Dot To Dot Festival – Nottingham 30/5/10

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As far as one day multi-venue events go Nottingham’s leg of the sixth annual Dot To Dot is helpfully localised (and helpfully dry, too). The eight rooms in use span five venues – Rock City, Nottingham Trent University and Stealth all have upstairs and downstairs stages – and only the Bodega is a significant distance away, albeit still walkable within ten minutes or so. For someone who usually ends up packing as many bands into a viewing schedule as possible on the offchance, it makes the plan of action taking potential demand into account a lot easier. As it happened, though, as far as I saw (albeit I didn’t venture near the primary room, Rock City’s main hall, towards the end of the day) there wasn’t too much of an issue with capacity, despite the signs warning us to make sure we were at our chosen room twenty minutes ahead of schedule. You’d be surprised at how much space was left in some of the bigger rooms by stage time – by all accounts last year was a feast of one-in-one-out so either fewer tickets were sold or door management has improved.

The preponderance of locals and makeweights for the first three hours, mostly spent popping into various places for a couple of songs mostly on the basis of interesting band name, made such egalitarianism almost into a chore, as most of the alternative genre sphere was covered in poor xerox form – mostly shoegaze, interestingly. Some rose above it – Boat To Row have a summery spark about their very much now indie-folk, while upstairs Burly Nagasaki have their own approach to the art of opening a live set, throwing rock shapes while not touching their instruments at all over a backing track of discordant electro beats. When they properly started, the duo proceed through a litany of short art-rock songs covering the gamut from surf to new wave to something not unlike a downsized Galaxie 500, including probably the weekend’s only bowed saw solo. The Crookes, who have something of a growing reputation and as such playing in an increasingly packed Rock City main room, wear their guitars high and their original rock and roll flavoured jangle-pop lightly, but while they provoke pockets of sporadic dancing in the throng, without a standout song they seem more like one of life’s perennial support bands.

With post-punk fully eviscerated, there are moments in Chapel Club‘s set where you feel they’re only just short of turning into The Departure. There’s more to them then that, the standard Joy Division dark foreboding being laced with a weight of reverberated guitar noise that owes as much to My Bloody Valentine as the Chameleons and, while Lewis Bowman is artfully static behind the mic stand, one of the guitarists regularly indulges in full-bodied string abuse in the style of Johnny Greenwood. Still, you get the feeling that others do this sort of thing better and the market is pretty much saturated as it is. Upstairs at the university LA’s Fol Chen, all in red, started out as a Flaming Lips-style controlled freakout with serrated guitar and a flailing drummer before devolving into warped passages of laptop-bolstered expansive new wave that occasionally recalled the Elephant 6 collective with a lightly funked-up sideline. Really quite impressive all told.

Rock City was pretty much rammed for Blood Red Shoes. As someone who was underwhelmed by Fire Like This, it’s encouraging to see its tracks work so well stripped back to their live basics of Steven’s forceful drumming and Laura-Mary’s deceptively simple powerhouse riffage creating immense kinetic energy. Down the road Washed Out provided a cheese to BRS’ chalk, not only in being live reputation vs chillwave blog sensation but the jolt resulting in going from full-on distorted guitar noise to the sunburnt Balearic wash Ernest Greene creates, here regularly stepping out from behind a bank of samplers, loop stations and sundry things with wires aided by two keyboard players and a rhythm section. Such recreation necessarily smoothes out some of the woozy dreampop that underpins the retro synth sounds but the playfully laidback beats and layered soundscapes envelope the only half full room.

So what was the main standout from a similarly underappreciated set upstairs in Trent Uni by Islet? That the first people to arrive waiting for them to start were half of Los Campesinos!? The regular excursions by members into the audience wielding guitar, bass or tambourine like a jousting weapon? The new song which takes on a reggae lope and just as you start thinking this might not be their best idea speeds up into something else entirely? Or the whole thing, the tribally rhythmic (three members solely on drums during two songs) freakout that, as their forthcoming mini-album (TLOBF review soon) cements, calls to mind all sorts of leftfield influences and touchstones yet ultimately sounds like nobody but themselves? All of the above, obviously.

Then again, others are quite good at that rhythm plus oddness equals unable to tear yourself away equation. Liars, the central trio bolstered by two of Fol Chen, start late due to unspecified technical issues, and what should have been a primal sonic fury of a 45 minutes, heavy on Sisterworld, is let down by a sludge of a mix that nearly wipes out the riff from ‘Plaster Casts Of Everything’. Even Angus Andrew seems muted, or as muted as a wild haired, wild eyed magnetic presence leaning over his mike stand can be muted. Not exactly subdued, though, as despite not taking off, and indeed taking over, as much as hoped for it’s still an object lesson in taking obtuse arrangements and dragging them into some sort of angular shape, darkly emphatic.

Sky Larkin, a late replacement for an AWOL Johnny Foreigner, have a set mostly of promising new songs from their second album, due in August, but are hampered again by the mix, nearly making Katie Harkin’s vocals inaudible. Kudos to her for carrying on after breaking a string despite it being one central to the song’s solo. If Washed Out were surprisingly underattended for their hype Zane Lowe/NME favourites The Chapman Family are positively lonely, although the thirty or so include proportionally plenty of the committed and some people dancing to whatever song was in their heads. It didn’t seem to be the one the band were playing, uncomfortably goth at times but often venomously noisy, bassist Pop less concerned with holding down the bottom end then with flinging body and instrument across the stage as frontman Kingsley ends up on the floor with the mike cable around his neck. The same room, the Rock City basement, is by contrast pretty much full to the brim for local hopes Dog Is Dead, people standing on tables and such vantage points. They’re a slightly confused band, a collision between Mystery Jets’ version of the 80s revival, Hot Club de Paris’ awkward structural harmonies and Vampire Weekend’s high-fret indie danceability, plus the odd sax solo. There’s certainly something very interesting bubbling under if they get time to develop it before the local scene expectation swamps them.

There’s not many bands about whom you can say there’s not enough dry ice about, but Beach House‘s eerieness deserves it. That said, we wouldn’t have been able to see their backdrop of five large rotating silver diamond-shaped figures, and Victoria Legrand seems to be suffering from something given the bit we do get is wafted away by her with apologies. It does little to bring down the mood, her vocal sounding fine if a little shaded amid the emotive ebb and flow of the Teen Dream-heavy set, although ‘Used To Be’ is a highlight, instils a gloriously hazy atmosphere over the packed room, somehow recreating the richly layered atmospherics of the recorded work with one synth, guitar and drums. At one point Legrand breaks out into a brief jig. In this substantial setting it’s the most incongruous thing all day.

Although the music hadn’t quite finished yet, my last port of call – sorry, Yuck, Lonelady and Egyptian Hip Hop – was back to Trent Uni’s main room for Los Campesinos! And to think plenty still refer to them in ‘twee’ terms. Within the first song Gareth managed to break two microphones, indicative perhaps of the increasingly muscular live form that make more sense of the pile-up of ideas and instrumentation. It’s responded to in kind by an up for it audience that appreciates and shouts back when best to Gareth’s personal diary entries of lyrics and really goes mad for ‘You! Me! Dancing!’ (sidenote: Gareth has taken to changing the lyric in that song’s first verse to “I’m dancing like every song he spins is Kenickie”, and every time it gets a noticeable cheer) A triumphant set to close an intriguing day’s watching bands, one of mixed outcomes but when finding something of individual enthrallment and on form proving itself to be a very worthwhile venture.