I see the decade as a great saggy gradient of decline followed by, in the last couple of years, some unmistakable signs of recovery. Somewhere right at the top of the reasons to be optimistic list is Animal Collective, a band who are living proof that it is still just about possible to achieve widespread recognition while maintaining a fiercely uncompromising high-pop/art-rock trajectory.
Simon Reynolds has argued that the Brooklyn band have latterly been progressing towards ‘middlebrow’ accessibility, a slightly misjudged tag, I think. OK, ‘My Girls’ achieved a kind of left-of-mainstream ubiquity at the start of 2009 (6Music playlist and all!) but, from where I’m standing, Animal Collective and Gang Gang Dance are about as avant-garde as its possible to get these days, while still being able to communicate outside the confines of an ultra-microcosmic coterie (I realize this last statement is pretty much a précis of Reynolds’s argument using slightly different terms. I guess I would argue for a modification of emphasis. ‘Middlebrow’ applied to Saint Dymphna just isn’t right, surely?).
‘My Girls’ is full of exotic suggestions about how the future of music might sound in a way that is relatively rare these days. There’s the first-annoying-then-enveloping-and-finally-addictive ‘underwater’ soundscape. There’s the trademark Brian-Wilson-at-the-bottom-of-Grand-Canyon expansive vocals. But ‘My Girls’ also develops exponentially over the course of its 6 minutes, marking it out as a milestone in the Animal Collective canon, the first time they’ve really successfully condensed their art-rock blueprint into the pop song format. Read the rest of this entry »
It was off to (sometime) sunny Green Man festival in the picturesque (probably an understatement) Glanusk Park in Brecon Beacons for the Grain on the weekend for three days of music, and starring amazed as ominous clouds passed over without shedding a drop. With a backdrop leaving the feeling you’d wandered into a postcard, 10,000 revellers wandered the compact sold out site, with an amenable, laid back to the point of falling down, atmosphere. The surprisingly family friendly festivities began bathed in unexpected sunshine on Friday following the briefest of brief downpours with something of a fancy dress-come-village fete ambience that so many boutique festivals aspire to but never quite reach. Green Man’s line-up was slightly more psychedelically inclined than previous years, though still with the indie-folk influence on which it has made its name.
But enough of poorly written scene setting introductions and to the music. Friday’s first notable performance was delivered by Newcastle’s Beth Jeans Houghton on the Far Out Stage, with her unmistakable appearance (essentially that wig) and attire not too dissimilar to a lot of the pre-teen girls around the site ( fairy wings and tutus the uniform of choice) so she was fittingly accompanied by images of images of childhood innocence as she delivered the sort of gentle folk-pop influenced melodies that are most associated with (and perhaps expected from) Green Man; sometimes its good to give the people what they want. Apart from an alluring rendition of her debut single Golden, she dedicating the more uplifting and uptempo Hoofs of the Sun, complete with bracing horns, to her violinist apparently off to a leper colony, and offered the similarly crowd pleasing jaunt of I Will Return, I Promise. The set suffered a little from the similarity of sound in tempo, style and texture, lacking in a breakaway moment, or even a little element of subversion, but enjoyable in this setting nonetheless. If you wanted a little more adventure and complexity in your song writing without losing the sanguine edge you were better off taking a trip to the Green Man Pub Stage later in the day for a forcible performance by Peggy Sue.
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