Latitude 2010 - Review (Part 3)

Despite over indulged weariness and the hottest day of the festival, a decent sized crowd trooped towards the Obelisk stage on Sunday lunchtime for the second set of the weekend at Latitude by Tom Jones - a late addition, the result of his Thursday night set being missed by many due to overcrowding and capacity issues at the small stage in the woods.

Rumours suggested that this set would see Jones wheel out the hits, but it was not to be. Instead he performed the same songs as on the Thursday, with Jones keeping his ladies man reputation alive by referring to his female backing singers as “lovely,” in a suggestive voice that got a laugh.

“Good morning Latitude,” announced a member of The Antlers in the Word Arena. “It’s not morning,” one of his colleagues advised. Whatever time it was The Antlers suited perfectly, their soaring, atmospheric soundscapes of songs emotionally numbing with their bludgeoning weight. Two was particularly impressive, the bands feedback rock-pop taught and mesmerising.

If Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys had just woken up, put a Dougal from the Magic Roundabout red wig on and played slacker-surf-rock songs from the 50’s whilst reinterpreting Billy Childish he may have just found himself transformed into the lead singer of Spectrals. Their short songs performed on the Lake Stage had a direct approach which sometimes hooked and caught, but in other moments it was just a little too hazy for its own good.

Evidence of the continued ascension of the soon to be Mercury nominated Mumford and Sons was one of the biggest crowds of the weekend turning up for their mid afternoon set on the Obelisk Stage. “Can we start?” they questioned the masses, receiving a huge roar in reply. It seems like only yesterday that the band were wheeling out their americana-folk inspired tunes to small pub crowds and now they’ve become possibly the first UK arena-sized bluegrass band. White Blank Page, Little Lion Man and Roll Away Your Stone were all greeted with hugely positive reactions, but for those who have seen Mumford and Sons a number of times over the last few years it all feels a little bit ‘one festival set too many.’ Time for some new songs perhaps? They did at least oblige with one new slice of mass-market folk-rock, a song with Marcus playing drums, a horn section adding depth and lyrics of “I’ll be yours if you’ll be mine.” Laura Marling were you listening?

As the black clad Morning Parade blasted out Pieces in the Sunrise Arena it became easy to understand why they are being tipped as potential next big things. Their confident brand of epic guitar drama combined with washes of fluttering synth made a sound tough and muscular enough to be liked by the indie rock kids but accessible enough to find itself on daytime Radio 1. Soaring choruses, guitar licks and strong vocals - the only thing they lack is originality.

Samuel Chase (previously known as Samuel and the Dragon) drew the short straw. Dressed as a huge red feather love heart (!) he played to about six people standing at the barrier at the Lake Stage - anyone else who may have been interested took shade from the searing sun under trees some distance away. You really had to feel sorry for him. Yeasayer had just finished their set in the Word Arena and thousands of people were passing by. If Samuel had grabbed the moment and started his set five minutes earlier then some of these punters were his for the taking. But by the time he started his first tune the moment had passed. His songs were a mix of plaintive vocals, electronic jittery beats and live strings - torch songs for a place far from a hot outdoor stage. His fantastic single Diamonds On A Boat didn’t even get an airing and the impression left was that Samuel just couldn’t wait to get it all over with and extricate himself from the stage.

Finding an audience was no problem for the Pains of Being Pure at Heart who played under the shady canopy of the Sunrise Arena, which seemed a blissful respite from the heat. Visually they were like a cartoon indie pop band - boys jigging round with guitars, and girl gently swaying at her keyboard - their sound consisting of twee optimistic fuzz-tones of lovely noise and soft unaffected vocals. They mixed old songs such as the giddy Young Adult Friction with new ones and joked about reading a poem at the festival. “Music is all the bad poetry you need,” singer Kip Berman quipped.

If Beth Jeans Houghton were a rock she would be quartzite. A metamorphic girl who changes every time she takes to the stage. Gone was the big wig. Gone was the bleached blonde. This time she was dark. Next time we expect to see her she’ll probably be sporting a Sinead O’Connor crop. O’Connor is a reference point musically as well, with Houghton’s vocal having an air of the celtic soul sister to her. With tales of dropping her sunglasses in the festival toilets (her manager rescued them) and a punk rock song that she dedicates to him, Beth entertained in between songs even although we suspect that her quirky stories were well rehearsed and practised before. The entertainment factor was kept high during the music as well, the songs varied considerably from danceable oddball pop to jaunty folk.

Latitude 2010 was almost at an end. Musical overload. Grizzly Bear were the closing act on The Word stage. They played to a mainly partisan crowd, who listened intently, their collage of sound subtly shifting between songs creating something that is highly admirable, very worthy and yet for this reviewer not a performance that could ever be loved. Their layered harmonies and experimental sound glided with well played competence, but maybe overexposure to three and a half days of music has numbed the soul and brain. It was time for bed. Goodnight Latitude 2010. The rapes, the canopy collapse, the Crystal Castles incident and the stinking toilets may have brought the festival down a notch or two in our ratings, but overall it was still an excellent event for lovers of music and the arts. We will probably be back at some point.

The Antlers - Waves

The Antlers Hospice was one of the finest and most intense albums of 2009 - no question. Now Antlers lead singer and guitarist Peter Silberman has covered Holly Miranda’s beautiful song Waves, one of the standouts from her sleepy, ember-glow seductive debut solo album.

Not so much a radical transformation, but a dreamy lo-fi version, Silberman gives the XY against the XX from Miranda. Take your pick, but both are designed for hazy, late night, out of body moments. A hypnotic piece of weary beauty, it streams below.

The Antlers - Bear

Sometimes we talk too much. Today we need to listen. It's Sunday after all. Here is the new video for the wonderful Bear by The Antlers, who made one of our albums of last year. We have no more to say. Let the music speak for itself. Gorgeous.

The Antlers - Hospice - Album of the Year #3

In our original review of The Antlers Hospice (read it here) in September we said that it was “an extraordinary album that demands to be physically owned and consumed with your ears from start to finish.” At year end we find ourselves fully agreeing with what we said back then. Hospice is a profound and sonically dynamic album that gets better and better with every listen.

Hospice is by no means an easy listen musically or lyrically. It has central themes of death, abuse, attempted suicide, ghosts and hospital machinery combined with a dense often all consuming musical structure that is as harrowing as the lyrics. The moment when lead singer Peter Silberman screams “Sylvia, get your head out of the oven,” as a barrage of white guitar noise crashes and storms the ears is as euphoric as it is depressingly sad. This is why Hospice works - it’s an album that in weaker hands would have sounded trite and schoolboy sixth form, but under Silberman’s guidance is mighty, intense and full of heavy dark weight.

It is never clear if the lyrical narrative of Hospice is fictional or based on real events, loosely the record deals with the relationship between a patient and another, heading into memories of abuse before death, but ultimately its extent of truth doesn’t matter. The test of any album is in the listening experience and Hospice succeeds as a squalling, shimmering, wrenching, exploding thing of dramatic beauty.

The video below is not an official video but a collection of photos meticulously pieced together by fan Dan Sully. The content of the photos is absolutely stunning and capture the music perfectly. Take five minutes out of your daily life to soak up this beautiful piece of art and music.

The Antlers @ Brighton The Hope

It’s Brooklyn’s The Antlers second visit to Brighton in just over three months, this time selling out The Hope some weeks before the gig was due. The reason for the full venue is simple - their album Hospice. With Hospice The Antlers have undoubtedly produced one of the most absorbing and sonically powerful indie rock recordings of the year. It has attained significant critical acclaim and continues to slowly build a profile in the UK, much of it through word of mouth and recommendation.

For this live show The Antlers concentrate on material from that album, the sound raw, evocative and if anything more cataclysmic than the recorded versions. Drenched in reverby guitar work that glides in and out of focus and carried by lead singer Peter Silberman’s haunted scratchy falsetto, the songs from Hospice provide a bleak but strangely euphoric emotional resonance that leads to at least two grown men hugging each other for comfort in the crowd. The Antlers live sound is not just something to listen to, it’s something to feel, to completely and utterly immerse yourself in.

The opening songs of Kettering and Sylvia, probably two of the most powerful pieces on the album, open the set and seem almost throwaway compared to what follows thereafter. Tense stabs of guitar are matched with moments of quiet, sad intimacy to create a superb show that really makes us want to use words such as epic and awesome to describe the three piece; except that these days those words are so often over used that they lose meaning. However this is exactly what The Antlers are like live. Epic, awesome, and worthy of such words. Live, Antlers produce the kind of music that grabs your heart and envelopes you in its howling grief. When Silberman sings “There’s a bear inside your stomach, a cub’s been kicking from within. He’s loud, though without vocal chords, we’ll put an end to him,” on Bear, it’s desperately sorrowful, yet because of the music seems poignantly beautiful.

As the bands set climaxes with expansive layers of guitar noise the audience, who at the start seem particularly reserved will not let them go without an encore. It’s utterly deserved and when Silberman returns with Epilogue and sings “So I lie down against your back, until we’re both back in the hospital. But now it’s not a cancer ward, we’re sleeping in the morgue,” before the song progresses and swells to a dramatic conclusion, it’s impossible not to be drawn in, the same way we slow down to watch a car crash on the motorway - brutal, tragic and yet darkly mesmerising.

We suspect that the next time The Antlers visit Brighton they will have to play a significantly larger venue than The Hope.

The Antlers - Hospice

The Antlers describe Hospice as ““The result of Manhattan isolation and Brooklyn re-emergence recorded over the course of two years in an apartment.” That only touches the surface. Hospice is a powerful and sonically masterful indie rock record that combines some of the most moving and disturbing lyrics you will hear all year with an aural assault of heavy heavenly beauty, both electric and acoustic. Expect to see it on a number of the better end of year lists.

Hospice is a thematic album, dare we say it, a concept album. Whether it’s fictional or non fictional is almost beside the point, but it does tell a story. A layered tale of two characters relationship, one of whom is dying. It is profoundly dark, flitting between memories of abuse and the present until eventually “Every machine stopped at once, and the monitors beeped the last time.”

In an age where the digital download has led to the average listener being unable to connect with any listening experience over five minutes long, Hospice is a kick back against such attention span deficit. This is an album that demands to be heard from start to finish in its entirety. Individual tracks simply don’t work as well as how The Antlers probably intended you to listen to their work - immersed and uninterrupted. It’s also vital that you listen with the lyric book held in your hand, only this way can you feel the austere weight of this recording as some of the words are difficult to make out without it. For example on Two, as vocalist Peter Silberman describes the inevitability of the girls death he also sings of past betrayals “They should have listened, they thought you were lying. Daddy was an asshole, he fucked you up, built gears in your head, now he greases them up. And no one paid attention when you just stopped eating. Eighty seven pounds and all this bears repeating.” Elsewhere the rage and madness of the situation is described on Atrophy in the lyric “Someone, oh anyone, tell me how to stop this. She’s screaming, expiring, and I’m her only witness.” It’s pretty uneasy listening.

Besides the black current and poetic density of the lyrics the music is mighty and intense - a mix of the subtle and the explosive. On Sylvia waves of crashing noise and feedback ring hard as lead singer Peter Silberman wails “Sylvia, get your head out of the oven. Go back to screaming and cursing, remind me again how everyone betrayed you.” Thirteen starts off with a moody haunting ambience before gradually morphing into waves of shimmering shoe-gaze guitar which then drops into almost silence for a ghostly female voice to call “Pull me out, pull me out, can’t you stop this all from happening?” over the lightest of piano sounds. On Kettering Silberman sets the scene of the two main characters, it’s never clear if they knew each other before this moment - “You’d been abused by the bone that refused you, and you hired me to make up for that. Walking in that room when you had tubes in your arms, those singing morphine alarms out of tune kept you sleeping and even,” over distorted distant piano that evolves into distraught and angry noise. It’s not always an easy listen requiring some patience, but the journey is worth it.

Hospice bears some similarities to another recent release - First Days Of Spring by Noah and the Whale, in that it that feels more like a film than simply a collection of songs and is bare and gut-wrenchingly sad. Buy the CD (not the download), admire the well thought out internal cover art picturing stark hospital scenes in black and white and read the lyrics rather than just listening to them. Hospice is the rarest of things in this decade; an extraordinary album that demands to be physically owned and consumed with your ears from start to finish.