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 07 Part 3

Piney Gir’s girl pop ensemble The Schla La Las are basically a joke, and like most jokes, they don’t work a second time. Apparently this is their last ever gig – hark to the rustle of a thousand Truckers shrugging.

Pull Tiger Tail are definitely the best high energy indie rock band we’ve seen this weekend, and we’re impressed by the vocal space they manage to find above the rubbery bass and clattering drums. Yes, we’ve seen it all before, but we’ve seen The Rotary Club’s tea tent before too, and that’s looking like a temple at this juncture.

The unwritten rule of Truck is that you’ll find your favourite act when least expecting it. We were thinking time was running out for this epiphany, when we stumbled on Italy’s Disco Drive. There are three of them, but sometimes two of them play drums. All their songs sound like Q And Not U playing along with a car alarm. We can’t get enough of it, frankly.

Exhaustion and fear of losing our lift home means we stay in the Trailer Park tent for the rest of the day, which is no chore at all when Rolo Tomassi take to the stage. Their preposterous maximalist metal marries a Zappa complexity with a Napalm Death vigour. The most obvious reference point is The Locust, but Rolo are more like a suburban thrash band playing Melt Banana. Plus they’re all about twelve! Obscenely good stuff.

Despite some promising synth sounds, Metronomy are deeply annoying. With their rinky dink melodies, their lacklustre robot choreography and their crappy light bulb shirts, they’re like some sort of Playschool take off of Kraftwerk; except at least Cant and Benjamin were professionals, these guys don’t even look like their hearts are in it.

Whilst nervous_testpilot is essentially just a funny little man playing prerecorded music and doing a silly dance, he’s still a cracking end to the festival. High points on his hardcore odyssey were when he (ahem) “dropped” "Apache", and the brilliantly original sound of a squeaky toy making an acid house riff: all hail breakbeat Sweep! Standing at the back of the tent watching the weekend’s casualties trying to dance to music that is officially too fast provides the most wonderful memory to take home from the festival.

It wasn’t the best lineup Truck’s ever had, we’ll admit, but we’re still glad that the festival managed to claw itself from the brink of its demise. We wonder what next year shall bring…

Truck 2008 Pt 2

The Family Machine have always looked to us like lovable scamps in a 90s British romcom, around whom everything goes wrong, but who come up affably smiling. In the midst of some random sound engineering, the unflaggable cheeriness of the band makes us assume that Hugh Grant is taking notes in the wing. After all the problems, it’s a glorious set from some of Oxford’s best songwriters, all lachrymose acoustic laments undercut with a plucky determination – we imagine a video of slow motion clips of missed penalities, fluffed catches and other sports failures to “The Do Song”, intercut with footage of Jamie Hyatt winking from the bleachers.

Was it really less than two years ago since we saw Rolo Tomassi at The Port Mahon as part of a single figure crowd? In a packed Barn they get a heroes’ welcome. This is, of course all good and proper, because their maximalist metal constructions are simply amazing, with intricate drums, throat shredding screaming and even more buzzy keyboards that are only a curry away from being Rick Wakeman, which seems to be a theme of the Barn today. The dexterity involved in the performance is incredible, but it doesn’t get in the way of the riotous passion on show. They do a track that sounds like “Eye Of The Tiger” remade by Napalm Death and Goblin. If you want more than that in your life you are greedy beyond belief.

Having read some embarrassing nonsense following Jay-Z’s Glastonbury booking that music festivals aren’t the place for hip hop, it’s a joy to see the Beat Hive jam packed fro Mr Shaodow’s frenetic set. He’s clearly happy too: much as we love his music, we’ve always felt that his shows can be somewhat nervous and twitchy. Clearly the adoring reception has pushed him to greater things, as he prowls the stage, ranting into two mikes simultaneously and generally sending a tent full of dancers insane, whilst never missing a syllable of his excellent lyrics. Asher Dust helps out with the odd piece of singing and a nice red hat, but this is Shaodow’s hour, and he deserves it.

When you see someone in a scarlet astronaut suit playing limp, Bowie-ish country songs out of tune and saying garbage like “I fell in the whoop-de-doo” and, “show me love, you kitty cats”, you begin to think that it must be an elaborate musical prank. We still don’t know if Y is a serious musician or a practical joker – either way, it’s a shit way to spend your life.

“Next on ITV3, When Irony Goes Bad, this week featuring rubbish band Dead Kids”. The spectacle of men dressed like The Quireboys who play songs that all sound like Van Halen’s “Jump” without the subtlety, and smothered with crap synths and tinny guitars is enough to sap the strength. Dead Kids look like something that was cut from Nathan Barley as being too awful to even satirise. Terrible shouty singer too. OK, we’re prepared to believe it’s a bit of harmless fun; but if anyone over the age of 14 tries to tell you this is punk attitude, kill them. Kill them, for they shall never know better.

Martin Simpson has a taste for language, introducing his set with a discussion of the adjectives “bucolic” and “crepuscular”, and clearly relishing the visceral imagery of his opening traditional ballad, lingering over the phrase “the bloody steel”. He also languidly enjoys every line of a bottleneck tune, which reminds us that the blues is an intelligent narrative music, not just an excuse to show your beery market town mates how fast your left hand can go. Of course, Simpson’s guitar playing is also phenomenal, varying from lutelike delicacy to swift percussive passages via sleazy Chicago blues, but he never milks it, always letting the song lead the way. He was playing The Albert Hall for the Proms the day after, we feel lucky to have caught him somewhere so intimate. Not to mention bucolic.

Some competent folk rock from Texas’ Okkervil River, who know how to do lush and full blooded, their line up including two keyboards and occasional trumpet. At times they resembled The Arcade Fire without the Biblical bits, but far too often they just passed the time. We asked three people in the crowd who they sounded like, and nobody could actually come up with a name; this means either Okkervil River are trailblazing geniuses, or forgettably generic. Make your own minds up.

We’re slightly suspicious of the Don’t Look Back movement in which acts perform their pivotal albums. When it was announced that The Lemonheads would do the excellent It’s a Shame About Ray at Truck, the first thing that sprang to mind is that it’s 27 minutes long: in their billed show they could have played it three times, and left space to mime turning over the record. As it is, they crack through the album, minus a couple of tracks, in record time, and it feels something like a contractual obligation. After a couple of minutes, Evan Dando comes on for a solo reading of Smudge’s excellent “Outdoor Type” and “Being Around”, before the band return in a seemingly much more relaxed frame of mind for another thirty minutes or so of superior playing. The problem is that these were never main stage songs, they’re vulnerable, retiring, lovable (and probably stoned) little tunes that are most likely happier out of the limelight: as is Evan, who seems unappreciative of the crowd and mutters barely a word. Not really a disappointment, then, but great as these songs are, the show added nothing to them.