Consider a Glastonbury late morning/early afternoon. Four o'clock rolls around: four drinks have been downed, and as many bands have been at least partially digested. Meanwhile at Rock en Seine, as Casios beep for quarter past, estranged Super Furry Animal
Gruff Rhys ambles out in a gorgeously grotesque brown velveteen suit. He is, to all extensive purposes, today's first noteworthy name to the discerning Brit indie aficionado, and there's plenty in attendance as words of Welsh encouragement are intermittently hurled his way.
And reciprocally, he seems to be in a rather buoyant mood, whipping out numerous placards calling for commotion while surf pop compatriots Y Niwl ensure Gyrru Gyrru Gyrru and The Court Of King Arthur are suitably giddy. In A House With No Mirrors (You'll Never Get Old), stripped of the Zappa-esque madness of VCR repairman Tony da Gatorra, is something of a garage rock titan, crescendoing amidst a whirr of frenetic grunge. Diolch yn fawr once again, Gruff. Sounding consistently more celestial while continuing to shoegaze, NYC trio
Blonde Redhead take to the Grande Scène in what may initially seem like an audacious, perhaps inauspicious booking. If the brothers Pace grow perceptibly more and more identical year upon year, their brand of woozy grandiosity continues to drift off into increasingly ethereal realms, and their position on this year's poster is emphatically vindicated as Kazu Makino's vox on Misery Is A Butterfly prove porcelain-shattering, and the melodrama of 23 seems capable of searing the most impenetrable emotional disposition. Zola Jesus lite, aka
Austra, then dishes out pseudo-kooky electropop schtick in the backdrop as the Scène de la Cascade is prepped for freak folk torchbearers
CocoRosie.
Back in the city of their reunion, while their mental stability may be questionable, the finesse with which they reproduce the likes of hip hopera opener Black Rainbow and the segueing R.I.P. Burn Face is astounding. Backed by a beatboxer and grand piano, and disguised behind pearly masks and permanent marker moustaches, the duo beguile and baffle in equal measure, Werewolf epitomising the former and a harp-led, heartfelt cover of Kevin Lyttle's Turn Me On embodying the latter. Irrespective of the great doom and gloom of
Interpol's debut LP Turn on the Bright Lights, it was their off-kilter, macabre power pop Antics that propelled their monochrome post-punk into a more mainstream consciousness and befittingly, it's from this record that half their set is derived. Barricade from their latest, eponymous effort sounds forceful, although without vaudevillian bass toter Carlos D they lack both panache and pastiche thus oomph is effectively provided exclusively by the towering despondence of Take You On A Cruise, the frenzied kinetics of Slow Hands, and bottom-end slump of Evil. The aptly thunderous Mammoth is omitted and indeed, the New Yorkers no longer sound as immense as they have done in recent history.
A little less elephantine these days too are
Death From Above 1979. If Jesse F. Keeler and Sebastien Grainger once sounded like a herd of rabid tusked mammals stampeding up and down Denmark Street, the duo now sound disappointingly controllable, containable. Stilted conversations with equally disenchanted bods in attendance suggest that they're more famed in these parts for Keeler's electro onslaught under the MSTRKRFT moniker, which goes some way to elucidating the meagre turnout. Keeler cuts a solitary figure stage-right, clad in black, while Grainger faces him from stage-left, all in white and these explicit contrasts suggest that the pair are not so much a functional band unit as two polar individuals clattering away to the former glories of Little Girl, Romantic Rights and Blood On Our Hands in gritted tooth disharmony. Before a backdrop displaying a tombstone citing their lifespan of 2001-2006, on tonight's evidence they may have been better off resting in discordant peace. Springing back to a more sprightly fore than ever before are Sheffield-to-superstar rascals
Arctic Monkeys, and sprightlier still is Alex Turner's hair, a wave of quiff rolling atop his head.
Arctic Monkeys - Brianstorm - Live (Rock en... by sourdoreille
Musically, it's Starcaster thunderstorms, Crying Lightning, and that mysterious Hellcat Spangled Shalalala, and it's pulsating for the length of a football tie as the 'Monkeys match
last night's heavyweights song for song. I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor, on foreign slurry-like mud, is as effervescent as it ever was, colloquialisms of "bangin' tunes and DJ sets" phonetically reinterpreted and regurgitated as dynamite-like flares erupt left, right, and centre. Pretty Visitors, driven by Matt Helders' spinach-bolstered biceps, is as ominous as much of the dreary cloud that lingers over Saint-Cloud throughout the weekend, while Do Me A Favour sounds positively ritzy. However it's an encore composed of the bittersweet lynchpin title track of their latest effort, Fluorescent Adolescent, and 505 that seals the proverbial deal. Bona fide headliners and boisterous underdog tykes all at once, Turner's heartwarming charm could still melt many a polar icecap. It's then the turn of
Étienne de Crécy, whose Beats & Cubes show is, visually, a modern wonder of the technological world. Sonically however, de Crécy's inability to disengage his house/electro hybrid from his audible obsession with the vocoder establishes inexorable parallels with a certain French pair famed for daft funk samples and infinitely more incisive records. Ironically perhaps, his crowning moment comes in the funked up form of an extended Am I Wrong. And on that synthesised note, Saturday disintegrates.
