Sherm (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shermarama) wrote2008-07-01 08:33 pm
shermarama) wrote2008-07-01 08:33 pm
Entry tags:
Great Escape Festival, May 15th - 17th 2008
Thursday night
We went straight from the wristband-getting place to Digital, ex the Zap, to see:
Eugene McGuinness - singer-songwriter who reminded me of John Lennon. If I were in charge of issuing licences for singer-songwriters, 99.9% of them would be never be heard from again, but this bloke could sing well and write songs with interesting changes and a strong sense of rhythm. He's part of the 0.1% that make it worth not running out of the room the second someone walks in with an acoustic guitar.
Broken Records - a large bunch of lads from Edinburgh with all your usual indie-rock equipment plus a string section, accordion and fiddle. Most of the set was melancholy dronings with only one idea, if quite a good one, stretched between several songs - but for about three songs at the end they picked up the pace to something more manic. All right, but nothing special.
Fanfarlo - Bah. I've seen too many bands like this now. The current excuse for getting away with playing strummy weak drifty music with no sense of how to get on top of the rhythm seems to be that it's indie-folk. Yawn.
The Futureheads - I like the Futureheads and I hoped they'd be good and they were better. Energetic and fun, with all the harmonies, a packed and bouncing crowd, which they seemed to genuinely appreciate. Ace.
We tried to go to theGloucesterBarfly after this to see the Ting Tings, but there was no chance of getting in, so we went over the road to the Pressure Point, for an anxious wait while the bouncer ate a bacon butty, and saw:
Arun Gosh - I have no instrinsic trouble with people trying to cross musical genres, but I have a problem with those who do it by chucking a bunch of random instruments together in a way that doesn't gel and expect to get lots of kudos just for trying it. Tablas, DJ, bass and clarinet. Yawn, unfortunately.
Nathan 'Flutebox' Lee and Guests - And this proves my point - both of these acts involved a dude playing tablas, but only one of them was exciting and interesting. Nathan 'Flutebox' Lee beatboxes and plays the flute, usually at the same time, and this could get old quickly, but he had a crew of guests around him - tabla dude, another beatboxer and a rapper - and they joined in in actually musical ways. The beatboxer was ace, doing ludicrously deep farty bass noises. The highlight of the whole thing was him and the fluteboxer doing the theme to Knightrider. Seriously.
Friday
First off, upstairs at the Revenge:
Gentle Friendly - Two man show with fierce drums and lots of weird samples and keyboard sounds. Violent and unfriendly in the best possible way. Cut regrettably short by technical trouble, though.
We tried to go and see Cage The Elephant at the Escape, but once again, no chance, so we went to the Sallis Benney Theatre, where there seemed to be a whole slew of promising-sounding indie on. Also, the Sallis Benney is part of the University of Brighton, which means that rather than the cripplingly expensive lager or cider on sale at every other venue we went to, there was Guinness for £1.85 a pint. Woo.
We saw:
Dash Delete
The Electric City
Twisted Wheel
The Rifles
but to be honest they were all fairly straighforward young indie bands, with variable quantities of rock or ponce, and they were all okay without being much special, if you ask me.
Saturday
First off, upstairs at the Revenge again:
Cheeky Cheeky and the Nosebleeds - There is hope for the future of music. They were young and trying hard but not taking themselves too seriously and taking many of the features of the current idea of indie, the slightly frantic electro beats and the cracked-note vocals, and some of the standing features of punk past, like furiously-strummed scratchy guitars, and doing their own thing with them. Good.
Then to the Arc to see:
The Clik Clik - Boring boring boring herdfollowers.
Damn Shames - A band with a drum machine instead of a drummer, but a well-programmed drum machine, and a style of guitar-based music and shouting that can take having genuinely metronomic drums. Not bad, but I can't see how they've got any scope to get better.
Then to the Brighton Coalition to see:
Viva Machine - who were boring enough that I think I spent their entire set ignoring them
Robots In Disguise - better than I was expecting from hearing the album. It's two girls doing the 'we're girls and we can do punk' thing, though electro-punk at the minute of course, but they managed to make it rise above its basic formula a bit. There was a girl playing the drums but I don't know if she really was, I'm afraid, or just adding some extra thump over the drum machine noises.
The Automatic - also a lot better than I was expecting. Them what do 'what's that coming over the hill, is it a monster' etc., but they had a whole bunch of other songs that also made good use of the same general sound, and they clearly knew what they were about and were pleased with their crowd, which surely means that they shouldn't stay the one-hit wonders people would be forgiven for thinking of them as. It's not entirely the sound for me but I would have no trouble understanding someone who declared themselves a great fan of them.
Now, I'm not certain but I think we went back to the Pressure Point to see:
Times New Viking - Hmm. I think they were exactly what you can see of them on youtube, which is a shouty girl with keyboards and a hair-obscured sweaty drummer and another guitar, and I don't think they're worth the hype in either medium. Meh.
And thus ended three days of indie festival. Three days of indie is enough for me, really.
We went straight from the wristband-getting place to Digital, ex the Zap, to see:
Eugene McGuinness - singer-songwriter who reminded me of John Lennon. If I were in charge of issuing licences for singer-songwriters, 99.9% of them would be never be heard from again, but this bloke could sing well and write songs with interesting changes and a strong sense of rhythm. He's part of the 0.1% that make it worth not running out of the room the second someone walks in with an acoustic guitar.
Broken Records - a large bunch of lads from Edinburgh with all your usual indie-rock equipment plus a string section, accordion and fiddle. Most of the set was melancholy dronings with only one idea, if quite a good one, stretched between several songs - but for about three songs at the end they picked up the pace to something more manic. All right, but nothing special.
Fanfarlo - Bah. I've seen too many bands like this now. The current excuse for getting away with playing strummy weak drifty music with no sense of how to get on top of the rhythm seems to be that it's indie-folk. Yawn.
The Futureheads - I like the Futureheads and I hoped they'd be good and they were better. Energetic and fun, with all the harmonies, a packed and bouncing crowd, which they seemed to genuinely appreciate. Ace.
We tried to go to the
Arun Gosh - I have no instrinsic trouble with people trying to cross musical genres, but I have a problem with those who do it by chucking a bunch of random instruments together in a way that doesn't gel and expect to get lots of kudos just for trying it. Tablas, DJ, bass and clarinet. Yawn, unfortunately.
Nathan 'Flutebox' Lee and Guests - And this proves my point - both of these acts involved a dude playing tablas, but only one of them was exciting and interesting. Nathan 'Flutebox' Lee beatboxes and plays the flute, usually at the same time, and this could get old quickly, but he had a crew of guests around him - tabla dude, another beatboxer and a rapper - and they joined in in actually musical ways. The beatboxer was ace, doing ludicrously deep farty bass noises. The highlight of the whole thing was him and the fluteboxer doing the theme to Knightrider. Seriously.
Friday
First off, upstairs at the Revenge:
Gentle Friendly - Two man show with fierce drums and lots of weird samples and keyboard sounds. Violent and unfriendly in the best possible way. Cut regrettably short by technical trouble, though.
We tried to go and see Cage The Elephant at the Escape, but once again, no chance, so we went to the Sallis Benney Theatre, where there seemed to be a whole slew of promising-sounding indie on. Also, the Sallis Benney is part of the University of Brighton, which means that rather than the cripplingly expensive lager or cider on sale at every other venue we went to, there was Guinness for £1.85 a pint. Woo.
We saw:
Dash Delete
The Electric City
Twisted Wheel
The Rifles
but to be honest they were all fairly straighforward young indie bands, with variable quantities of rock or ponce, and they were all okay without being much special, if you ask me.
Saturday
First off, upstairs at the Revenge again:
Cheeky Cheeky and the Nosebleeds - There is hope for the future of music. They were young and trying hard but not taking themselves too seriously and taking many of the features of the current idea of indie, the slightly frantic electro beats and the cracked-note vocals, and some of the standing features of punk past, like furiously-strummed scratchy guitars, and doing their own thing with them. Good.
Then to the Arc to see:
The Clik Clik - Boring boring boring herdfollowers.
Damn Shames - A band with a drum machine instead of a drummer, but a well-programmed drum machine, and a style of guitar-based music and shouting that can take having genuinely metronomic drums. Not bad, but I can't see how they've got any scope to get better.
Then to the Brighton Coalition to see:
Viva Machine - who were boring enough that I think I spent their entire set ignoring them
Robots In Disguise - better than I was expecting from hearing the album. It's two girls doing the 'we're girls and we can do punk' thing, though electro-punk at the minute of course, but they managed to make it rise above its basic formula a bit. There was a girl playing the drums but I don't know if she really was, I'm afraid, or just adding some extra thump over the drum machine noises.
The Automatic - also a lot better than I was expecting. Them what do 'what's that coming over the hill, is it a monster' etc., but they had a whole bunch of other songs that also made good use of the same general sound, and they clearly knew what they were about and were pleased with their crowd, which surely means that they shouldn't stay the one-hit wonders people would be forgiven for thinking of them as. It's not entirely the sound for me but I would have no trouble understanding someone who declared themselves a great fan of them.
Now, I'm not certain but I think we went back to the Pressure Point to see:
Times New Viking - Hmm. I think they were exactly what you can see of them on youtube, which is a shouty girl with keyboards and a hair-obscured sweaty drummer and another guitar, and I don't think they're worth the hype in either medium. Meh.
And thus ended three days of indie festival. Three days of indie is enough for me, really.