La Route Du Rock – St. Malo, France 14th-16th August 2009

- Peaches // Photography: Leah Pritchard

It somewhat defeats the point of setting a festival in St Malo, a tall, beautiful walled town in northern France, when the first acts of Friday afternoon play in what feels like a sterile Milton Keynes conference centre. After taking a sleepless 12 hour ferry crossing to arrive in 26˚C heat, it’s embarrassingly difficult to sit in the dark of the Grand Palais (neither grand, nor a palace) and stay awake through Mark Kozelek’s opening set. Not that he helps us out much either.

“Am I the first act of the whole festival? Well that’s insulting…!” he seems to only half joke. It’s true that he’d be far better suited to Gang Gang Dance and Telepathe’s Sunday afternoon slots at the Palais stage, and they to his, but his mock indignation at being so far down the bill is hard to sympathise with. On record as the Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon, or solo, Kozelek’s prowess lies in his inimitable subtleties – few others could avoid shtick to render AC/DC’s ‘If You Want Blood’ so touching – but live, and this is said with an iron heavy heart, he’s just painfully boring to watch. He plays for over an hour, initially disengaged before smirking at the fact that several of the audience have fallen asleep. It’s hard not to resent his performance and long for what would be an awkward and visible exit by the time ‘Heron Blue’ becomes a self-indulgent, generic Spanish guitar noodling session, but happily he ends on a joke. “They’ve just told me I’ve got time for one more song,” he says. And then plays ‘Duk Koo Kim’ (14 minutes long).

The Kills

Still in the warmth of the Grand Palais, the idea of Marissa Nadler’s set is weighted down with sleepy eyed dread, but she’s surprisingly invigorating. Unlike Kozelek’s blanket of guitar, she plucks her guitar strings with stirring, slightly maniacal force and occasionally breaks out of her usual honeyed tone to sing in what must be her normal register – it’s something she should certainly do more often, allowing her to inject significantly more feeling into lines like “I dreamed your face a million times and how to get you out”. The reverb on her guitar echoes as if from the depths of a well before her band appears for ‘Mexican Summer’, which becomes an odd stoner blues slow dance. Although at times her wan stillness gets a bit much, the music skips easily within genres; ‘Rosary’ sounding as sweet as the songs the Lisbon sisters play down the phone in ‘The Virgin Suicides’ and its successor bordering on Grails territory.

To have free programmes and transport laid on between the venues (the Grand Palais is in town, the main stage and camping are at Le Fort de St Père, 25 minutes drive away) is a luxury unheard of for us English folk used to paying in excess of £5 to know who’s on when, but the festival goes through fits and starts of over- and under-organisation. The bus back from the Grand Palais takes forever to come and then isn’t big enough for everyone to get on, meaning that stage openers Crystal Stilts apparently play to quite an empty field. Once back on site, ridiculous security measures (checking the contents of our bags and getting frisked twice) mean that Deerhunter’s first four songs waft over a queue of disgruntled fans. It’s just in time to catch ‘Nothing Ever Happens’, whose guitar scree curdles with the smoke that surrounds Cox. He snarls throughout as his guitar warbles and whirlpools like a sinking ship taking on water, at one point sounding like a tribe of encroaching bass drums when Moses Archuleta is actually sitting stock still. They’re just the starting point of an impeccably pitched evening – Tortoise play next, and for all the talk of ear destroying noise (that’s yet to come) and remembering to bring a set of earplugs, it’s easy to forget just how much funk is inherent in their live set. A single exacting note builds to shaking columns of noise and an amazing King Crimson-esque proggy crescendo before they dash to swap places, splinters fly from both drummers’ sticks as they construct incredible polyrhythms whilst bassist Doug McCombs’ bass plays a seismically awesome horror movie creep. Also easy to forget is just how sexy they sound at times – D’Angelo could practically come in after some of the alternate realm jazz lounge introductions.

St Vincent

Volume aside, it’s shock enough for the ears to go from meticulously precise alt jazz to a deluge of sound that’s less waterfall, more being trapped buried beneath a ton of sand. There’s little point in Shields and Butcher actually having microphones – not that they seem to notice or care that no-one can hear them, standing unshaken whilst strobes thrown by a smiting Zeus ricochet off the sides of the stage. It’s a pleasure that where they could elongate their songs into circulation pounding epics, they keep things short and pleasingly tortured. But then revenge is exacted by means of ‘The Holocaust’. Although it’s been analysed to death both by fans of its physically supportive strength and those who can do nothing but cower throughout, it finds an interesting parallel with the argument that’s plagued Lars Von Trier’s ‘Antichrist’ – to love the Brechtian onslaught of what sounds like a planetary Newton’s Cradle is to be an ass kissing liberal who’ll buy whatever these supposed auteurs throw at you, and to hate it makes you close-minded and unimaginative. Either way, it’s entertaining to watch the kids in front of us play chicken, taking their fingers out of their ears, and quite incredible how the band all come back in simultaneously after over 10 minutes of noise, with no apparent signal.

It’s a tad suspect that all the main stage female performers (aside from Bilinda Butcher) are grouped together for Saturday night, but any chance to see St Vincent again is one to be taken with glee. Being something of an Annie Clark veteran this summer (it’s the third time for this contingent of TLOBF), it’s a pleasure to see how she rolls solo. A slight sound imbalance means that opener ‘Jesus Spends, I Save’ booms almost like an industrial techno track, and with the vocal “bam bams” on a loop she’s free to make the frippery of the outro even proggier than usual. Changing up the setlist from the usual roster, her cover of The Beatles’ ‘Dig A Pony’ gives her the first chance to shred demonically, and ‘Landmines’ weighs heavy and cinematic after an almost Rodgers & Hammerstein take on ‘Actor Out Of Work’. It’s a shame that Papercuts aren’t nearly so inventive – opener ‘You Can Have What You Want’ feels stretched out across the whole of their monotonous set. Worries from the offset are that Camera Obscura will be equally cloying, but they’re a much more winning bet live than on record. Somewhat abetted by the sunset, ‘Let’s Get Out Of This Country’ rings of Super 8 summer holiday films and giddy fun, thanks to Traceyanne Campbell and Carey Lander’s sonorous harmonies.

Andrew Bird

Despite the bizarre amount of adoration shown towards them by the French crowd, there’s only so much sultry hipster nonchalance you can take from The Kills – not that it matters, as all memory of their lacklustre stage show is quickly dismissed by Peaches’ canon blast of an arrival. In the words of the great Andy Samberg, there’s many a “my dick is scared of you” conundrum taking place around the arena; dressed as a swollen pink fruit à la Georgia O’Keefe and wearing a gold gimp mask, she puts on a display of terrifying sexuality that makes Grace Jones look chaste. Her every stamp elicits a round of dynamite bass drum electroclash before she whips off the mask to reveal a blonde Mohican, flexes her guns and leaps into the crowd, singing “I drink a whiskey neat” all the while. She makes The Kills look downright lazy in comparison. Several costume changes later, she saunters back on stage wearing a winged white swimming costume – when she spreads her arms, two singing faces are projected onto the hanging material – before caressing a lightsabre-style Theremin during ‘More’ with a well practiced wrist that gets everyone burning beneath the collar. It’s a shame that ‘Fuck The Pain Away’ isn’t as hard or fast as it needs to be, setting the gradient for an evening that goes downhill quickly with Four Tet’s set. Playing alone with just a laptop and some decks, there’s nothing to look at or dance to in particular, saving a record-emulating ‘Smile Around The Face’ until about halfway through his set.

In the Sunday afternoon mists of a post-gin and Pastis fug, Bill Callahan’s the perfect restorative draft. He’s in great spirits, beaming and marching barefoot on the spot as the cello ribbets the rhythm of ‘Rococo Zephyr’. To see him grimace through the songs from Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle and on ‘Say Valley Maker’ imbues his set with a mirror-like capacity for self-reflection that’s been absent for the rest of the weekend. Unlike a performer such as Bon Iver, who openly invites shared catharsis and falsifies the depth of his own feeling through crowd manipulation, the look on Callahan’s face that suggests that the weight of his words press on him today just as they did the first time they occurred to him. It’s an emotional depth that’s not reached throughout Andrew Bird’s set. His veracious relationship with performance means that although baroque pop songs like ‘Effigy’ might be the nearest pop music can get to the transcendent heft of an orchestra, his virtuoso nature and furious bow brandishing leave little room for empathy, and it’s not as if his words lack the capacity. That’s not to say that there aren’t pleasures inherent in his set – during an elongated rendition of ‘Masterswarm’, he’s a jittery bug himself whilst singing of moths and midges, darting between the guitar, violin, whistling and clapping whilst a double ended whirligig gramophone spins behind – and perverting Callahan’s steady ‘Cold Blooded Old Times’ with numerous semitones and swoops within individual words.

What with France having state supported live music and quotas for the amount of Francophone music that has to be played on the radio (40%), it’s surprising that only one French band graces the main stage amongst the 17 other American and British offerings present this weekend. Of all the innovative acts they could have chosen, Dominique A is soporifically dull – setting up bland sub-Massive Attack looped drumbeats and turgid drawn out emotional sections, the only intrigue comes from the serif curlicues of his languid mother tongue. Despite the rushing to the front at the start of his set, by the end even the patriots seem to have tailed off.

“The first festival we ever played in our lives was La Route Du Rock,” says Daniel Rossen. Three years later, Grizzly Bear are deservedly headlining its closing night. The sensation of seeing a beloved band translate their material to a live setting is always a thrilling one, but Grizzly Bear’s refusal to wallow in the fixed accomplishment and arrangements of their repertoire only emboldens the soothing majesty of their performance. A power cut delays the start, but when it comes, ‘Southern Point’ ruffles around the awkwardly loud bass like a breezy Miles Davis moment, and the profound “cheer up, chin up” of ‘Lullabye’ becomes the body sustaining salvo that ‘The Holocaust’ couldn’t (on a personal note, anyway). It’d be all too easy to note that Grizzly Bear are the perfect way to end a festival, and reductive too. They’re so much more than that.

Grizzly Bear

La Route Du Rock