Truck 2011 Sunday

Tate's Vorticism show today - just snuck in on the last day of the exhibition. Wonderful to see some of the stuff, but the show was a little thin for £12.70 - not their fault lots of it has been lost, but there was a lot of archival material amongst the actual artwork. Perhaps a little bit of Epstein & Lewis post-Vorticism would have filled things out.

Blasts & Blesses still one of the greatest pieces of writing/page design in the English language, and beuatiful to see wall-sized.

The bonuses were Nike Nelson's amazing The Coral Reef and a pleasant surprise in walking past Selfridge's on the way to the Oxford tuvge and discovering a new show from the fantastic Museum Of Everything. No, I don't have links. You heard of Google?




We’d be lying if we told you that Mat Gibson was an amazing, ground-breaking artist, but laying on our back, listening to his plangent, pedal steel drenched songs, watching the white clouds form and disperse as if we were submersed in a giant, freshly poured Guinness is a pretty great way to start Sunday. Cashier No 9 play comfy rootsy pop on the Clash stage, like a Northern Irish La’s, and they’re followed by Lanterns On The Lake, who make grown up indie folk with Sigur Ros crescendos, which isn’t seismic, but is actually better than Mew’s set at last year’s festival. And that’s the gist of Sunday: lots of good stuff, very little bad, but very little great.

Take Maybeshewill, for example. They have a dense, muscular sound, and we enjoy their set a lot, but there are only so many times one can get truly excited about this Mogwai tumescent guitar trick. Alessi’s Ark are also listenable, but help us to work out what Americana actually means. It means “leftovers”. It’s not folk, blues, country, rock, bluegrass or anything else that’s actually good, it’s just the offcuts you get when you’re making any of those. Ho hum.

As the music isn’t sparking any synapses, we drop in on the Free Beers Show’s comedy stage, who are quick to announce they can’t give out free beer because of licensing restrictions. Lucky it’s a well behaved crowd at Truck, they could have been lynched in other festivals. As a sort of object lesson in the value of delivery, we see Alex Clissold Jones, a man who strikes us as being potentially very funny, die on his arse, before being followed by Chris Turner, a comedian with inferior material, who is connecting with the crowd. In actual fact, the bays should go to compere Matt Richardson, who manages to keep coming back with funny, mostly improvised stand-up between every set.

Much as we respect it as an addition to Cowley Road, we have to say that the Truck Store’s selection for the Last.FM stage is noticeably the weakest of the three days. Tribes, for example, play a sort of CITV grunge, big-boned, melodic punky tunes lobbed skywards, as if to see where they land. It’s all pretty good, but doesn’t quicken any pulses. Islet should be the ones to turn things upsidedown, but they can’t capture the magic of their Barn set last year. The show is still a beguiling mixture of howls, whoops and keyboard washes, all held together by occasional dub basslines and percussion that sounds like an autistic class day out in a cowbell factory, but it is fun rather than mystifying. Last year we felt as though we were caught in a harrowing Branch Davidian ritual, this year it’s more like being in a training camp for a Chuckle Brothers franchise.

The main stage has been a bit of a parade of worthy solo and duo sets all day, so Tunng liven the soundscape somewhat, with Casio African rhythms, and well placed layers of sound a la vintage Four Tet. If we’re honest, we found the songs to be a bit less interesting than the soundscpaes underneath them, but it’s still a very strong performance.

Phil Selway also puts in a strong performance, but it leaves us entirely ambivalent. His voice is decent, which is a nice surprise, and he plays some well-structured, but slightly twee semi-acoustic numbers, one of which reminds us strongly of “Little Drummer Boy”. As befits a member of Radiohead, there are some subtly evocative touches in the arrangements, such as the “O Superman” backing vocals on the second number, but overall the conclusion is that this is music that would work better on midnight headphones, not in a tent on a sunny afternoon.