re clearly a superbly virtuosic folk act, but we’ve had our folk bones reset in funny shapes by Bellowhead. Next time, maybe.

“This is the future” chant Phantogram, because they’ve got some synths, see. Not really the future, is it, more a refracted present, seeing as they sound like The XX mixed with Crystal Castles. Bloody good, though, as only glacial synth pop drenched in reverb (splash it all over) can be. Ah, the reverb, surely it’s the sound of 2010. If you want to taste the zeitgeist buy an Ariel Pink album. Or sit at the bottom of an empty culvert with a broken radio playing Heart FM, there’s not much in it.

Mew sound alright, but their gate reverb stadium drum sound reminds us of Simple Minds so we sneak off to see Ms Dynamite. Us and the rest of Oxfordshire, as we don’t get in, but it does let us watch the headliner we should have been watching all along, The Original Rabbit’s Foot Spasm Band. Most trad jazz and blues comes to us pickled and dried with all the life leached out of it by some dead-eyed sense of heritage; The Rabbit’s Feet let the music live, but this time it’s the band that are pickled. Seriously, half of them seem to be drunk. And the other half paralytic. But they can still play fast, loud, funny and with as much passion as anyone on the bill. They’re grrrreat.