Let's get a couple of things straight from the off.
ATP: The Fans Strike Back II was not as good as last year's Nightmare Before Christmas.
It was still freakin' awesome.
Half of the line-up was chosen by the good people at All Tomorrow's Parties; the other half was voted for by "the fans". Everyone that bought a ticket could vote for any ten bands they liked, and each fortnight the bands in 1st, 2nd, 25th, 50th, 75th and 100th place in the chart were approached by ATP to see if they were up for it. The voting threw up an interesting mix of popular beat combos, from Slayer to Elbow. Of course, not everyone wanted/was able to perform at ATP... but the final line-up was a fine mix of indie-folk-Americana, and good bands.
Friday
Grouper had the unenviable task of being the first act on the first day. Her gently warbling whale-playing-guitar-through-a-delay-pedal made quite pleasant background music, but was otherwise unengaging. And kind of fuzzy.
HEALTH were the complete antithesis to this, and spent a full hour assaulting and offending our senses with a chaotic onslaught of guitar, synth, screams and tribal drumming. There was a lot of leaping about and hitting stuff with other stuff, and a spazzy light show to boot. I thought they were cool; The Boy started to black out a bit.
M83 turned out to be an insipid wash of French ambient shoegaze electronica. Meh. On the other stage, Andrew WK was playing a solo acoustic set; so we went back to our chalet to watch Gardener's World.
It didn't seem right to go to a festival where Devo were playing, and then not see Devo; so we went to see Devo. Who were quite surprisingly brilliant... albeit getting a little too chubby to fit comfortably into their yellow jumpsuits...
Antipop Consortium might have been good, but I nodded off for a fair chunk of their set before we wandered off to catch the end of Jesu. I don't know where to begin categorising their music. Doomgaze? Colossal riffs played in slow motion through amps turned up to 11. Awesome.
And yet not quite as awesome as Electric Wizard, who reduced everyone to ash with tar-thick doom riffs. Awesome +10.
Saturday
Lords should change their name to Eagles Of Death Zeppelin. They smashed out a whole bunch of groovy dancin' rock, and were actually quite fantastic despite a) it being quite early Saturday morning (well, quarter-to-three in the afternoon, but it's all relative innit), and b) my view of the band being somewhat slightly completely obscured by the tallest man in the world with the biggest hair in the world.
Qui are a band fronted by The Jesus Lizard's David Yow, so are pretty much a vehicle for his jibbering lunatic rambling. But a good vehicle, with some neat bluesy licks here and there.
Harvey Milk played some nice and sludgey grunge 'n' roll, not dissimilar to the Melvins at their most accessible.
Errors played "post-rock electro" that sounded to me a bit like 65daysofstatic, but without the guitars. I seem to remember liking them at the time, but I struggle now to remember exactly what they sounded like. Possibly because of booze.
But probably because the next band we saw was The Jesus Lizard, and the sight of a half-naked David Yow swimming across the crowd towards me made me void my brain completely. And my bowels. On record, The Jesus Lizard's awkwardly twangy incoherence has always seemed to me a bit... well... awkward, twangy and incoherent. But live and up close, with all the sweat and the spit and the bruises, it made perfectly horrible sense.
And finally Sleep, who spent 90 minutes ploughing through the entirety of their stoner rock masterpiece "Holy Mountain", with a few extras thrown in here and there. It was a damn long set at the end of a damn long day, but they were still cool, and I stumbled back to the chalet with ears ringing and a head full of pleasant fuzz. And a bag of chips.
Sunday
We decided to take advantage of the fact that ATP take over Butlins' cinema, and went to watch Withnail & I. Despite the film's renown as a cult classic, I'd never actually seen it before. I quite enjoyed it. I think my favourite bit was when the film got stuck and caught fire, owing to the fact that the projection equipment was so old that the original blueprints were deciphered from paintings found in caves on the remote south-facing coast of Gibraltar.
Then, after a few hours spent lounging about drinking cider in the sun (and a swift round of mini-golf), we decided to see some bands. Grails played some pleasant, psychedelic, but ultimately a tad forgettable, post-rock. Good, but not great.
Future Of The Leftwere great. The Welsh three-piece blasted out a set of punchy three minute rock numbers, pausing only to throw sweets into the crowd and to take the piss out of a few unfortunates ("Your hoody makes you look like a child's version of Hellraiser, only without the promise of rape"). A good time was had by all.
The Mae Shi threw a parachute into the crowd a few songs into their set. Kids love parachutes. It quickly got spread out over the top of us, and when the singer guy leaned in under the front of it and sang at us it was like we had our own personal little festival tent. The only problem was that no-one seemed to know what to do after that, and it quickly got very warm and smelled a lot like feet. The other only problem was that The Mae Shi were, frankly, a bit bollocks. The kids seemed to love it though, so maybe it's just me being a miserable old git.
After that, there was just time to witness a smidgen of The Jesus Lizard's second set of the weekend before This Will Destroy You took to the stage in Reds and... well... destroyed us. The words "epic" and "post-rock" get thrown about quite a lot when describing this sort of band, and seldom is it unjustified. But you haven't heard truly epic post-rock until you've heard these guys. You can chuck "gut-wrenching" in there too. Words simply don't do them justice.
Absolutely.
Fucking.
Incredible.
And then, tediously, it was back to real life. For at least a couple of days, I kept having weird dreams that I was missing a load of cool bands...
Grown-up Work has found a solution to the problem of there not being enough spaces in the car park. They're making 130 of us redundant. This might include me, since I am far and away the most expendable thing in the office (even the water cooler is more useful than me), but probably won't. Chances are I'll get to finish my placement, and they just won't bother getting another student in to replace me. It's not all doom and gloom, though; on Wednesday, some company that's tending for our stores contract turned up for some sort of open day. They took over the training room with a load of display stands and tables covered with various tools and components, and so me and Old Man Braddon (who may also be getting redundantified) went along to see what free stuff we could blag. Pretty much all of the good food had gone, but there were still some fine biscuits to be had. Plus of course, all the other promotional junk... we trawled about, feigning a vague interest in what was on display and answering the occasional question about what our "functionality" was. It was all worth it in the end; we came out with a pretty good haul. I got a mug, a pad of paper, two bearing catalogues, three retractable ball point pens bearing bold corporate logos, a stress ball, a keyring, some fancy mints, and a fistful of jammy dodgers.
A couple of weeks ago, Matt "Say What You Want About The Tenets Of National Socialism, At Least It's An Ethos" Smith and Laura decided to go to Bristol's annual Italian car show (rather than accidentally stumble upon it, as they have done for the last few years), and they were kind enough to invite me along too. Unsurprisingly, the Italian Car Show consisted mainly of Italian cars... (click each picture for more photos)
Ferrari...
...Maserati...
...Lamborghini...
...Alfa Romeo...
...Lancia...
...and Ascari, which is actually a British car, but is named after an Italian racing driver, so that's okay.
Apparently only 17 of those Ascaris were ever built; and only 9 of those are still in existence, the remaining 8 having been "destroyed" (presumably by overenthusiastic owners who ran out of talent at some key moment). You'd have thought the owner of this one might have bothered to clean it...
The day after I found myself in London with the family, visiting Dr Sister in her nice new house. Well, some of the time was spent in her shiny new house; the rest of it was spent racing around the neighbouring town of Pinner.
In a wheelbarrow.
The rules were quite simple; each team must consist of two people, and one of them must be in the wheelbarrow at all times. The other one gets to push. There are five checkpoints, and you must each down half a pint at every checkpoint. The first team to arrive at the car park of the Queens Head is the winner.
As it happens, we were the last team to arrive at the car park of the Queens Head, but we at least retained some small amount of dignity by not being sick at any of the checkpoints.
And the next weekend, Matt and I got dragged to some weird ass shenanigan by Alan and Dory. Dory didn't give much away about the details of said shenanigan; but our suspicions were aroused by the presence of men in faceless masks, riding impossibly tall bicycles and jousting against imaginary foes whilst we queued...
Turns out we were queuing up to get into Carny Ville, a moderately insane steam punk Victorian freak show apparition.
And it was freakin' cool. Here's a tiny bit of what happened.
Some chick put a spoon in her nose and served tea.
Dory played on a severed head coconut shy.
Lobotomized twins messed about on silks.
Matt played ping-pong with the devil.
I got summoned onto stage for a dance-off against a guy called Barry in front of, like, a thousand people.
Ghosts walked down the side of a building.
The whole thing ended with an apocalyptic turn-off-the-century outdoors dance party.
Not "proper" busy, with meetings and appointments and people to see and things to do and blah blah blah. Mostly just the drinking and frolicking kind of busy. The best kind of busy.
I battled Warhammers for for two solid days at the start of the month, at a local gaming club tournament - the Bristol Vanguard's "Vanquish". I typically turn up to such events with the principal aim of not coming dead last; if I can win just a single game, this is seen as a bonus. But it turns out that since various rulebooks got re-worked and re-printed, my marauding Ork horde is now the very epitome of badassery; and even the hastily cobbled together army that I turned up with was good enough to see me finish 6th out of 55. Here's a photo of me and my boyz inflicting a crippling and permanent sense of humour failure on some guy who just moments later was removing his army from the table with a dustpan and brush.
He should have pulled a Renton; a little known gaming technique, reportedly used by a former Head of UK Retail for GW whilst he was being thoroughly trounced by some smug kid.
You may "pull a Renton" at the start of your game turn.
Observe the futility of your present situation. Desperately seek some way of preventing humiliating defeat at the hands of a pre-pubescent gobshite with a chin full of wispy bumfluff occasionally punctuated by weeping acne.
Seeing no way out, place your left hand under the edge of the table, about a third of the way in from the left.
Place your right hand under the edge of the table, about a third of the way in from the right.
Sharply lift both hands and flip the board up, shouting "WARHAMMER IS CUNT".
Stomp away, leaving the child sobbing amidst a pile of broken toys and trapped beneath 6'x4' of chipboard.
The following weekend was Easter, and mostly involved family visits, Mexican food, delicious cocktails, banger racing, rough cider and mild sunburn. And also an awesome gig at The Croft; Palehorse, Big Naturals and Baroness.
I love Palehorse, and am unable to adequately explain why. Their set began with a barrage of noise, and the drummer yelling incoherently from behind his drumkit like an escaped mental patient. An escaped mental patient that plays the drums. After that it all got a lot more noisy and savage. Here is the wonderfully low budget video to their soon-to-be hit single, "What Community What Scheme".
Big Naturals set up in the front room and cranked out some doomy psychedelic hard rock type stuff. For just two guys they made a lot of noise, and I seem to recall quite liking them; but at this point I was still quite blown away by Palehorse, so it's hard to be sure. They'll be playing again in a few weeks, supporting the ever-amazing Taint, so I'm sure I'll be seeing them again.
And finally, the very splendid Baroness. Their twin-guitar proggy-space-metal comes across as a slightly more easy listening version of Mastodon; it's the same kind of set-up, except the beards are slightly smaller. Apparently, a new record is on its way later this year - looking forward to it.
The next day was mostly spent attempting to recover, though my efforts were hampered largely by the fact that I had to spend my bank holiday working in the Big Gay Department Store; and then go out for birthday drinkums with Dom and my other geek buddies.
Through some devious cheese-eating ploy, Dom managed to make his birthday last an entire week, and so the following weekend involved yet more birthday drinkums - this time at Dom's own house. I spent a considerable portion of the evening wearing my powerful shirt; then it all goes a bit blank; then I woke up on Matt "Ich werde Sie sprechen Mexikaner machen" Smith's sofa feeling like death.
Another week passes, and a double whammy of gig action! Wednesday 22nd April; ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead at The Thekla, supported by So So Glos and Middle Class Rut.
So So Glos weren't really my cup of tea; competent enough, I suppose, but they sounded like if they were a bit more rubbish and had a few more trumpets they would be just another shitty ska band.
Middle Class Rut fared somewhat better, despite there being only two of them. On record, they still sound a bit tame to me, but live they sound massive. I guess when drums are the only other thing in the mix and the guitar is turned up to 11, it can only sound awesome (even if the Jane's Addiction-esque vocals start to grate after a while).
...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead have as many band members as both of the other bands put together, so should be at least as good as both of them combined. Well, that's the theory; but how does the maths work out?
So So Glos had twice as many guitars as MCRut, but MCRut's guitar was 50% noisier than all of the So So Glos.
So So Glos had one bass, whilst MCRut had none.
So So Glos had, at times, all four band members contributing vocals; but they all sounded the same, so it was effectively only as good as two sets of vocals - still one more than MCRut.
So So Glos and MCRut each had just a single drummer, but MCRut's drummer had "FOR SALE" written on his chest in red marker pen.
...AYWKUBTTOD had three guitars, a bass, keyboards and drums, with vocals predominantly handled by one of the guitarists, but with others chipping in here and there, and sometimes one of their guitarist/singers would play keyboards and the keyboard player would play drums, and sometimes one of the other guitarists would play drums, and sometimes he would grab a mic and charge into the crowd hardcore-style.
Trust a bunch of artists to ruin maths for everyone. They were bloody brilliant, though.
And then the next day... more gig! Earth, supported by Stebmo.
Stebmo are a jazz duo made up of half of Earth; pianist/trombonist/hip geography teacher Steve Moore, and bassist Don McGreevy on drums. It all started a bit iffy, with an awkward plodding piano line sat on top of a very ordinary beat; it sounded like we were going to have to endure 45 minutes of the emperor's new jazz wank experimentalism coming in our ears. Or go to the bar. They're all good options. But by the end of the first song, they'd started to ease up a bit and things suddenly got very groovy. Like, really groovy. This was great. And for all the face-peeling, bile-fueled, spleen-rendingly angry brutality I often like to pollute my ears with, it's sometimes just great to see people playing music and smiling. It was fun to watch the interplay between the two guys, too, especially at the end of a John Coltrane cover (I didn't get the name of the song) where they were each clearly trying to catch each other out with a fearsome exchange of piano and drum solos.
Earth slowed things down again with their megalithic desolate country drone. Not a band for those with short attention spans, they rumbled through a set consisting mostly of tracks from last year's "The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull". Almost impossibly slow, quiet and heavy all at once, and with so much bass reverb that my innards were almost certainly liquefied. Frankly, it's a miracle that I'm even able to sit here typing this crap out. I love this band, but you'll probably hate them.
HEALTH were the complete antithesis to this, and spent a full hour assaulting and offending our senses with a chaotic onslaught of guitar, synth, screams and tribal drumming. There was a lot of leaping about and hitting stuff with other stuff, and a spazzy light show to boot. I thought they were cool; The Boy started to black out a bit.
Lords should change their name to Eagles Of Death Zeppelin. They smashed out a whole bunch of groovy dancin' rock, and were actually quite fantastic despite a) it being quite early Saturday morning (well, quarter-to-three in the afternoon, but it's all relative innit), and b) my view of the band being somewhat slightly completely obscured by the tallest man in the world with the biggest hair in the world.
But probably because the next band we saw was The Jesus Lizard, and the sight of a half-naked David Yow swimming across the crowd towards me made me void my brain completely. And my bowels. On record, The Jesus Lizard's awkwardly twangy incoherence has always seemed to me a bit... well... awkward, twangy and incoherent. But live and up close, with all the sweat and the spit and the bruises, it made perfectly horrible sense.
Future Of The Left were great. The Welsh three-piece blasted out a set of punchy three minute rock numbers, pausing only to throw sweets into the crowd and to take the piss out of a few unfortunates ("Your hoody makes you look like a child's version of Hellraiser, only without the promise of rape"). A good time was had by all.
After that, there was just time to witness a smidgen of The Jesus Lizard's second set of the weekend before This Will Destroy You took to the stage in Reds and... well... destroyed us. The words "epic" and "post-rock" get thrown about quite a lot when describing this sort of band, and seldom is it unjustified. But you haven't heard truly epic post-rock until you've heard these guys. You can chuck "gut-wrenching" in there too. Words simply don't do them justice.
