Constellations Festival – Leeds 13-14/11/10

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Click on any image to enlarge | All photographs by Daniel Heaton

With Stag and Dagger no longer a going concern in this part of the country, and Live At Leeds a full six months away, the good people of Futuresound have blessed the people of Leeds with a new festival to keep independently-minded types going during the long winter months. Constellations takes place over two days – a pre-party at the Brudenell Social Club, and a three-stage extravaganza at the University of Leeds – and holds something for everybody: Four Tet, Gold Panda, Sleigh Bells, Local Natives and The Vaccines are just some of the bands that I didn’t see.

It’s Saturday night, and the six-foot tall singer stares, wide-eyed, into the sparse crowd. “This song’s for everyone who takes cocaine off the bar at work.” He pauses. “This is why we’re not playing Conste-LA-tions Festival!” Bitter, moi? Such is the force and arrogance with which pre-party openers Eagulls take to the stage. Their bluster isn’t necessarily misplaced – a mind-meltingly loud slackernoise explosion, the band definitely have the sound to back up their ramshackle delivery, but perhaps a little personal restraint might not go amiss. The exact opposite seems true of D/R/U/G/S, two cool dudes with hoodies, synths and samplers, whose painfully hip blog-friendly electro leaves a lot to be desired. After that, it’s understandable that Abe Vigoda begin their set to barely anyone, but by the end of their first song, the numbers swell dramatically. Their tropical disco punk is a hit, with the rainswept Leeds crowd even shaking off their parkas to dance like fools. Admittedly, some of their newer material – heavier on synth hooks and rapidstrum guitars – veers worryingly into Editors territory, but the band always know when to pull it back around. BEAK>, meanwhile, need never worry about being anyone but themselves; their curious set kicks out the drones for half an hour, before slowly evolving into more conventional material. The sound of Krautrock in a k-hole, their sparse, doom-laden jams are a surprising hit; hell, the goddamned hippies even finish with a gorgeously atmospheric cover of ‘Let the Sun Shine In’ from the Hair soundtrack and a Kyuss cover – proof, if proof be need be that they’d be just as comfortable with an album of more song-based material as with their motorik moods.

Night turns to day on chilly Leeds, as the tired masses start trickling into the University campus for the main event, and proceedings in Stylus begin with the cerebral AV club indie disco stylings of Breton; they perfectly capture the festival’s intended mix of art and music, and their aloof stage presence is augmented by some nifty stop-start background projections, but their architecturally precise pop (Foals and Phoenix spring to mind) doesn’t quite have the songs to make up a firm enough foundation. Hitting the stage in matching black military jackets, iLiKETRAiNS seem to have been together forever, but have puzzlingly never gained the popularity their epic sound suggests; they pull a substantial crowd at the Refectory, and their pounding tom toms and doomy reverb-laden arpeggios cast a pitch black pall over the PA, but you can’t help thinking a smaller venue and a later time slot might have better suited them. Wingman, however, are perfectly placed at Mine, the smallest stage on the bill; formed from shards of various Leeds mainstays like The Old Romantic Killer Band and Sketches, they party like it’s 1991, but their spirited slackpop explosion is ultimately pretty forgettable, and not helped by the venue’s terrible sound.

The day’s first true triumph comes from Sky Larkin; the unassuming local heroes bring their feisty indiepop to the Refectory stage and own absolutely every second of their set. Katie Harkin pulls all the rock god moves she can during tracks like ‘Fossil, I’ and ‘Still Windmills’, and her vocals sound absolutely natural – like The Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler having a rare, unguarded moment of rocking out; meanwhile, Nestor Matthews’ various facial contortions while he thunders several shades of shit out of his drums are worth the price of admission alone. “They say it takes a village to raise a child,” Harkin says, humbled, at the end of her band’s set. “You are that village and we are that child.” The audience, meanwhile, beams back at the stage like proud parents. After a set like that, the three silhouettes that make up Esben and the Witch manage to bring down the mood substantially; backlit by some rather nifty Victorian streetlamps, their hypnagogic minimalism can only be a dissapointment, struggling as it does to translate in the Refectory’s cavernous confines, and failing to draw a substantial crowd. Meanwhile, back in Stylus, the newly-minted five-man line-up of Liars eschews its weirder side. Angus Andrews remains as compelling a frontman as ever throughout the fuzzed-up set, crooning ‘Scissor’ like Iggy at his lounge lizard best, and attempting some kind of Nick Cave-like shamanic bedroom dancing for the rest of the time. ‘The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack’ runs straight 1into ‘Plaster Casts of Everything’, creating a fuck-me twofer of physically violent proportions, and the crowd can’t help but respond in kind, appreciating a touch of Brooklyn artschool cool in this stuffy redbrick campus.

Three costume changes, hanging upside down from a balcony, eating a microphone cable and skateboarding across the stage on a flightcase – hey, it’s just three songs in the life of Les Savy Fav. Cramming more antics into one set than most bands do in their whole career, LSF play arguably the most energetic set of the entire festival; Tim Harrington – who stalks the stage dressed as a college professor, and begins the set with a five-minute mock graduation speech – and co play to an absolutely rammed Stylus, all of whom are eager to see just what Beardo will get up to next. The tunes, however, don’t suffer a bit; where songs from Root for Ruin lagged on record, live they become angry writhing beasts, with ‘Let’s Get Out of Here’ already becoming a singalong classic. Sadly, after ‘Patty Lee”s disco workout sees Harington dryhump a stage invader, things take a turn for the worse, as the frontman tones down his antics for reasons that become clear at the end; over the course of his onstage striptease, someone has stolen Harrington’s t-shirt, a hand-painted gift from his four year old daughter. When the offending article of clothing isn’t returned, he sulks offstage – and understandably so – making for a bittersweet end to an otherwise riotous set. After that madness, all it takes is a quick jog across the union to catch the last four songs of Los Campesinos!‘s set – one of the day’s most painful clashes; playing to a packed Refectory, the band storm through the epic ‘The Sea Is a Good Place to Think About the Future’ with as much storm und drang as the venue’s sound system can muster. Then, after being told they had an extra ten minutes left, the band make a surprise detour into their back catalogue; introduced as “an old song, but not a popular one”, the neurotic waltz of ‘…and We Exhale and Roll Our Eyes in Unison’ becomes all the more forceful, thanks to the line-up’s new addition of tattooed powerhouse Jason Campesinos! on drums, while the closing blast of ‘Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks’ merely demonstrates how far they’ve come from their international tweexcore roots.

Unfortunately, the extra time LC! spend onstage may well have delayed headliners Broken Social Scene, who take to the stage half an hour late, rushing through what neon pink bobblehat-clad frontman Kevin Drew called “a punk rock set” to make it to the strict 11pm curfew (punk rock, eh?). Still, what the band do play more than made up for the curtailed set; with a line-up that boasts four guitarists at any one time, the sound is fat-free, as the band blast through ‘Superconnected’ (with a curious Sandinista!-style dub sax break) and ‘Forced to Love’ with aplomb. Lisa Lobsinger’s vocals on Forgiveness Rock Record highlight ‘All to All’ and an always-welcome rendition of ‘Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl’ are gorgeous, but the biggest surprise of the night is ‘Cause=Time’, whose glorious cascading guitar break is bolstered by one-off guest star and serial indie rock guest star Johnny Marr. Storming instrumental ‘Meet Me in the Basement’ closes the night in energetic style, and while it doesn’t quite make up for the shortened set, it still brings the festival to a fantastic finish; sure, there’s some administrative tweaking to do, but after a first run like this, there’s no way Constellations doesn’t deserve a regular place in Leeds’s thriving musical calendar. Same time next year?