Reviews

Simple Things Festival 2015 - Live Music Review in Bristol

Posted on: 2015-10-26

The festival started proper on Saturday but the Friday night pre-festival concert would have been worth the price of weekend admission alone. Canadian post-rock titans Godspeed You! Black Emperor kicked off the weekend in appropriate fashion.

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Another year, another Simple Things. Another chance to see some of the brightest and best acts that the music world has to offer. From avant garde indie darlings to filthy booty house pioneers, through whimsical folk troubadours and bearded bellowers, Simple Things has always had an eclectic mix of talent to sample over its one day and two nights.

The festival started proper on Saturday but the Friday night pre-festival concert would have been worth the price of weekend admission alone. Canadian post-rock titans Godspeed You! Black Emperor kicked off the weekend in appropriate fashion. You can read a full review of their set HERE but suffice it to say that they encapsulated the spirit of the festival perfectly. Eclectic (a word already overused but appropriate), original, challenging and unconventional, superlatives to describe their epic fuzz laden compositions but also the festival as a whole. They defy easy categorisation and take inspiration from many sources, as does the line-up of this festival every year. It’s not a rock festival, it’s not a dance, or even ‘electronic’, weekend, rather it, like Godspeed…, treads a line somewhere between easy category labels and genre tags. No pigeonholes can coop it and it does what it likes.

Not possessing the stamina to attend anything past 1am (already a good 3 hours past my usual bedtime) and not having the athleticism to bound from venue to venue to catch the maximum number of bands humanly possible, this review and the following 15 ‘Profound Observations’ (patent pending Dragons’ Den) is based on my own experiences, word of mouth, overheard/spied on conversations, general tittle-tattle and some late-night Thatchers induced epiphanies.

Profound Observations:

1. Animal print is in…in a big way. Also, sparkly clothing, anything garish which clashes with anything else garish you are wearing, knitted dock worker hats, hoisty trousers, hugely voluminous trousers, general youthful exuberance, crazed dancing at 4pm and trench coats which you could hide Steven, your partially sentient abdominally connected Siamese twin, under. It’s enough to make you feel properly old!

2. Sex Swing, disappointingly, have no sex swings. Rather, they are a collective of loud shouty beards who make scary, saxy noise.

3. Moxie has moxie…also a seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of ALL music and an ear for a killer hook…plus bass…LOTS OF VERY LOUD BASS!

4. Penguin Café like that song they wrote about telephones. They like it so much in fact that they treated Colston Hall to about three renditions of it before they had even begun their set. It’s about telephones and uses the sound of a telephone. I think it’s called ‘Telephone’.

5. Speedy Ortiz look like the kids even the Glee cast pick on and shun in the dining hall and sound like 90s sludgers Hole with a smattering of Pavement (surely I can find an appropriate drain based joke to insert there).

6. I feel old!

7. Maximum Joy create just that (depending on your individual maximum level of joy).

8. Grumbling Fur, disappointingly, are not a collective of misanthropic merkins, rather a psychedelic twosome with infectiously catchy hooks. Triumphantly morose, they created a really big sound between the two of them.

9. Avalon Emerson played for a looooong time. They play house but not the sort that I live in. Mine creaks at night and has a more ‘kitcheny’ vibe.

10. Micachu & The Shapes sound like a Pokemon revival on paper but packed out the Foyer with their experimental stylings. Her guitar broke in the first song but was saved by a bald, bearded hero who provided her with a replacement. She subsequently, joyously, thrashed the hell out of it.

11. Gwilym Gold is not James Blake.* Gentle keys, throbbing and pulsing electronica pierced by his sweet vocals. A layman might stick him in the same space as James Blake, but while Blake can sometimes get lost up his own production techniques, Gold never loses focus on the song craft. Saying that, is there one track which really stood out? Nope. Just quite nice really.

*Note that Gwilym is also not James Bay, James Blunt, James Brown or Rick James.

12. Khruangbin is hard to pronounce but not to listen to. Dreamy, head-nodding funk sound with some glorious 70s-style licks which make you sit up and listen. Wouldn’t sound out of place in a Bonobo mix CD. Actually, they did feature on his Late Night Tales instalment from 2013 so there you go. This was ace and you should listen to them yourself.

13. Danny L Harle’s DJ set continued the TFI Friday 1990s time-warp, bashing out happy-hardcore to a bunch of grinning revellers. He played Prodigy ‘Crazy Man’, a B-side from 1991 for God’s sake. Having said that, nothing from a PC-Music artist should be particularly surprising by this point.

14. Skepta and JME are so grimey that you need a bath after. This was all about energy; they ripped through their combined back catalogues of classics, new and old. The pair owned the stage, and there were more gun fingers than you could shake a stick at. Hilariously, a large number of these menacingly brandished digits belonged to the type of University of Bristol students whose closest experience to a strap is on the lacrosse team’s minibus. Unlike myself, of course, who has been a roadman since day. ‘That’s Not Me’, ’96 Fuckries’, ‘No You Ain’t’, ‘It Ain’t Safe’ all got an airing. But it was all about ‘Shutdown’ of course. Blew the roof off. Truss Mi Daddi!

15. Factory Floor are perfect 2am fodder (or was it 1am, clocks went back eh?) Anyway, heads-down, driving techno from the pair of them. The sound was so crisp, so sharp and awesome, it’s hard not to love it. Depends what you like of course. But yeah, pounding, relentless and perfect to get dirty to.

So, another year, another Simple Things. Sorry if I wasn’t able/couldn’t/didn’t want to see your particular favourite but, you know, there’s always next year and another roster of weird, crazy, individual and yes, eclectic acts! I feel tired, revolted, euphoric, dirty, elated, hungover, tired, happy, profoundly moved, satisfied, tired and a bit like I need a hug from my mum. If you don’t then you’re a stronger, or just younger, person than I. Ultimately though, another great year; a little bit of everything for every taste…even Steven (remember him? He’s inside the trench coat.) That, I’d say, is worth pointing a gun finger at!

5/5

Reviewed by Phil Spring, with special contributions and witticisms by Stu Roberts, for 365 Bristol - The leading events and entertainment website for Bristol

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