Live Review : Arctangent Festival on August 17th 2022
Arctangent is very much the thinking person's metal festival. It's a wonderfully eclectic argumentation of all those "difficult" bands that operate at the fringes of our world. Every act and subgenre that your mainstream Maiden fan would considered as being "odd" is represented here this weekend. Compared to Bloodstock’s beer and amphetamines fuelled masses, this is a much more refined and even cerebral audience. This is not just metalheads with degrees, this is metalheads with doctorates and plethora’s of letters after their name. However it isn't just the audience and the bands that make this festival, this is one of the most intricately and concisely organised events that I have had the pleasure of covering. When we chatted to festival organiser James Scarlett on the final day of Arctangent it became clear the amount of thought process goes into the layout, down to the positioning of every tent and the structure of the whole shebang. This is not a "oh it will do" sort of event, this is one where the booking of every act and their placing on the bill has been thought about in advance.
Due to network rail shenanigans, we arrive at the tail end of the first day. In fact, the first day is not really the first day at all, it’s more a prologue for those willing to pay for early entry. Held exclusively in the smallest of the five tents, it allows the organisers to showcase a number of acts (mostly from the surrounding area) that they probably couldn't shoehorn into the main event. We sadly miss Mother Vulture who absolutely blew us away at last weekend’s Bloodstock. A fantastic mix of proto-prog and classic rock they are firmly in my "need to catch up with soon" file.
So the honour of being our first Arctangent act goes to Memory of Elephants, a local trio plying a free-form variant of math-rock. The expected angular riffs are there but also there is a level of scuzziness and improvisation that actually makes this feel much freer and more anarchistic than other variants of this genre. The joy of watching them is that you are not quite sure where each song is going and in fact, you get a distinct impression that the band themselves are not quite sure where each song is going but are distinctly enjoying the journey.
Whilst Sugar Horse’s press releases may modestly describe themselves as "a distinctly average band" what they actually are is the epitome of an Arctangent act. Managing to be simultaneously caustic and endearing, they capture in a 40-minute set all that makes this festival so enticing. Rather than wanting to fit into a particular pigeonholed genre, they instead seem hellbent on touching on every band they potentially have listened to over their entire collective lives. There is a real danger that this sort of eclecticism could end up a soggy and aimless mess, but actually, Sugar Horse are really clever and adept musicians and they manage to skilfully bounce from one influence to another without it feeling scattergun or meaningless. They seem to share an irreverence about song structure and instead quite happily go rogue in terms of how tracks should start or end. At times frustrating but in the end, they provide a thought-provoking and actually highly entertaining diversion.
The St Pierre Snake Invasion have the honour of being this year's first Arctangent headliner. Hailing (like Memories of Elephants) from nearby Bristol, they seem to have been on “the one to watch” list for ages. At heart, they are a hardcore band, fuelled by politics, Red Bull and a shared love of Converge. But there is something else here, something more nuanced and subtle. Yes, there is a heady stream of latent anger fuelled by political astuteness, but the band seem to realise that they are not actually going to get their message across by simply screaming into their audience’s face. Melody, minimalism and even comedy are all absorbed into their model, which results in a brand of hardcore that has vast swathes of accessibility to it. Nothing has been toned down and nothing has been diluted, but there is very much the feeling that the band have decided that simply preaching to the converted is not going to achieve their goals. Enticing and eclectic, you get a distinct feeling that there is real breakout potential here.
I just love Metal. I love it all. The bombastity of symphonic, the brutality of death, the rousing choruses of power, the nihilistic evil of black, the pounding atmospherics of doom, the whirling time changes of prog, the faithful familiarity of trad, the other worldlyness of post, the sheer unrefined power of thrash. I love it all!