The first Bon Iver LP, For Emma, Forever Ago, appeared complete with a rather romantic back story. The mental image created was of a collection of songs recorded by Justin Vernon on his own in monk-like seclusion in a remote log cabin. Whatever the actual conditions of the recording of For Emma, songs like “Skinny Love” certainly conjured up the backwoodsy, heart-on-sleeve feel of sincere and home-crafted folk music.

Bon Iver - Bon Iver

Notably on the follow up Bloodbank EP Vernon steered away from recreating this primitive-folk feel and instead opted to experiment with looped and layered vocals to create a very different musical feel to the record. With Bon Iver Vernon picks up where Bloodbank left off: there’s no return to the solitary folk sounds of For Emma, instead the much fuller band sound and variety of instrumentation create a much richer backdrop for Vernon’s strikingly beautiful voice.

Vernon’s voice is still the key to the appeal of Bon Iver and one of the reasons why the difference in musical styles in this self-titled LP makes less difference than you might think. If you loved his high, fragile-yet-strong voice on his previous work then you’ll certainly love it here.

The opening track “Perth” sets the tone well for what’s to follow: instantly recognisable multi-tracked vocals hang suspended in the air supported by a single guitar until the track reaches a tipping point and military-sounding drums and more guitars crash in, building to exactly the sort of crescendo that most bands in the post-rock game would give their eye teeth for.

Despite the much broader scope of the backing instruments it is the voice that dominates Bon Iver. Vernon’s lyrics are often hard to make out exactly, but the tone of fragility and beauty remains constant throughout (almost) the entire album. Occasionally there are phrases that recall For Emma, ‘Did I lose it in the stacks?’ he ponders in “Minnesota”. In other places lines that sound quite banal written down, like ‘I could see for miles and miles and miles’ in Holocene, acquire a poignancy and depth through the tender power of Vernon’s delivery.  Bon Iver constantly makes you realise what a fantastic instrument Vernon’s voice really is; he is surely one of very few artists today who could probably make a decent fist of an a cappella record.

For the vast majority of the record, from the triumphant clatter of the first single “Calgary” to the reverbed piano and studio effects of “Hinnon, Tx”, you get a sense of a songwriter breaking free of the ‘backwoods’ and ‘folky’ tags and producing a record of real strength and character. Unfortunately, however, not every single attempt at moulding this new style is a success. The one fly in Bon Iver’s ointment is the final track “Beth/Rest” which, quite simply, isn’t very good at all. The track employs several ‘80s power-ballad signifiers (the plaintive squiggles of lead guitar and sax in particular scream “lighters in the air”) and creates a rather tacky and treacly sound that doesn’t fit with anything that came before.

Bon Iver shows Justin Vernon getting away from the sound of For Emma, Forever Ago and experimenting with a richer, fuller sound and new ideas. It is a pity that the final experiment seems to have backfired, but each of the other nine tracks on the record has more than enough to make up for it.

Aidan Baker is a prolific man – a very prolific man. Whether churning out ambient soundscapes under his own name, laying down semi-improvised droning doom epics with his main band Nadja or releasing material in collaboration with other like-minded sound artists or other fringe projects, Aidan Baker releases more material in a year than many bands or artists release in their entire careers. Unless you are a Baker completist the question that arises with each new release is ‘is this an essential one?’

Aidan Baker - Lost In The Rat Maze

The same Baker completist might well argue with you that each of the man’s solo releases, from the most obscure limited-pressing CDR upwards, is essential, but the truth is that some are certainly more essential than others. Last year’s Liminoid / Lifeforms release, for example, showcased Baker pulling out all the stops and seemingly distancing himself from the ‘typical ambient / drone’ tag: aided by a host of guest musicians Baker added frantic pummelling drumming, operatic vocals and soaring strings to one of 2010’s finest (and, unfortunately, most overlooked) releases.

On first listen, Lost in The Rat Maze sounds rather more like ‘typical’ ambient and your initial impression might be disappointment: the bold and experimental sound of Liminoid / Lifeforms and Baker tearing up genre expectations is gone and instead you are presented with 56 minutes of, on the surface, fairly conventional drone/ambient sound. Each track blends and blurs into its neighbours, creating one coherent and unified sound world, but one that is initially quite ignorable. Many different elements are present: muffled piano chords, occasional sub bass rumbles, percussive snaps and cracks, shoegazey guitar strums, almost-not-there whispered vocals. None of these elements seems to want to stand out from the background though, to impose itself too strongly on the listener: they catch your ear only as they dissolve and melt back into the background.

And yet, somehow, by the third track ‘Fanciful Flight’, the record has gathered forward momentum and is starting to drag you along with it: almost without realising it the record that minutes before was gently humming to itself in the background has become insistent and unignorable.

One of the most remarkable things about Lost in the Rat Maze is how it manages to be simultaneously calmly meditative and also full of movement. This is not ambient as, for example, Stars of the Lid create it where each note hangs perfectly suspended in mid-air and time seems to stand still. This is the ambient of movement and change: there is always an element gently driving the music forwards, like the sound of continually rippling and splashing water.

One of the landmark achievements and most essential records in Aidan Baker’s career is his collaboration with Tim Hecker – Fantasma Parastasie. This record also recalls the movement of water, in particular the great oceanic swell of waves. Lost in the Rat Maze instead recalls a constantly babbling stream, a less ambitious sound world perhaps, but on close listening no less engaging.

Is ‘Lost in the Rat Maze’ an essential Aidan Baker record? No. It does not have the scope and ambition of some of his other landmark works. It is, however, an extremely immersive and pleasing Aidan Baker record and one that should remind us how essential Aidan Baker himself is.

Grinderman - Grinderman 2

The first Grinderman record, for all its successes, left many questions unanswered from some quarters. Was the ‘Grinderman’ project one with any future or just a fun one-off? Was it just Nick Cave and a few of his cronies messing around? Songs that weren’t good enough to make it onto a Bad Seeds record? Grinderman 2 (has there been a lazier attitude towards naming records since the early days of The Tindersticks?) doesn’t exactly answer all of these questions, but it goes a long way towards making the listener not give a damn either way about them. When a record sounds this good who cares?

Apparently the recording of Grinderman 2 was finished more than a year ago. The official reason given for delaying the release – that the various members with their other musical commitments were waiting for a time when they were all free to tour it live together – sounds enormously plausible on first listen to the record. If ever a record sounded like it was designed to be played live it’s this one.

Opening track ‘Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man’ begins with 30 seconds of quiet and aimless noodling before roaring into full-on stomp-rock sound and fury. The sound is immediate, stripped down and direct, picking up exactly where the first Grinderman record left off. This second record doesn’t consistently continue in the full-throttle scuzz-rock vein though: it’s a much more varied beast than its predecessor.

‘When My Baby Comes’ for example is a much more restrained affair for the most part, including one of the album highlights: Cave’s pleading refrain backed by some majestic sweeping solo viola from Warren Ellis. Fans of the Dirty Three will be delighted to hear Ellis’ beautiful nuanced playing given a free reign that there is very rarely space for on Bad Seeds’ records.

In fact it is telling that they are ‘Grinderman’ and not, say, ‘Nick Cave and the Grindermen’: Cave’s contribution is only one of many here and the other players – Ellis’ fuzzed up electric bouzouki, Sclavunos’ pounding drums and Casey’s tight insistent bass – all more than hold their own.

They sound like a real band. Their songwriting process is said to include a fair amount of improvisation, and this comes across in songs that sound looser and freer than those on most Bad Seeds’ records. On most songs the approach works, but it’s not an approach without its misfires: ‘What I Know’ limps along formlessly and it without anything much to recommend it.

For all the band unity on display, Cave’s lyrics and the powerful scowling baritone he delivers them in will often be what hold your attention. Whether he’s singing lasciviously about “hanging around your kitchenette/ Sticking my fingers in your biscuit jar” or invoking “the spinal column of JFK/ wrapped in Marilyn Monroe’s Negligee” there’s always something to entertain, terrify and/or turn-on his listener.  So what’s the point of Grinderman, what makes it different to the Bad Seeds if it’s essentially just more Cave, albeit with a rather louder and looser sound? Listening to Grinderman 2 you get the impression that Grinderman exists mainly because Cave, Ellis et al wanted to have fun playing these sinister sexy songs live without having to play ‘The Mercy Seat’ or ‘Into My Arms’ every time they plugged in. The record is enormous fun, but its primary purpose seems to be as an advert for the Grinderman live experience, which promises to be really something to behold.

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan - Hawk

Isobel Campbell has released several solo records, both under her own name and as The Gentle Waves. Though they all have their charms, especially 2003’s superb Amorino, they all suffer from the same problem – though she’s clearly a talented songwriter and she is unarguably possessed of a beautiful voice, her vocals do lack the bite and the presence to really hold the listener’s attention for the length of a whole LP. Kristin Hersh she is not.

Which is why her first collaborative LP with Mark Lanegan, Ballad of the Broken Seas, was such a triumph. Campbell took charge of the bulk of the songwriting and arranging, Lanegan brought his trademark gravel-throated vocal swagger and the end product was a Mercury-nominated minor classic. However, 2008’s follow up Sunday at Devil Dirt seemed to have a bad case of sequel-itis. Sticking rigidly to the same formula of Campbell’s soft high voice floating above Lanegan’s deep rough one whilst the Americana-tinged rock played subtly beneath them, it seemed like a less-inspired version of its predecessor.

Hawk, the latest offering from the pair, sticks for the most part to the formula of their previous collaborations, but some attempts are made to move things on a little. For example Lanegan isn’t the only male vocalist on show here; Willy Mason guests on a couple of tracks. Hawk also features a couple of Townes Van Zandt songs and a guest appearance from ex-Smashing Pumpkins’ guitarist James Iha, not that either of these involves a marked difference from the overall sound of the album. The one song where expectations are confounded is ‘Hawk’ itself: a boogie-woogie instrumental that seems to have no real connection to the songs around it.

The highlight track is ‘Time of The Season’, not a copy of the classic Zombies song, but a well-crafted showcase for demonstrating once again how well these two voices can work together. What’s noticeable though is that although this is effectively an album of duets, they don’t experiment much with the potential of having two voices. Lanegan and Campbell don’t tend to create distinct characters for their voices or indulge in call-and-response as, for example, the Tindersticks used to do to such effect on duets like ‘Buried Bones’. What you get on almost all of this album is the pair singing pretty much the same melody throughout a song, albeit at several octaves apart.

This is without question a good album; with two such talented performers involved it would be odd if it wasn’t. But the surprise factor is gone: we learnt on Ballad of the Broken Seas how beautifully these two such different voices could work together and nothing on Hawk really signals much of an advance or progression from that record. It would be good to perhaps see Lanegan let off the leash a little more if they were to record together again; to bring a little more of the more powerful and vitriolic vocals that he leant to the Gutter Twins recently. As it is Hawk is the sound of the lion lying down with the lamb, but maybe the two of them have got a little too comfortable together.

1234 Festival

July 24, 20201

The 1234 Festival has a rather unusual ambience, set in a smallish London field and overlooked by the Hackney council estate tower blocks. It has a very definite selling point though: it is the festival for the credit crunch. Twenty quid is all it takes to gain entry to a day of musical treats ranging from Peter Hook galloping through ‘Unknown Pleasures’ to hardcore favourites Fucked Up and Rolo Tomassi tearing it up.

In the ‘Rough Trade’ tent I catch Mazes and Comeanechi, two guitar-and-drums duos playing with real energy and venom. These New Puritans headline the tent but don’t play at all. The sound cuts out halfway through the first song and no amount of frantically scurrying roadies can restore it.

Those playing in the tents are better off in the afternoon than the headline acts playing on the main stage. The sun is unforgivingly hot for the crowd and the sound for S.C.U.M, The Dum Dum Girls and Vic Goddard is rather limp and flat.

Rolo Tomassi have a rather bizarre billing in the early evening at the New Bands tent; Eva points out to me afterwards, “we’ve been a band for five years!” The band are in their element in the over-crowded circus tent, though. They rip through a lot of their most aggressive material, pausing only for Eva to exhort the crowd to climb the central support and dive back down. Afterwards, Eva is full of praise for the crowd and the energy in the tent. Despite the sound problems that leave her microphoneless for the middle of the set, she claims it’s been a great gig.

Back over on the Main stage, a sizeable crowd draws for Peter Hook’s trawl through ‘Unknown Pleasures’. Initial scepticism is mostly deflated by the enthusiastic way Hook launches into it. He’s not an enormously accomplished natural singing talent but then, let’s be honest, neither was Ian Curtis. He finishes the set by dedicating the last song to a newly engaged couple before, without a trace of irony, ripping into a superb ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. He seems to have been able to move on from the emotional resonance of Curtis’ life and death and to be challenging us to do the same: just enjoy some damn fine songs.

Following on from this, Wavves can’t help but feel like something of an anticlimax despite a high speed charge through ‘So Bored’.

Fucked Up headline the Main stage. Not that singer Damian spends any time on the stage itself. A fat, naked man, bleeding from the head while barreling through hordes of moshing fans is a great way of finishing the night in style.

Despite the regular sound issues, the 1234 has hit on a formula that makes for a good festival: the pile-em-high-sell-em-cheap philosophy means that you can see a large number of great bands for a minimal fee, and no camping is required.

Sun Kil Moon - Admiral Fell Promises

“No, this is not my guitar,” sings Mark Kozelek on ‘Alesund’, the opening track of Admiral Fell Promises, and listening to the guitar work on the album you are more than inclined to believe him. The first thing that stands out about the new Sun Kil Moon album is the guitar work: completely acoustic and intricately picked out in true ‘classical guitar’ fashion – Kozelek sounds like an indie version of Julian Bream throughout the record.

One thing that remains reassuringly familiar though is Kozelek’s vocals. Despite having a very soft-sounding unobtrusive voice there is something very distinctive about his vocal work that will be immediately familiar to those who’ve had a shiver run down their spine from previous Sun Kil Moon records or from Kozelek’s prior incarnation in Red House Painters. Because the music is so stripped down, the intricately picked acoustic is almost the only instrument you’ll hear, the vocals are very noticeable and dominate the mood of each piece superbly. Many soft-voiced vocalists have a problem with just sounding a little bit weedy, but this isn’t an issue for Kozelek; despite the melodic tranquillity of his voice it’s given the space and the opportunity to really stand out. The sympathetic and skilful mixing and, in places, the multi-tracking of his voice makes this a wonderful listen, especially on headphones. Even the simplest and most straightforward lyrics such as ‘There by the blue, blue sea’ from the opening to the excellent ‘Sam Wong Hotel’ have an indescribably heart-breaking quality about them.

This is an album that is really only made up of two elements: expertly played acoustic guitar and soft yet powerful vocals. Both elements are easily described as superb so that must mean that it’s a superb record surely? Well, yes and no. If there is a problem to be found with Admiral Fell Promises, it is the lack of variety that is a consequence of each song being made up solely of these two elements. The tempo and pace of each song is more or less the same, the lyrics are mostly sketches of places and the feelings that they conjure up, there are no bad tracks but there aren’t really any standout tracks either. Don’t buy this record expecting to find the next ‘Grace Cathedral Park’ or ‘Summer Dress’.

Writing this review I am grateful for the fact that Muso’s Guide does not believe in giving simplistic ratings out of ten. What you will get out of Admiral Fell Promises will depend totally on what you look for in a record. If you can imagine sitting by a river’s bank on a summer’s day watching the gentle stream slip by and be content then this is a record for you. If you’d get bored and go off looking for waterfalls and rapids then you should probably look elsewhere.

The Wave Pictures - Sweetheart EP

“When the sheet slides from your chest / It helps to have a reason when you’re fondling the breasts / of the wife of the guy with the knife across you neck.” Peddling the kind of guitar/bass/drum straight-ahead indie that you’ve probably been listening too for a very long time, The Wave Pictures need something to stand out in this most crowded of crowds. Where a lot of ‘guitar music’ has homogenous and anonymous lyrics, The Wave Pictures revel in specifics and story telling: the words tell a story and the stories are always worth listening to.

Don’t expect any great narratives here though; the stories the lyrics tell are mostly of the ‘slice of life’ genre. In fact, ‘Cinnamon Baby’ mostly revolves around a young lady picking her teeth clean ‘with the nails of her left hand’. Dan Brown it is not. But then is that such a bad thing? As a lyricist David Tattersall is probably the closest that England has come to producing John Darnielle, he of Mountain Goats fame who sets the standard for story-telling in modern indie music.

Lyrics don’t mean a thing though if you haven’t got the music to propel them through the speakers. The enjoyment you’ll get from Sweetheart EP will to a large part be dependent on your tolerance for sloppiness in music. Wave Pictures’ fans will know exactly what to expect from these six new songs: Tattersall’s impassioned, slightly off kilter croon and manic guitar lines scrawled over a tight, if basic, rhythm section. There are no radical departures from the norm here although the EP format seems to have given them the licence to cut loose more than on their previous long players. Two of the songs end in long guitar freakout solos that sound like Thurston Moore probably would if you confiscated all his pedals and made him live on his wits.

There is an endearing sloppiness to the music throughout: a slightly ragged feel to the backing vocals, a casually placed guitar strum in the bridge; it feels loose and relaxed. Only repeated listens reveal the fact that each of these laid back flourishes is carefully and cunningly placed in exactly the right place for maximum effect. The strength of this record is in how carefully and precisely structured both words and music are; and in how well they have disguised this and made it sound spontaneous and unstructured.

Should you check out this record? If you’ve enjoyed previous Wave Pictures records then definitely, yes. If you like the idea of a love-lorn sounding vocalist singing about how ‘we play in a dust cloud, like Pig-Pen from Peanuts’ then definitely, yes. If you like your records to sound precision engineered, with all rough edges sanded away then… probably not.

The Dodos – Time to Die

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I still love the Pop Will Eat Itself song ‘Wake up! Time to Die!”. I probably haven’t heard it played for about a decade but I can still hum you the chorus. Similarly, It’s been quite a few years since I’ve seen Bladerunner, but that line “Wake Up! Time to Die!” delivered with such gleeful venom by Leon the rogue android will probably stay with me until I die. In stark contrast to thisTime to Die, the new Dodos album, is utterly forgettable. I’ve listened to this record at least twice a day for the last week but I honestly can’t recall much about it.

The sound of the album is (breathe) polite indie and it remains so unvaryingly throughout. The sound is that of a few young men enjoying playing their music, but ultimately without anything whatsoever to say. You feel like this should be a very promising time for The Dodos: the popularity of bands like Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear with whom they loosely share a musical bracket (and a penchant for animal names) should give them a leg up to success. Unfortunately there is none of Fleet Foxes soaring anthemic quality or, for example, Bon Iver’s yearning lyricism; nothing to raise this record out of the ‘bog standard’ camp or to make it live up to its predecessor, the far superior ‘Visiter’.

One of The Dodos’ selling points is their unusual musical set-up: Logan Krueber’s bizarre drum kit and Meric Long’s training in west African rhythms should, you feel, combine to give you something a little out of the ordinary. Yet ‘the ordinary’ is exactly where they remain, and they seem to be quite comfortable there, making no real effort to escape ordinariness.

The lyrics are a case in point. ‘The Strums’ contains lines such as “yeah they say that they want you, when they don’t” and “get your Daddy’s gun” which sound so generic that they could be from any polite indie record of the last fifteen years. The lyrics don’t tend to intrude at all except with the odd clunky rhyme: “Children kill your teachers/kill your pets/then kill your preachers” and throughout are delivered with the same unvarying delivery as if no line has any more importance or significance than any other.

Sometimes it can be difficult to find a record to put on that won’t bother other listeners. If you are looking for a record to put on in the background that no-one else will find objectionable then Time to Die is exactly what you need. But if you are looking for more than pretty aural wallpaper then look elsewhere.

Lounge On The Farm

Festival season’s truly in, so here’s another in our comprehensive series of reviews before we swan off to Latitude tomorrow morning…

Friday July 10

Lounge On The Farm is a small festival but there is no mistaking that it is a real festival. Within two minutes of arriving I’ve seen a large man in a pink t-shirt playing slide guitar blues, used a fresh air urinal and been assaulted by street-teamers promoting the next young band. I’m only in time to catch the very end of Casio Kids but even a short blast of their high-energy positivism is enough to set me up for the weekend.

The Sheepdip tent hosts most of the rock action for the weekend and its here I head to watch It Hugs Back. It takes them a good while to set up, they have 15 effects pedals, a macbook, a synth and a sampler to organise. However, despite all the technology, when they come to take the stage the sound is straight ahead indie guitar inextricably stuck in the mid-90s. “When are they going to play ‘Kill Your Television’?”, my friend asks.

Ghost of a Thousand, Brighton based screamo upstarts, play the sheepdip tent next and generate far more energy in their soundcheck than the preceding bands managed during their actual sets. They then play an unrelenting set of hardcore with zero pretensions towards being ‘math’ or ‘tech’, they are all about the straightforward thrust of kick drum to sternum. They whip the young crowd into utter frenzy; until you’ve seen a hundred teenagers with asymmetrical haircuts slamdancing around a circus tent then you haven’t lived.

There is a similar circus tent further along hosting the weekend’s folk; I pop in and catch the Jonquil set as it disintegrates, ‘I think we’ve run out of things to play’ the singer admits mournfully before they salvage things with a stirring version of ‘Magdalen Bridge’.

A new addition to the festival this year is the Furthur Field, which is where the older festival-goers congregate to watch the acts aimed at a more mature audience. It even has a purpose built stage and a light show, although the endearingly amateurish atmosphere is maintained due to the fact that the sound-crew’s area is made out of hay-bales. It is here that we watch Gong, 1970s psych-freak survivors, on Friday evening. They certainly put on a show: the singer arriving onstage in a mirrored wizard costume making mystical benedictions at the audience. It almost compensates for the fact that he can’t actually sing terribly well. Almost. The band pump out meandering solos and quirky instrumental passages, you can imagine Mercury Rev listening to this lot 15 years ago and making lots of notes.

Back at the Sheepdip tent there’s time to catch Joe Gideon and the Shark. As they are a duo comprising a male singer-guitarist and a female drummer pedalling raw bluesy rock they are always going to struggle to escape comparisons to The White Stripes. They use a sampler, layered vocals, songs that tell stories and some very theatrical drumming and do end up convincing you that here is a band with its own identity.

The headline acts play in ‘The Cowshed’ which is exactly that. In preparation for the festival they’ve moved the cows out and decorated it with dishevelled Victorian chic. Tonight a packed cowshed crowd watches The Horrors loom out of the dry ice. They play a Primary Colours-heavy set that the majority of the crowd laps up although I am unconvinced. The vocals have so much reverb on them that Farris sounds like Brendon Flowers trapped down a very deep well. As the set continues you are left with the impression that The Horrors really only have one song and that is a song that has a stamp saying “if found please return to The Jesus And Mary Chain” on it.

The Headliners at the Folk tent are A Hawk and A Hacksaw, and tonight they’ve fleshed out their violin and accordion with trumpet and other strings to give themselves an engaging full gypsy folk sound which meanders across Europe and beyond in its influences.

Saturday July 11

Before their set I catch up with The Wave Pictures and chat to them about the festival (bit of a panic relating to equipment they didn’t bring and found out they needed, Jonny had a pie, it was good), the reaction to the success of Instant Coffee Baby (apparently there has been more of a gradual increase in their fanbase than a huge leap in popularity) and their recommendation for a pre-Instant Coffee record for their new fans to check out (eventually they settle on ‘The Airplanes at Brescia’). It’s then time for them to take to the stage and The Wave Pictures proceed to shred face. Well, at least as much face as a trio of skinny white boys playing indie rock can be expected to shred. Their audience is mostly static, neither moshing during the faster numbers nor (despite David’s insistence) slow dancing to ‘If you leave it alone’. It’s hard to see what else they could do to move the crowd: bass and guitar solos are traded amidst some frantic drumming and sing-a-long choruses about marmalade and sculpture. Maybe everyone is still exhausted after Ghost of a Thousand yesterday.

The Wave Pictures are followed onstage by The Temper Trap. This lot do get the crowd moving to an extent but then they have the advantage of a three guitar assault and a charismatic frontman prone to joining in with the drumming. Equal parts earnest, sweaty and fast: it’s not hard to see them getting huge.

Over in the folk tent there’s 6 Day Riot a six piece folk ensemble who (despite the guitarist’s gold lamé braces) demand to be taken seriously. The folk audience have been sitting on Hessian mats for the preivous bands but get to their feet straight away when invited to by the charismatic singer. Their last song also gets us singing along and almost morphs into ‘Teen Spirit’ at one point; quite a way to go out.

The Aliens play over at the Cowshed and they could show Gong a thing or two about cosmic pych-rock and how it’s done in the 00s: faster, louder and with a wall of sound. Even the wackiness is more streamlined: the singer disposing of his comedy headgear a few songs in. He’s got the tunes. He doesn’t need it.

They are followed by the Dub Pistols whose sonic chaos attempts to put the trombone at the heart of a rap/rock crossover and almost succeeds. We are exhorted to “make some fucken noise” and we do. Everyone is happy. Happiness could well be a theme of the festival; perhaps due to the excellent weather almost all the bands seem to be bringing on the good times and playing with smiles on their faces. This is not the case however with S.C.U.M, they revel in misery as they wade through 80s goth sonic sludge of their own creation. I’m left wandering how flattered the Horrors must be to have already spawned their own tribute band.

There is some angst and insecurity also in evidence in the folk tent with The Sargasso Trio. The guitarist announces that the last song ‘my microphone’ is ‘about Emily’s stage fright. She craps herself before she goes onstage. Not literally, well sometimes it’s touch and go’. Nice. The song starts and it’s clear that she has the powerful voice that makes these insecurities totally unwarranted.

The weather has been good consistently during the weekend but it starts to rain in earnest just in time for the entire crowd to decamp to the shelter of the Cowshed for headliner Roots Manuva. On the way I pause in the rain to check out Figital, a violin and turntable duo whose cover of the theme from Knightrider is well worth getting wet for. Roots Manuva fits the headline spot perfectly. Despite starting slowly, a few songs in and Rodney Smith has us exactly where he wants us: chanting along to ‘Too Cold’ “Sometimes I hate myself/ Sometimes I love myself” . Roots Manuva certainly knows how to put on a show and we forget our fatigue and the rain outside for the length of the set.

Sunday July 11

Despite the meteorological doom-mongering, Sunday turns out to be the hottest day of a festival already blessed with (mostly) very good weather. Lounge on the Farm is proud of its accessibility to families and children so I bring my pair of under-five daughters along with me to put this to the test. First up we see Monday Street, a band they both declare are ‘too noisy’. They play straightforward bluesy indie rock and, yes, it is noisy. It has passion and energy, but it does not get the toddler vote. The kids retreat to the Little Lounge area where the eldest gets a princess painted on her face and the youngest does some abstract art and clay modelling; they both have a good time. Note to self, next time bring some mini ear-protectors. Or breed tougher kids.

Because of the relatively small size of the festival it is easy to do a quick circuit of the main stages and dip in and out of what they are offering. Delicious venison burger in hand this is exactly what I do. Today The Woodentops are chugging away pleasantly enough in a mostly empty Cowshed, while the Soundcasters rock away at the Sheepdip. With their cheery guitar led melodies, matching outfits and cello bodied guitars the Soundcasters look and sound exactly like a 60s boy band, for better or worse. Meanwhile in the folk tent Chris TT brings a more sinister edge to proceedings. Alone with an acoustic on stage he intones: “I broke her ankles/She was leaving me/Coming back to you/What else could I do?” The Lounge on the Farm festival doesn’t really do dark though and so he quickly cuts through the gloom by pointing out ‘I didn’t really’. He then sings a song about a hedgehog.

Bent also have a trombone but they don’t use it to the same effect as the Dub Pistols did on Saturday; mid set they are plagued by technical problems and sound more Limp than Bent. The singer salvages the set with some dreamy languid pop vocals towards the end. Trombones could be the closest that the festival comes to having a theme, Yearner Babies also employ one over in the Sheepdip tent. Although they could be backed by a 50 piece brass ensemble wearing fluorescent jackets and they still wouldn’t distract your attention from the singer for a second. During songs full of passion and energy she combines shape-throwing charisma with genuine singing talent. Worth missing Billy Childish for? Damn Yes.

My daughters are fast succumbing to the festival fatigue that is setting in across the site and it’s time to go home. It’s been enjoyable; I’ll definitely be back next year. As you’d expect from a venue that normally plays host to cows it doesn’t always smell that good, but with the combination and variety of bands on offer, not to mention the superb local food and beer, it consistently looks, sounds and tastes good.

Tortoise - Beacons of Ancestorship

I really don’t dance. But listening to this new Tortoise album, damn I wish I did. In fact, listening to Beacons of Ancestorship for too long makes me get involuntary muscular twitches that could soon escalate into dancing. I’m guessing here a few people are going to be scratching their heads and wondering if I’ve got the right band. The Tortoise we all know and love are a cerebral instrumental rock/jazz/misc outfit more likely to make us think and soundtrack our sense of sophistication that tap our toes.

It was noticeable on their last release – 2004’s It’s All Around You – that they were starting to get themselves pigeonholed as a band more likely to affect your brain than your heart, your feet or your genitals. Tortoise always seemed to stray away from prescribed genres, to flirt with a bit of post-rock here, a bit of funk there and so on but always to carve out a niche for their own. The problem was that this niche was becoming so well-worn they were in danger of creating a genre all of their own and never escaping it.

Maybe that’s why it has taken them five years to create their follow up, they needed to find a way out of the ghetto of their own creation. And it is apparent from listening to the opening 3 tracks of Beacons that they’ve done this by employing some driving danceable rhythms and made a record you can enjoy on more than just an intellectual level. All the Tortoise sonic trademarks are there: layers of keyboards, complex drumming patterns, sudden changes of tempo, melodies played by competing guitars and glockenspiels. But there’s a sense of freedom and fun that’s married to a sense of direction and purpose, probably for the first time since their classic Millions Now Living Will Never Die.

I suppose what a lot of people will want from a Tortoise review is to know “is it as good as Millions Now Living?” To which the answer is: no. No it is not. But if you were to get rid of all the records that you own that aren’t as good as Millions Now Living Will Never Die then I guarantee that you’d have some very bare shelves and an exceedingly empty iPod. There isn’t anything on Beacons that’ll have your jaw hanging open in amazement as you might have had when you first heard ‘Djed’ but it’s still a fantastic record and one that you’ll have great fun listening to.

One of the strengths of Beacons is the fact that they are still prepared to take risks on many of the tracks and try new things. For example, ‘Yinxianghechegqi’ comes roaring out of the speakers like a stoner rock classic; its overdriven bass wouldn’t sound out of place on a Melvins’ song. It has to be said though that for the final third of the album though that they do go back into their comfort zone though; there are a few tracks that are typical ‘cocktail jazz’ Tortoise, offering nothing we haven’t heard from many times before.

But when they are good, they are really good. I played ‘Prepare Your Coffin’, the brilliant second track, to some colleagues of mine at work. Cue total and utter bemusement: “what is this? It sounds like the soundtrack to an arcade racing game!” claims the middle aged guy sat opposite me. I suppose it does; it sounds like its going somewhere fast and its having real fun getting there.