Live Review : Arctangent Festival on August 19th 2022
Last Hyena are another Bristolian outfit pulled into Arctangent's gravitational field. Their take on maths/post-rock is laid-back with an almost loungecore lethargy. There is no urgency at play here and to be honest, there does not need to be, they are the first band on and we have a whole day in front of us. Their proggy-like inclinations fit beautifully with their audience’s hung-over state. Very much music to do (a liquid) breakfast to.
Heisa hail from Belgium and are making their first foray into the UK. It seems their one intention is to mess about with standard song structures as much as they can. This is post-rock but post-rock done very much their way. Where we would expect them to go left, they go right and where we would expect the music to soar, it heads in an altogether different direction. Constantly baffling and essentially highly challenging, they still manage to be both intriguing and enticing. Just because you haven't got a clue where it's going on doesn’t mean it’s not highly enjoyable.
In a weekend of wacky band names, Hippotraktor seems to have struck gold. They are another band making their debut on the shores (this lot are from Belgium) and they really seem rather chuffed to be here. Their trade is highly competent progressive metal, full of looping time signatures and angular riffs. What makes them stand out from the rest is the furiosity at which they go at it. They approach their set as if they are headlining the whole darn thing as opposed to playing the lunchtime slot to half interested and half full tent. There is so much conviction going on that you cannot help but be drawn in by them. Conclusive proof that is not what you do but how you do it.
Still produced an absolute cracker of an album last year. A desolate noise-core classic that stretched the boundaries of what we would consider music. Unnerving and in places unlistenable, it nevertheless was one of those records that just takes your breath away. I, therefore, was extremely interested in whether they could replicate on stage its claustrophobic nihilism. The answer is, to be honest, not quite. It is obvious that to them playing Arctangent is quite a big deal indeed and those nerves seem to crossover into how the music is presented. There is still a level of brutal negativity to their stuff, but it never quite matches the intensity or the feeling of total consumption that they achieve on record. Maybe it’s the blazing sunshine or maybe the fact that is only midday but that feeling of cathartic despair that I got from listening to “{}” is sadly missing.
MØL seems to be on a one-band mission to completely and utterly recalibrate what we understand to be Black Metal. To be honest they're not Black Metal at all. They use it as a pallet to paint their sonic pictures from and that's about it. What they are, is not just debatable but incredibly hard to pin down. See, they are playing metal but in a distinctly major key. Theirs’ is a euphoric rush of noise full of tenacity and melody. To say they burst off the stage is an understatement as Kim Song Sternkopf spends a good proportion of his time down in the pit and stretching far into the audience. Their sound is not just big, it is anthemic in its scale and scope. There is so much self-confidence and audacity in what they do that it is obvious that they will very soon outgrow these early afternoon slots.
In a world of nonconformity, how do you stand out? In the case of Tuskar, it is by not conforming to the nonconformity. They have chucked all given musical templates out of the window and are instead doing very much their own thing. Their own thing turns out to be a drum orientated, if not drum-led, take on sludge metal. This is all about Tyler Hodges, in fact, for a lot of the set, it feels like Tom Dimmock’s guitar is only there to stop our Tyler from getting lonely. It is certainly way down in the mix and doesn't seem to play much of a role in shaping the songs. That is because they are all being willed into life by Tyler's extraordinary drumming. Completely forget what you think a solo drummer would be like and you are somewhere in the ballpark of what Tyler is doing. This is not an elongated drum solo (thank God), the drums don't just lead the rhythm, they are operating as the main instrument. Using pulsating patterns, they drive each track forward. Utterly unique and utterly astounding.
Slow Crush seems to have been surgically removed from the late 80’s and plonked unceremoniously into 2022. This is not a reinterpretation of shoegaze; this is an utterly faithful facsimile of what bands like Curve and Lush were producing long before any of the members of Slow Crush were even born. My companion whispers to me halfway through "this is the Cure with female vocals”, he is completely right because that is exactly what Curve was doing 35 years ago. It's not bad, in fact, it's all rather pleasant, it's just that it's a complete carbon copy of what came before it. Beautifully rendered and beautifully performed, it just doesn't have an original bone in its body.
If one band have been taken to heart this weekend, then that's Alpha Male Tea Party. Every other band within their sets urges their audience to go and buy their merchandise and every conversation that you have with a fellow punter begins with the line open "have you heard what happened to Alpha Male Tea Party?” We take care of our own and the support wrapped around them is certainly heart-warming to see (for the uninitiated they had all their gear nicked from a service station on the way to the festival). In terms of audience reaction, they were always going to be treated like gallant heroes, but the roar that goes up when they hit the stage is utterly insane. In many ways, they are Arctangent’s house band having played six times over its nine-year history. What we get is a noisy riotous set, full of passionate pogoing and joyful jubilance. Essentially a massive middle finger up to anybody ever considering half-inching something that's not theirs.
Årabrot feels refreshingly different in their simplicity and their stripped-down nature. There are no angular riffs here or complex mathematical musical structures. Instead, this is bluesy rock 'n' roll, seasoned with a pinch of postpunk. Television is the nearest simile, but even that does no justice to the uniqueness of this Norwegian oddity. Named after a garbage dump in their native Haugesund, they have been through a variety of line-ups and musical forms before arriving at their current contemporary blues trio set-up. The tracks are organic and minimal with Kjetil and Karin’s vocals playing as key a role as any other instrumentation. Evocative and highly entertaining, the main question is why are there so few people in the tent?
Rivers of Nihil are very much a Death Metal act and are probably one of the main reasons why they are swathes of Cannibal Corpse T-shirts strewed around the site. However, they are also a Death Metal act with hidden depths and that hidden depth surfaces in the shape of sax solos (though sadly only present on the backing tape). You see there is a real prog and experiments edge to what they're doing, but they are using it to complement as opposed to dilute the furiosity of their Death Metal. They are still brutally jagged and coarse in their delivery, but those fits of extreme aggression are joined together by some wonderfully wistful instrumental interludes. Heavy, powerful but also triumphantly progressive.
From early afternoon people have been claiming their spots for Mono. Whilst Arctangent is a veritable playground of post-rock bands, there is no one quite like these Japanese legends. They have taken the overused post-rock template (quiet, quiet, LOUD) and just enhanced the quality at every angle. The quiet bits just have more depth and beauty than anybody else and those loud bits, you know they're coming but they are still utterly overwhelming. There is something equally cathartic and riveting about watching the four members of Mono work. Before your very eyes, they weave this maelstrom of melodic noise, knitting together the different sounds to create a sonic tapestry. Utterly exquisite and utterly astonishing.
In many people's eyes, it may well be deemed as a crime fit for corporal punishment, but people do drift out of Mono early. This is because someone made the dubious decision to put the phenomenon that is Zeal and Ardor onto one of the smaller stages. Even those arriving early find the venue rammed to capacity, by the time they make it onto the stage the audience is five or six deep on all three sides. Zeal and Ardor are a true word-of-mouth sensation, the media hype has been limited, but everybody who has seen them live has spoken in reverential terms about them. What started as a joking dare online around six years ago has metamorphosed into quite simply the most seismic reinvention of metal in decades.
What Zeal and Ardor do is incredibly simple but blisteringly effective. They'll take everything back to the heart of music as we know it, and that's the human voice. There is guitar there and there are drums, but everything is driven by the three vocalists who stand before us in an unwavering line. The vocals are not there as window dressing or to provide the narrative, it provides the rhythm, and it provides the beat. It's astonishingly basic but it manages to feel so different to anything else that we are used to in our world. It's sterling and it's immersive and it's compelling. Reassuringly familiar but also simultaneously alarmingly alien. there is quite simply nothing like them and that's why they are bound for headline status.
After the unworldliness of Zeal and Ardor, there is nothing Tesseract can do but feel pedestrian and a bit safe. Whilst they do have a hardcore following for whom they can do no wrong, they still do feel an interesting choice for a headliner and the stage is never more than two-thirds full. To give them their dues, they face this adversity head-on and make it their mission to put as memorable are show as possible. For the sixty minutes, I will admit, I am hooked. The lasers add an additional visual element that, at least initially, takes the whole endeavour to another level. It's also very obvious that the band are pouring every inch of their hearts and their soul into their performance.
The fanboys and girls down the front are obviously in utter rapture over it. However, around the hour mark, I start to get bored and I never recover. The problem is that just isn't enough variation in what they're doing. At the start, their interesting mix of mass metal and pop vocals is both endearing and also intriguing, but it never seems to really go anywhere. As the set proceeds songs just seem to blur into one and there seems to be very little demarcation and difference. I diligently stayed to the end, but it just seems to peat out without being any form of a grand finale. They certainly knew how to start a headline show but sadly they don’t quite have the ammunition to finish it.
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!