The Netherlands
Apr. 25th, 2008 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shermaramaLads, oh lads, oh lads, you've gorn and dropped it. I only bought one album at this year's Roadburn and it was by a band I saw on the first night, Taint, and they were absolutely cracking live and most of the album is likewise but track 7 is frankly dodgy prog, with guitar work that crosses the fine line into widdle and a genuinely inadvisable flute. For an otherwise shouty and angular band doing cunning things with rhythms and odd tonality in a way that's sure to be describable as post-something-or-other, it's a distressing departure. Oi, lads, how about trying post-flute?
Anyway, yes. Me and Jon, we went to the Roadburn festival. We got up early on Thursday morning after a pretty poor night's sleep and got a Eurostar to Brussels, and Jon's French lasted through the process of enquiring exactly how much of the rest of the trip our tickets were valid for and most of the way through getting tickets for the last bit to Tilburg. Total train travel time was four hours, which is very competitive with overall plane travel time while being far more civilised, although coming back on a Sunday night meant it wasn't as who should say cheap. We went to the bus stop outside the station and found a slightly smarmy man selling tickets for the shuttle bus and bought a bunch of them. The festival is in a three-stage venue complex in town and there's camping organised all together in a place a few kilometres outside it, and there's a bus laid on to ferry metallers between the two. Last year the bus was infrequent, crowded and generally rubbish but included in the festival price; this year there was a two-Euro charge per trip, and while the buses were much less crowded, they were still infrequent enough to be irritating, especially when we were waiting outside the venue at midnight. The man was also advertising a service called the Beer Taxi, where he'd be selling cold beers between midnight and four at the campsite, and generally seemed to have latched himself onto every commercial opportunity going; he was a small but irritating presence all weekend, especially when we were keenly watching for a minibus at midnight and it kept turning out to be the bloody Beer Taxi.
So given that we'd just missed a bus and it was early yet, we went into town to see if I could remember where Lidl was to lay in supplies (I could) and also to be the only sober people eating frites and sauce for lunch. Seriously, though, it's probably good that chippies in the UK don't serve huge splats of satay sauce on chips or I'd get very fat very quick. While there we ran into Litmus, who were playing the warm-up event that night, and they told us who else was playing at the warm-up event that night, viz, Down, so we went and got tickets pretty quick. After eventually catching a bus and setting up camp and heading back, we went and saw a bunch of good bands including the aforementioned Taint, but I think Down were the band of the night. It's difficult to say exactly how they were good, I don't even own any of the albums and I surely ought to, and Litmus reckoned they were being cocks in terms of distancing themselves in a private dressing room in an otherwise gregarious and egalitarian sort of festival, but they were proper metal and they were doing what they did very well. Curiously, Phil Anselmo is an ex-smackhead of nearly forty who you could easily be convinced wasn't thirty yet, while Rex, the Sensible One out of Pantera who's now also in Down, looks considerably more battered.
Last year we only had tickets for one day of the festival and so being barely able to stand, let alone dance, by the time Volt were on at one in the morning was a wise use of resources. This year we did three days running and the second was the worst, waking up knackered, hungover and cold and with sore feet. Jon had lost a contact lens while moshing to Down, too, so was facing a weekend of not being able to see properly, and was also suffering from dying boot soles. Tilburg is almost unnaturally efficient and shiny and nice, though, and an amazingly helpful optician sold Jon some disposable contact lenses and took great pains making sure he knew how to use them, and a shop a hundred metres away sold him insoles, and a record shop sold him a rare Heads EP on Man's Ruin that would never be seen again and after that there was nothing to be done but eat more frites and sauce and go and listen to rock. None of Friday's bands were real killers, though there was a path of consistent quality through the day. Zone Six were a bunch of aging hippies with a splendidly camp skinny drummer, making jams up on the spot with the help of Guru Guru's guitarist and more pedals than I've ever seen on stage before, and they were good fun and absorbing. Gentlemans Pistols were their 118-Core-looking selves, bigging up Leeds and playing songs about masturbation and fine women with great aplomb, and La Ira De Dios were Peruvian and space-filled while also having a drummer who justified being dressed like he was going to play football, being totally soaked by the end of the set. We were a bit knackered to hang around for too much more ourselves. Oh, and I was surprisingly incensed by Witch, who got a huge amount of hype but who were, as far as I could tell, rubbish. The music was all wrong, somehow, tuned into all the overtones and not the fundamentals of stoner rock or something, and the singer was bad bad amateurish bad, in a way where you could tell he thought he was still really rock and roll. Bah.
Saturday had some structural problems. Boris and the Heads, the two bands on the list I already knew I wanted to see, were on at the same time, while research showed that after them, there was an hour and a half of badness. "Wolves In The Throne Room play music that is inspired and informed by the tribal war-spirit found in Burzum. But their roots are in the underground punk scene, and their themes are deep ecology and eco-spirituality, the study of myth, religion and magick. Casting these influences against their own personal struggles to create a stronghold in this ugly and banal world results in their genre-transcending sound." Trans.: we're a bunch of ludicrous emo hippies that can't be bothered to play properly because that might take effort, but we're going to inflict our whingeing on you anyway. Woo. The structure of the day turned out even more unanticipated than that; the Heads were good but didn't really hold me, while the permanently-evolving Boris seem to have hit a bum patch involving an extra guitarist who diminishes the effect of their long-standing main one and someone telling the bassist he can sing when he can't really, so I saw half of both and didn't feel I needed much more of either. The best band of the day, in the normal band category anyway, were a Swiss lot called Kruger, and it may say something about what really musically floats my boat that the other album I wanted to buy this weekend was theirs, another band where the word post- must surely be involved, but it was only available on vinyl so I didn't. They were unquestionably excellent, though, being angular and energetic, with a singer bouncing off the walls and the sort of drumming I can tell I'm going to like in advance by the symmetrical pair of central crashes that speak of hands being equivalent and washes of noise being important. And, they closed with a tight, muscular cover of Kyuss's Hurricane which I ain't never going to see done live otherwise. Ace. Elsewhere, Tia Carrera (a Texas band who've nicked the name, not her) were fun and noisy with a drummer that reminded me of Joey from Acid King and Zak from Kn0wn with his minimal kit and flat toms, while Enslaved were properly proper metal, in a way where you have to respect twenty years of serious metallic effort, and their guitarist's ability to stand with no shirt on and extremeley wide-spaced legs looking very metal for the entirety of the gig, although not the drummer who had a massive, impressive kit that he didn't really deserve.
I say the best normal band because the day was bracketed by Electric Orange and Acid Mothers Guru. Electric Orange were doing songs that were recognisable from their recordings, but their recordings are somewhat abstract and involve a lot of strange sorts of noises, so they won the prize for the greatest number of instruments including flute, acoustic and electric guitars, congas, normal drums, samplers, keyboards, a pedal-operated synth and a variety of curious little percussiony things. Acid Mothers Guru won the prize for being so totally disdainful of the gravitas of rock music that they managed to turn two people who'd spent a lot of the weekend talking their way through the ending of a serious relationship into a pair of giggling, wide-eyed loons, delighted with the possibilities of music. Although I was also giggly because of being stoned, it being impolite to refuse a proffered joint at that sort of moment and such things round there tending to be strong. Acid Mothers Temple consisted of a guitarist that only plays shred, a stand-in bassist who was doing something rather jazz and playing around with time, and their normal drummer playing the bottom end of a kit and a synth. The Guru bit was Mani Neumeier, the drummer from Guru Guru, who had an entire kit and was more or less running the show. Everything they did was playful and deft, but there was about twenty minutes in the middle where the other two buggered off and left it to the two drummers. They were having such a splendid time, messing around, swapping kits without ever dropping the beat. Mani came out to the front of a stage and emptied the contents of a bag noisily onto the floor; it was a collecton of metal pots and dishes and trays and hubcaps and anything shiny that would go 'dink' when it was hit, and the two of them started playing this pile of junk like it was a kit. Every time something was hit it tended to jump and move, so they were chasing these things around across the stage, always making sure they hit something to keep the busy beat going. I think delightful is the only word for it. They got a huge round of applause when they were done because I can't imagine who wouldn't have enjoyed it, all considerations of genre being irrelevant.
We had a lot of time on Sunday to get back to Brussels for the Eurostar so we had a leisurely day of wandering round the Low Countries, although it would have been more enjoyable if anywhere had had functioning luggage lockers. Tilburg is nice but feels a bit unreal, like some future place where no-one really has to work but they're doing it anyway to pass the time, where everything is clean and works because it's being secretly tended by robots when you're not looking. Seriously, in the venue, there are six separate sets of toilets, two large ones and four handily-placed outlying ones, and every single toilet I went in over the three days was unimprovably clean and fully functional, with a working lock and stocked-up toilet paper, but I never saw anyone doing anything staff-like in there. I suppose the civility of the festival-goers themselves must be a big contributor but still, I've rarely seen a pub, venue or even office in the UK that I could say that about. We left Tilburg on Sunday lunchtime, anyway, and decided to get off at Antwerp to see what we could see of the place. Antwerp turned out to have a spoony station, with the platforms arranged in three decks in a vertical stack, topped by a ridiculously baroque station hall full of gilt and marble. We went and found a park and sat in the sunshine and read books and watched passers-by and ate ice-cream in waffle cones and talked and it was all very restful, although still a bit more real somehow than Tilburg. There were more Africans around in Antwerp, which is perhaps what I've come to expect of a city these days. There was also, Stuart Maconie would be appalled to hear, a Greggs. We got on another train back to Brussels and there was still a bit of time to kill so we went out into the streets briefly and found a place that seemed even more like a real city; I'd quite like to go back there sometime and look around properly. And so back on the train and under the Channel to Kent and then St. Pancras and then it was time to go our separate ways. If we were ever going to have to do that, doing it over the course of a long weekend full of bands and beer and travel, and time to talk everything out, was about the best possible way to do it, I think.
So given that we'd just missed a bus and it was early yet, we went into town to see if I could remember where Lidl was to lay in supplies (I could) and also to be the only sober people eating frites and sauce for lunch. Seriously, though, it's probably good that chippies in the UK don't serve huge splats of satay sauce on chips or I'd get very fat very quick. While there we ran into Litmus, who were playing the warm-up event that night, and they told us who else was playing at the warm-up event that night, viz, Down, so we went and got tickets pretty quick. After eventually catching a bus and setting up camp and heading back, we went and saw a bunch of good bands including the aforementioned Taint, but I think Down were the band of the night. It's difficult to say exactly how they were good, I don't even own any of the albums and I surely ought to, and Litmus reckoned they were being cocks in terms of distancing themselves in a private dressing room in an otherwise gregarious and egalitarian sort of festival, but they were proper metal and they were doing what they did very well. Curiously, Phil Anselmo is an ex-smackhead of nearly forty who you could easily be convinced wasn't thirty yet, while Rex, the Sensible One out of Pantera who's now also in Down, looks considerably more battered.
Last year we only had tickets for one day of the festival and so being barely able to stand, let alone dance, by the time Volt were on at one in the morning was a wise use of resources. This year we did three days running and the second was the worst, waking up knackered, hungover and cold and with sore feet. Jon had lost a contact lens while moshing to Down, too, so was facing a weekend of not being able to see properly, and was also suffering from dying boot soles. Tilburg is almost unnaturally efficient and shiny and nice, though, and an amazingly helpful optician sold Jon some disposable contact lenses and took great pains making sure he knew how to use them, and a shop a hundred metres away sold him insoles, and a record shop sold him a rare Heads EP on Man's Ruin that would never be seen again and after that there was nothing to be done but eat more frites and sauce and go and listen to rock. None of Friday's bands were real killers, though there was a path of consistent quality through the day. Zone Six were a bunch of aging hippies with a splendidly camp skinny drummer, making jams up on the spot with the help of Guru Guru's guitarist and more pedals than I've ever seen on stage before, and they were good fun and absorbing. Gentlemans Pistols were their 118-Core-looking selves, bigging up Leeds and playing songs about masturbation and fine women with great aplomb, and La Ira De Dios were Peruvian and space-filled while also having a drummer who justified being dressed like he was going to play football, being totally soaked by the end of the set. We were a bit knackered to hang around for too much more ourselves. Oh, and I was surprisingly incensed by Witch, who got a huge amount of hype but who were, as far as I could tell, rubbish. The music was all wrong, somehow, tuned into all the overtones and not the fundamentals of stoner rock or something, and the singer was bad bad amateurish bad, in a way where you could tell he thought he was still really rock and roll. Bah.
Saturday had some structural problems. Boris and the Heads, the two bands on the list I already knew I wanted to see, were on at the same time, while research showed that after them, there was an hour and a half of badness. "Wolves In The Throne Room play music that is inspired and informed by the tribal war-spirit found in Burzum. But their roots are in the underground punk scene, and their themes are deep ecology and eco-spirituality, the study of myth, religion and magick. Casting these influences against their own personal struggles to create a stronghold in this ugly and banal world results in their genre-transcending sound." Trans.: we're a bunch of ludicrous emo hippies that can't be bothered to play properly because that might take effort, but we're going to inflict our whingeing on you anyway. Woo. The structure of the day turned out even more unanticipated than that; the Heads were good but didn't really hold me, while the permanently-evolving Boris seem to have hit a bum patch involving an extra guitarist who diminishes the effect of their long-standing main one and someone telling the bassist he can sing when he can't really, so I saw half of both and didn't feel I needed much more of either. The best band of the day, in the normal band category anyway, were a Swiss lot called Kruger, and it may say something about what really musically floats my boat that the other album I wanted to buy this weekend was theirs, another band where the word post- must surely be involved, but it was only available on vinyl so I didn't. They were unquestionably excellent, though, being angular and energetic, with a singer bouncing off the walls and the sort of drumming I can tell I'm going to like in advance by the symmetrical pair of central crashes that speak of hands being equivalent and washes of noise being important. And, they closed with a tight, muscular cover of Kyuss's Hurricane which I ain't never going to see done live otherwise. Ace. Elsewhere, Tia Carrera (a Texas band who've nicked the name, not her) were fun and noisy with a drummer that reminded me of Joey from Acid King and Zak from Kn0wn with his minimal kit and flat toms, while Enslaved were properly proper metal, in a way where you have to respect twenty years of serious metallic effort, and their guitarist's ability to stand with no shirt on and extremeley wide-spaced legs looking very metal for the entirety of the gig, although not the drummer who had a massive, impressive kit that he didn't really deserve.
I say the best normal band because the day was bracketed by Electric Orange and Acid Mothers Guru. Electric Orange were doing songs that were recognisable from their recordings, but their recordings are somewhat abstract and involve a lot of strange sorts of noises, so they won the prize for the greatest number of instruments including flute, acoustic and electric guitars, congas, normal drums, samplers, keyboards, a pedal-operated synth and a variety of curious little percussiony things. Acid Mothers Guru won the prize for being so totally disdainful of the gravitas of rock music that they managed to turn two people who'd spent a lot of the weekend talking their way through the ending of a serious relationship into a pair of giggling, wide-eyed loons, delighted with the possibilities of music. Although I was also giggly because of being stoned, it being impolite to refuse a proffered joint at that sort of moment and such things round there tending to be strong. Acid Mothers Temple consisted of a guitarist that only plays shred, a stand-in bassist who was doing something rather jazz and playing around with time, and their normal drummer playing the bottom end of a kit and a synth. The Guru bit was Mani Neumeier, the drummer from Guru Guru, who had an entire kit and was more or less running the show. Everything they did was playful and deft, but there was about twenty minutes in the middle where the other two buggered off and left it to the two drummers. They were having such a splendid time, messing around, swapping kits without ever dropping the beat. Mani came out to the front of a stage and emptied the contents of a bag noisily onto the floor; it was a collecton of metal pots and dishes and trays and hubcaps and anything shiny that would go 'dink' when it was hit, and the two of them started playing this pile of junk like it was a kit. Every time something was hit it tended to jump and move, so they were chasing these things around across the stage, always making sure they hit something to keep the busy beat going. I think delightful is the only word for it. They got a huge round of applause when they were done because I can't imagine who wouldn't have enjoyed it, all considerations of genre being irrelevant.
We had a lot of time on Sunday to get back to Brussels for the Eurostar so we had a leisurely day of wandering round the Low Countries, although it would have been more enjoyable if anywhere had had functioning luggage lockers. Tilburg is nice but feels a bit unreal, like some future place where no-one really has to work but they're doing it anyway to pass the time, where everything is clean and works because it's being secretly tended by robots when you're not looking. Seriously, in the venue, there are six separate sets of toilets, two large ones and four handily-placed outlying ones, and every single toilet I went in over the three days was unimprovably clean and fully functional, with a working lock and stocked-up toilet paper, but I never saw anyone doing anything staff-like in there. I suppose the civility of the festival-goers themselves must be a big contributor but still, I've rarely seen a pub, venue or even office in the UK that I could say that about. We left Tilburg on Sunday lunchtime, anyway, and decided to get off at Antwerp to see what we could see of the place. Antwerp turned out to have a spoony station, with the platforms arranged in three decks in a vertical stack, topped by a ridiculously baroque station hall full of gilt and marble. We went and found a park and sat in the sunshine and read books and watched passers-by and ate ice-cream in waffle cones and talked and it was all very restful, although still a bit more real somehow than Tilburg. There were more Africans around in Antwerp, which is perhaps what I've come to expect of a city these days. There was also, Stuart Maconie would be appalled to hear, a Greggs. We got on another train back to Brussels and there was still a bit of time to kill so we went out into the streets briefly and found a place that seemed even more like a real city; I'd quite like to go back there sometime and look around properly. And so back on the train and under the Channel to Kent and then St. Pancras and then it was time to go our separate ways. If we were ever going to have to do that, doing it over the course of a long weekend full of bands and beer and travel, and time to talk everything out, was about the best possible way to do it, I think.