Truck 2013 Saturday Pt 2

Luke Smith can be found in our record collection between Jimmy Smith and Mark E. Smith, which seems pretty fair as a) he’s pretty useful on the old keys, and b) he’s resolutely English, a deeply acquired taste, and has changed a band member every time we see him.  His lovable Stillgoe meets Betjeman schtick is much as it always was, even after a few Trucks away from the bill, although the addition of young female vocalist has turned set stalwart “Please Be My Girlfriend” into a sort of tea room version of The Smiths’ “Girl Afraid”.

Crash Of Rhinos are epic and wired and excited, but like lots of angular emotional rock there doesn’t seem to be much underneath it all worth being epic, wired or excited about.  They’re like getting Gielgud all dressed up in his Richard III costume, then making him recite excerpts from Teen Wolf.

Now, LA duo The Bots on the other hand are properly gigantic, a vicious mess of feral guitar and pummelled drums that takes in Sabbath riffs, Hendrix via Last Exit solos, punk vocals and more pummelled drums.  It’s irreverently witty, too, and our favourite moment is when one of them breaks off from caustic guitar screeches to stop and play three notes on a farty synth repeatedly for about two minutes.  The other one, in case you’re wondering, was pummelling the drums at the time.

And So I Watch You From Afar are on the main stage.  It’s almost too easy.  They might as well be called, And So I Nip Off To The Bar.  Which isn’t to say they’re rubbish, but their twiddly posty-rocky thingy is not as interesting as watching kids climb over the giant CD sculpture, or trying to explain cryptic crosswords to a Swede (partial success).  Fight Like Apes are better, not least because their singer is dressed like Siouxsie and if they are overly fond of a repeated singalong vocal line, they know when to kick in enough energy to take a song home.

The timetable says the Jamalot stage should host The Fridge & Bungle Experience now, but it looks a lot like Ilodica to us.  You have to love the way that he just plays his relaxed roots whilst members of the organisation set up the stage around him, laying down airy melodic lines and singing in a style equidistant between Max Romeo and Horace Andy as if he is lost in his own musical world.  He’s a proper ragamuffin too – we mean that in the original sense, his scruffy martial jacket makes him look like a disciple of The Libertines gone dread.  He jams out a track with Pieman, who is next on the bill, which is rather a sweet way to treat set changeovers.  Pieman is not, as you might expect, a Headcount tribute act, but a beatboxer of some frightening ability, who is incredibly adept at replicating dubstep wubs and scratchadelic curlicues as well as the traditional drum sounds.  And he can rap, it turns out.  The bastard.  Our only criticism is that his show is a crowd-pleasing diversion, we’d like to see him doing something more substantial one day, or perhaps a set of collaborations.

When The Subways run onstage, fists aloft, like second rate telethon presenters, or clueless youth workers, we fear for our teeth, which can only take so much grinding of a weekend.  But they’re actually  - whisper it – good fun.  They know their way from one end of a tune to another, they look as though they are sincerely having a ball onstage, and their set does actually make us a smile, even whilst we fail to recall any of their music mere seconds after it has finished.  Plus, it’s endearing that their stage moves are a vindication for clumsy wedding dad dancing the world over.

The only thing that annoys us about Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip is the “Vs”.  Considering they’re a laptop twiddler with a taste for 8 bit squiggles and late 90s breakbeat wrangling, and a beardy spoken word artist with a love for classic hip hop and Detroit hardcore, their music is a surprisingly cohesive collaboration.  We can, on the other hand, talk at great length about why we admire them, from the impossibly infectious music to the erudite lyrics to the fact that they’re politically engaged musicians who don’t resort to rabble-rousing simplifications.  This 45 minute show is inevitably a bit of a greatest hits workout, and we would have liked more time to explore their more esoteric work – not to mention a clearer vocal mix – but seeing a packed tent leap manically to a track we first saw Scroobius play solo to fewer than 20 people in The Zodiac, before the P.I.P. was a V.I.P., is pleasing.  In fact, whilst this set is going on, other stages were being headlined by ShaoDow and Rolo Tomassi, two more acts Nightshift first discovered playing blinding gigs  to q tiny smattering of listeners, and it’s truly heartwarming.  Or depressing, of course, depending on how you look at it.

After that endorphin blast, The Horrors can’t compete.  We think they’re fairly good on record, but the show is an anonymous parade of plodding drums and synth washes, like karaoke backing for a mid-80s Simple Minds song everyone’s forgotten.  There are hints of an atmospheric tune here and there, but after seeing Toy this is cruelly thin broth to serve as the final course.

It has been a thoroughly enjoyable festival, with the Saturday especially rich in treats.  On one of our visits to see the ever-helpful Rapture Records stall, one of the staff announces, “It’s OK!  Truck is complete, the Thomas Truax records have arrived!”.  New York’s Meccano music maestro made a welcome return to the Veterans stage this year, and our only concern for coming events is how mavericks like him find a place on the bill, and get a chance to earn their place as future veterans.  Once you felt the curatorial sway over Truck, from the Bennetts themselves to Trailerpark’s PC, to Alan Day, and if this resulted in some mystifying decisions, it also gave the festival a stamp of identity that nowadays doesn’t seem to quite remain.  We saw some truly outstanding acts this weekend, but if you want to, you can go and see most of them sharing bills at other festivals all the way through the summer.  As we said at the outset, mix up the stages, and throw in some more adventurous act choices, and Truck could easily be better now than it ever has been, but if it becomes just one more identikit summer stop for the floral welly crew, then we’ll lose a vital part of what always made it special, and all the volleyball nets in the world will never buy that back.

Truck 2012 Friday Pt 2

We pop in on Delta Alaska, who are like nothing else than a blythe AOR version of Oxford’s Scrappy-Doo pop wastrels, Secret Rivals, and end up with Josh Kumra, a young man with a surprisingly eloquent vocal delivery, who isn’t above showboating or swiping a tune form MGMT to keep the party going.  Not a chart-topping act we expected to get excited about, but Josh is a talented, professional performer who deserves to capitalise on his sudden success.

Oh, and, speaking of which.  Late on Saturday the staff at the Rapture merchandise tent tell us they’ve not sold a Fixers album all day.  Inconceivable when this outstanding, gorgeous record has only recently been released after a long delay?  If you saw their set, then no.  A hundred times, no. As if to prove our claim that past glories can never be relived, Fixers contrast last year’s joyous, epochal Truck performance with what can most generously be described as a wonky drunken stumble somewhere in the rough vicinity of their songs.  Jack Goldstein spends some while slurring into the mike about how he isn’t sure if this is a “festival” or a “festiVAL!”  The set is a hiLARious disasTER, put the random emphases where you like, Jack, old son.

Over in the Barn, Spring Offensive are snatching Fixers’ local hero crown, sharpening up the angular points, and dousing it in pop sugar.    They have a knack of writing vast music with the drastic emotional pull of a Hollywood blockbuster, and making them sound subtly intimate.  It’s a trick Clock Opera could do with learning, as their set is far from bad, building heart-wrenching songs on slightly fidgety rhythms, but it becomes two dimensional and predictable long before we wander away.

Jamalot is a small tent hosting DJs and a few live acts – it also has a couple of very comfy sofas, which we make grateful use of once or twice over the course of the festival – although it’s hard to know who’s on when.  We’re not sure if this is because a dance tent is on the periphery of the organisers’ concerns, or because the sort of people who book a stage like that don’t quite get round to arranging the acts before the programme copy deadline.  Judging by the timetable outside the tent, which is so randomly inaccurate it was probably created by John Cage with the I Ching and a box of twelve inches, we lean towards the latter interpretation.  We do, however, manage to see funky jazz outfit The Heavy Dexters, over an hour later than advertised.  Like the Disco Pimps, they could do with adding some proper filth to their sound, but their saxophonist does have lovely, conversational phrasing, and they also do a pretty cheeky arrangement of “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, so it’s a close but clear victory at the final count.

The very second their set is finished, beatboxer Pieman takes over.  It takes us a few bars to realise the chunky beats are coming from a man’s mouth, not the DJ.  Of course, as with most beatboxing, turntablism - or arguably live hip hop in general - the show is a showcase of techniques and effects rather than a cohesive artistic statement, but in the face of someone who can make a righteously flatulent dubstep bass like that with their lips, our criticisms evaporate.  Top stuff.

Nipping back to the Barn we hear what sounds like a cross between metal and techstep drum ‘n’ bass from Turbowolf.  Then the track stops and we think we must have imagined it.  Regardless, the rest of their greasy cartoon heavy rock is infectious fun.

Tim Minchin isn’t funny, and The Guillemots don’t really seem to be delivering, probably due to Fyfe Dangerfield’s throat infection, so we return to the Barn for Future Of The Left.  We think we’re scribbling lots of insightful notes about their angular hardcore, but in the morning we discover we’ve just written “Grrrrrr” for twelve pages.  Two things are sure: a) when they add a buzzing, two finger keyboard to their sound, it’s like a hideously brilliant cross between Bis and Atari Teenage Riot, b) when they finish with an unfeasibly distorted, disgusted and dystopian Mclusky track, it literally recalibrates our ears so that we can’t listen to Mystery Jets.  Seriously, don’t recall any of it.  We think they were probably harmless and vapid and bouncy and perfectly acceptable, but we have no real memory of doing anything whilst they’re on except replaying the preceding ten minutes in our minds. 

Sing it.