So what is next?

Here is a song-and-a-half and now a suitably great video to go with it... Ooh. This attempt to embed Vevo video might not work out as intended first time! Let's just see what happens... I like meddling, but the real point is that this video is simply too good not to share.  It worked for six months and then it didn't.  Fair is fair. Here is a direct replacement.

Well it could have been worse; at least something happened now I have meddled with it some more and that's OK, at least for now. If you think that Alynda Lee Segarra is a tough cookie then you are right. That, however, is certainly far from the whole story.

She is also one of the most self-effacing artists that I have ever met.

End Of The Road Festival 2012.

EOTR 2012 - Thoughts on new music...

One thing that really appeals to me about End of The Road Festival is the chances it offers to see new music. I mean that - new - in a variety of senses; some of it simply entirely new to me, some new to me live and some about which I am aware (or was aware of) but have subsequently forgotten to follow up.
I really haven't any preconceptions about how this post will unfold, hence this preamble!  I'm not even sure how or where to start. Indeed I have only written this in order to commit myself to actually writing it...
I'm going to have my dinner first and then, somehow or other, get going on this. One thing that is quite certain is that it simply won't work in any festival time-line way.
This is what I decided to start with and for a rather strange reason - listening to a 2010 UK modern-folk album 'One Light Is Gone' by Josienne Clarke.  The reason being that when I heard Hurray For The Riff Raff (live, it so happened) for the first time it had the same impact that hearing the aforementioned album did: that is the admonition-to-self  - "WTF?  Why didn't I already know about this?"

  

Hurray For The Riff Raff, Woods Stage, EOTR 2012 at 12:00, Sunday.

Suffice to say it was 'one of those moments' and that this is another band that I saw twice at EOTR 2012. I promptly purchased the 2012 album 'Look Out Mama', to which I am listening while writing. On reflection there are not many times that I have consciously found myself trying to work out lyrics to songs that I'm listening to live and hearing for the first time. When it happens three times, pertaining to totally different acts in the space of three days, it is becoming something of an addiction! It is likely to define the rest of this post.
It became no secret that Alynda Lee Segarra and her band much prefer playing small venues in the early hours but the pictures above were both taken on the outdoor main stage just after mid-day...

OK folks. Fourteen hours later, on the Tipi Stage, 2am Monday!

  

If you think the story of the evolution of Hurray For The Riff Raff is convoluted than it is easily exceeded by that of the next...

Kai Welch and Abigail Washburn opening The Garden Stage on Saturday.

Bluegrass tunes, but sometimes ones with Mandarin Chinese lyrics.

  

This one was a case in point.

Whilst she explained the bones of how this apparently odd but actually extremely likeable combination, at least to my ears, came about there is a fuller history to be found here.

The article finishes like this...

" [She played] a recently written murder ballad, her delicate frame dwarfed by the surreal dimensions of the cello banjo.

"It's a cut that didn't make the album [City of Refuge] because the producer thought it was too morbid," she explains. "But all the old-time tunes have a female victim. I thought 'How about writing a song which gives the girl a gun for a change?' "

  

She did not have the 'cello banjo at EOTR but she played the song nevertheless, with Kai Welch on acoustic guitar and backing vocals, and the whole set was a highlight of the weekend - if only one amongst many. That only goes to show just how strong and yet diverse End Of The Road Festival actually is.

Bella Union is 15 (Part 1) - EOTR 2012

Once upon a time, decades ago and when all was good in the world, there were record labels (remember those things) that you could rely on. I mean that in the sense that if they were on your list of labels to 'like' you could trust that a new release would be at the very least likeable and most possibly lovable even if totally unheard?
Why would one worry about the Iron Curtain, The Cold War or 'mutually assured destruction' when you have a comforting blanket like that?  Or indeed the anti-war artists nibbling at the mainstream... be it in response to events in Malaya, Korea, Vietnam or simply part of a vision of utopia? 
Well, while we haven't reached our panacea yet though the signs are not as poor as some might believe, at least we've got dependable labels back and that is a damn good start.
One of them, Bella Union, is fifteen now and its teenage birthday party was the Friday of End Of The Road Festival 2012 across all four music stages with bands from the Bella Union family. Like all the best parties it started rather early and finished rather late...

Here, on the Garden Stage at around 1pm, is Mountain Man.

Traffic issues, associated with The Dorset Steam Fair apparently, meant they arrived just in the nick of time and without any kit. They borrowed this guitar, that they had never seen before, and promptly nicknamed it 'The Cadillac' - for its white lacquer and shiny chrome fittings...
Suffice it to say that it was not what they would have chosen.

After this start you just knew that it was going to be a remarkable day.

  

Flitting between the various stages at End of The Road is happily very quick and easy to do so off we go to the tented Tipi Stage.  In this case there is a real problem... I didn't take enough pictures but here is one of the only two that I did.

Hannah Cohen, The Tipi Stage @ EOTR 2012.

Another Bella Union artist and her début album 'Child Bride' is quite something. The thing about Bella Union artists, however, is that they are unfailingly good when performing live.
Bella Union does not however just help new artists on the way by releasing their first album... indeed it only signed this one for her second, 'Time Traveller' (2011), although at 22 she is hardly an old-timer. I saw her live at Truck Festival last year, performing with a band, and am now of the opinion that she is better live as a solo artist as here for the band tended to overwhelm the purposefully-fragile beauty of her song-writing and never more so would it be true than of the brand new songs that she essayed last Friday. This really is Alessi in Wonderland and (the prospect of) album #3 is a reason to continue living.
  

Alessi's Ark (Alessi Laurent Marke)  on the Tipi Stage @ 15:05 Friday, August 31.
  

This next artist however, although only recently added to the Bella Union rôster, released his first solo album when I was just a toddler! That, and the next two, have recently been re-released on Bella Union and to go with it he has returned to live touring. He is one of the legendary American songwriters and, as it happens, also a gifted raconteur between those songs.

Van Dyke Parks - Garden Stage @ EOTR 2012, about 17:15 on Friday.

  

This of course just a part of the party and then only those bits of it that, being unable to be in more than one place at a time, I chose to see! Part 2 of that which I saw of the party will follow tomorrow.

Now explain this...

It is what live music is really about: 02:40 BST on September 3, 2012.
They are as thick as thieves.

Deer Shed Festival 3 - one week on

This is incredibly hard to write and not for the reasons that over the last five years and some I have become used to. I've even gotten somewhat inured to the fact that I write as a Briton (if never a great one) to a potential audience of millions. All that was put in to perspective yesterday - with the opening of the 30th Modern Olympiad in London. We, as host Nation, were never planning to upstage the sheer scale of the equivalent event at Beijing 2008, nor did we ever think that we might try to do so in budget, scale or pale imitation.
Britain just had to do it the only way it knows, which is what defines us - a wonderful mix of contradictory things that everyone but almost nobody - myself included - really properly understands and a certain penchant for comedy and self-deprecation.
It involved a lot of music, both old and new, but none of that from Deer Shed Festival 3 that I'm planning to mention now. It does however prompt me to mention that for every well known artist featured yesterday there are plenty more who aspire to gain our attention and are worthy of doing so. Aspiring athletes do not start at the Olympic Games, just as aspiring musicians do not headline Glastonbury, but they are there at the smaller festivals and local venues every week of every year. One thing that has made changes for them, and it was featured by the appearance of Sir Tim Berners-Lee at yesterday's event, is the internet. Without it I might not yet have even heard about these artists that I saw performing live at Deer Shed Festival 3: Think about what that really means.

As it always was, it only needs a little sunshine to get us in a party mood but a bar also helps too. Without the internet I would not be writing this and you, wherever you might be, would not be reading it. Yet, for all that, the reason that almost six-thousand of us were gathered there at all was for the entertainment - modern music,  live and strictly non-digital primarily, but also that most human of desires that is like-minded comradeship.

The sun first made an appearance on Friday evening when Belfast five-piece Cashier No. 9 were playing on the main stage.

I have seen this band live before, at Truck Festival 2011, and I was impressed then. I still am and they appear again at EOTR 2012, as part of the 15th anniversary of Bella Union Records on the Friday.

The very first act to play at Deer Shed Festival 3 was Leeds' Moody Gowns on the tented 'In The Dock Stage'. Not exactly the least abrasive of welcomes, perhaps...

...on the other hand a worthy welcome to the orthogonal world that is a good festival.

Last Thursday is a long time in Music

Last Thursday I wrote something, about the passing of Jim Marshall and his influence on electric guitar music. That included the comment that, at least in the UK, it is somewhat out of fashion.
That would be quite inconsequential were it not for this...  much hailed as just more 'southern fried rock', something long forgotten and also forever indie, so Alabama Shakes was derided by much of the music industry. It is a cliché that, I'm pleased to say, I don't think they could ever stoop so low as to reach; it was, however, tentatively predicted to gradually conquer at least the more receptive parts of the UK audience through live performance.
  
Be that as it may, the latest UK album chart mid-week predictions suggest otherwise - the début album 'Boys and Girls' is really on to something... it was only released - vinyl, CD and d/l on Monday, 9 April in the UK by indie label Rough Trade Recordings.  There's serious trouble afoot and it is just possible that it will top the UK album chart on its week of release. WTF is that about?
The album is extremely good, and not just for a début, but more than that the band's live reputation is already firmly established. The band is awesome live but, unusual in such a genre, so too is the contribution by vocalist Brittany Howard.
  
The album artwork has a quite unsurprising geometry:

Alabama Shakes is confirmed for End Of The Road 2012 (EOTR 2012). I, for one, can't wait.

New Music 2012 - Part 10 - Trailer Trash Tracys

Just as a starter, what an awesome band name. It tells of something and nothing in equal measure - leaving you to contemplate the beauty that it promises in complete isolation.

It could be all-out metal, for the band name would suit that, but in fact it isn't. It is actually so 2012 that it hurts in the very best way imaginable. I'm wary of saying what I think is comparable, or indeed influential, except to say this.
I like it. You know what I like in music. The album 'Ester' has it all. It is available on vinyl (Double Six Records) and how could you not want that album artwork on 12"?
When it comes to individual tracks that is just something that will have to wait for now. It is too much to take in one go.
  
Note added February 21, 2012:
Trailer Trash Tracys was today confirmed to be appearing at End Of The Road 2012.