Riverside Is Painless

The harpsichord was once described as a "cage of flies". Apparently this is suposed to be a bad thing. Madness. I love a bit of harpsichord, me, the more like an insect prison the better.

RIVERSIDE FESTIVAL, Mill Field, Charlbury, 20-1/6/09

Saturday

Back To Haunt Us, Part One: A year ago we saw Jeremy Hughes busking before the 2008 festival started, and suggested that he was better than many of the official artists. We’re certainly not deluded enough to think that his presence as half of Moon Leopard has anything to do with that observation, but they are the ideal opener to the festival, encapsulating the strengths of this year’s best bookings: approachable, handmade, rootsy, melodic and with a pleasing absence of pretension. The aforementioned Hughes (who looks like a gentle cross between a blasted hippy and Dumbledore’s understudy – you’d recognise him even if you don’t know him) adds chiming, lucent guitar lines to Julie Burrett’s rhythm and vocals on a selection of relaxed Americana tunes. The set might contain more noodles than Norris McWhirter’s chilli ramen, and Burrett’s voice may occasionally drop into a mildly grating whinny, but they do manage to turn “Big Yellow Taxi” into a subtle waft, hanging in the air like a Texarkana blacktop heathaze, and many moments of the performance are implausibly lovely.

The Inventions Of Jerry Darge is a glorious development on Moon Leopard’s opening gambit, taking us further into the mid-west, and playing an even more ethereal set. Theirs is a blurred, intoxicating sonic mist, sounding like a sleepy mixture of country balladry and vintage shoegaze. Gram Parsons fronts Slowdive, if you will, with added ‘cello and a guitar with tolling bells dangling from the headstock. A barely audible vocal even adds to the woozy effect. We’re so floored by the allegation that this is a Deguello side project that we check the programme twice and order a strong coffee.

Ah, yes, the coffee. Non-musical festival highlight is the excellently named Diplomat’s Coffee, served by a dapper, well-spoken chap with a gentility that belies the drizzly surroundings. Presumably a Rocher pyramid is available on demand. We chat about whether the toddlers in the crèche adjacent to his stand will prove louder and more difficult to handle than the musicians on the stage opposite. Probably a draw, all things considered.

Ex-members of Mondo Cada shock us slightly less than the Deguello boys with new act Ruins. They play deep fried, artery clogging rock, with plenty of passion and intensity. However, not only does the under-powered vocal mike cause them more detriment than Jerry Darge, but the bass and drums duo is becoming an increasingly over-stuffed corner of the rock spectrum, and they may have to come up with something else to make a mark. A decent listen all the same.

“No one can hear you scream”, alleges Thin Green Candles’ Elm Street referencing track. That’s as may be – it certainly sounds like none of the band can hear each other, such are the wild variations in tuning and time-keeping. But whilst “tidy”, or even “vaguely proficient”, are terms highly unlikely to be applied to TGC in the foreseeable future, their twisted, hallucinogenic, paranoid techno rock actually gains from being a bit out of whack. Listening to their set is like watching a 3D film without the special glasses – you’re not likely to follow the plot, but you might have a whale of a time all the same.

We’d completely forgotten we saw Jamie Foley’s adequate semi-acoustic rock combo, until we wrung the beer out of the notebook. That probably speaks volumes, though what we can actually recall was pleasant enough. The fader for the vocal channel seemed to have been located by this time, but the effect was negligible, as the singing was an incomprehensible slur somewhere between Damien Rice and Rab C Nesbitt. The last tune reminded us unexpectedly of Pearl Jam, and we conclude that it’s all decent, but not for us.

Music For Pleasure were forced to pull out of the gig, so Dave Bowmer is promoted to the main stage, widdling away on his Chapman stick, whilst a chum clatters about on a percussion rack that seems to primarily constructed from biscuit tins and washing up liquid bottles, placing him equidistant between Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason and Blue Peter’s Yvette Fielding. Pretty easy to ridicule this sort of polite mid-80s fusion (especially when they have a reggae tune celebrating hippy Volkswagen vans called – wait for it – “V Dub”), but the playing is able without being ostentatious, and the arrangements are intricate without being poncy, and Dave ends up as our surprise hit of the weekend.

“This does sound very heavy, but it’s certainly not classical,” says a man walking near us back towards the second stage, who has clearly misread the programme slightly. This turns out to be the sound of Punt favourites Desert Storm, who turn in some top notch, Pantera influenced metal. “Roaches feed on my brain,” growls Matt Ryan; we dare say, but they’ll probably find your black gravelly larynx less digestible.

There are three glaring reasons why you shouldn’t name your band Flutatious: 1) It’s a frankly unforgivable pun, 2) “Flautatious” would be more eloquent, if you really must go down that drab route, and 3) it’s liable to be misspelt in listings until the end of time. Lo and behold, the official Riverside T-shirt claims that “Flutations” played, although seeing as this was just one of a wopping seven errors, we suppose it’s immaterial. They’re a surprisingly good band, though, cooking up a crusty shuffle that loosely recalls Afro-Celt Soundsystem, with plenty of firy folky fiddle and (duh) flute. Unlikely to make the transition for balmy afternoon field to dank city centre basement well, but plenty of fun at the time.

Back To Haunt Us, Part Two: Just a few weeks ago we claimed that given a large enough festival stage, Inlight could make a huge impact. Well, OK, we didn’t find ourselves transported with bliss at the section of their set we caught, but it was a good listen. They do have a well thought out, wide-angled sound, that’s neither over-egged nor emptily bombastic, but once again we felt that the songs lacked depth, even if they were well-played. A note on the Wishing Tree read “I wish the world were one big sweet”. If you think like this, you’ll adore Inlight; if you find the very concept of a Wishing Tree to be fatuous claptrap, then you can come and scowl in the corner with us.

Back To Haunt US, Part Three: In last year's review we hoped that Death Of A Small Town (FKA script) could hold onto their rhythm section for long enough to get their wonderful baroque pop across to the people of Oxfordshire. Sadly personal issues mean that the whole band can’t be present today, but Pete Moore and Corinne Clark put in the effort and turn up with an unrehearsed set of songs for piano and guitar. Several thousand marks out of ten for not letting the organisers down, but the reserved, slightly hesitant set won’t be one for the annals.

A recent viewing of the 2004 Riverside DVD reminded us how good Smilex can be, but this year’s show blew that old recording out of the water. Recent claims that their show is becoming more grown up and less theatrical only serve to remind us that everything’s relative: yes, there is no full frontal nudity or bloodshed during the performance, but the rest of their comicbook punk maelstrom is all present and correct, thankfully. Mind you, Lee Christian’s eye-jarring lime shirt and purple satin jacket make him look like a gameshow host in Hades, and we almost prefer him half naked. Almost. Anyway, none of that matters when the music is so great, with sleazerock hooks tossed onto monumental glam punk rhythms, and Tom Sharp’s formidable guitar (his technical ability is sorely under-rated, but then again does a band that looks like a massacre in clown town want people stroking chins over their technique?). Even if they don’t like the music, locals can amuse themselves by shouting “Sorry, Trev” every time Lee swears.

Lux Interior

Last night I was talking about mashups, and in my sleep I dreamt one! Well, not a mashup, precisely, but an arrangement mixing Jacques Brel's "Amsterdam" with Michael Nyman's theme to The Piano was played by Oxford's Les Clochards and a colliery band. Maybe I'll make it happen.

INLIGHT/ JESSIE GRACE/ SAMUEL ZASADA/ LUKE KEEGAN – Jericho, 5/6/09


“What are you here to see?”, asks the girl at the Jericho’s desk. “Just, err, music”, I reply. It turns out that the organisers use this method to calculate how much to pay the performers. Bit depressing, really, isn’t it? A whole system predicated on the assumption that nobody is going to come out on the offchance they’ll hear some good music looks like a tacit admission that the promoters have already given up on the idea of enticing fresh blood into the venue, and are relying on the acts to bully their friends and colleagues into coming along. What’s even more depressing is that they’re probably right.

Anyway, as the system seems grossly unfair to Samuel Zasada, who is standing in after a change to the advertised lineup, we put our tick against his name. But before we get to Samuel, there’s the unpleasant matter of Luke Keegan’s set to deal with. There he is, strumming away at some forgettable acoustic songs, droning in a voice that’s half pub singalong, and half lax karaoke Bowie, whilst a chap who looks fantastically like a spry Erroll Brown adds some very proficient, but rather disjointed bongo accompaniment. Looking up at one point I see I am one of four people actually listening, three of whom appear to be close friends or family, and the gig begins to feel like an episode of Flight Of The Conchords. “Did you hear about tomorrow?”, sings Luke; yes, it was when I woke up and realised this was a bad, and very boring, dream. Thankfully the last song has a bit of drama, featuring the howled chorus “I never had that bloody hammer”, which is either an impassioned defence in a brutal murder inquest, or the sound of a petty argument in a carpentry workshop.

When Mr Zasada starts up, we decide that he’s well worth our cover charge support, as his voice is immense: creamy, guttural and melodic, with the breath control to rip into some intriguingly wordy verses. He’s got a real talent, but this set seems deliberately designed to hide this fact. The accompanists don’t help any: a man playing possibly the most uninspired cajon we’ve seen, and a woman who might well be Britain’s top canine ventriloquist, as she seldom opens her mouth, and when she does the sound is clearly inaudible to human ears. Ignoring this dismal pair, the songs just don’t seem to be quite there. We’d like to see Samuel with a nice tight band at the more literate end of roots pop – say, something in the Counting Crows line – and then we feel we’d have something to get excited about. Once again, the last track is the winner, as the two stooges leave the stage to let Zasada sing a brutal murder ballad, which sounds like Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” rewritten by Travis Bickle. At one point I look up and discover that I’m one of two people actually listening. I’m not sure which is sadder, that the braying horde is not giving this musician a chance, or that he’s not utilising such a great voice to make them sit up and listen.

Jessie Grace’s appearance ups the quality of the night enormously. Put simply, she has a gorgeous voice, and some pretty impressive control to go with it. In the opening number, which sounds like a version of “Heart Attack & Vine” rearranged by Joni Mitchell, she swoops from sweetly sinister incantation a la mid-period P J Harvey to gutsy rock stridency, with just a hint of soul. She plays the first half of the set on a tiny guitar - is it an alto? - giving just the right amount of garage fuzz to offset her clear, winning voice. Later she switches to a standard acoustic, and the set drifts a tiny bit into Tunstallised neo-folk pleasantries, before the final number (it’s a good night for set closers, evidently), with its playfully lopsided rhythms impresses us once again with Grace’s abilities. I’m reminded of the first time I saw Laima Bite, or Richard Walters: with a voice like this, why isn’t everyone in the room twitching with excitement? But, like Bite or Walters, behind the voice the songs themselves don’t make a gigantic impression on first listening; there are certainly no lyrics that catch the ear. Still, I’m quite prepared to put the effort into finding out whether Grace’s songs turn out to be growers.

When Inlight crank up, the first thought is that there’s been a gross miscarriage of musical justice in this town. They’ve had any number of stinking reviews, but the first tune not only shows a band who look like they’ve been playing together since they were put on solids, but is also an epic piano-led swoon that really isn’t far from A Silent Film’s celebrated stock in trade. The following track only serves to bolster such musings, revealing an instinctive knack for balancing the quartet’s sound, and showing the bassist’s subtle inventiveness.

Sadly, the effect is marred once they get to a mawkish ballad, because not only is the song asinine and vacuous, but the same audience who were literally shouting and banging tables during the previous sets are in rapt silence and serving me a stew of black looks just for having a conversation near the back of the room about how good the band are! Still, you can’t judge an artist by their fans; I’d certainly have to sling the old Wagner records on the fire, if so. Ultimately Inlight don’t quite have the compositions to hold the attention for a full set, and too many songs seem to exist solely because they can play them well. It’d be nice to see some more adventurous writing, and an appeal to something other than the broadest emotions, but we can imagine that on a huge stage in the summer dusk Inlight could be just the ticket. Does the critical reappraisal start here?