Latitude 2010 → EOTR 2010 → New Music 2010 - Part 17

With EOTR 2010 just a few days away and Latitude 2010 still quite fresh in my mind, it is time to tackle a few more images, expectations and hopes for the future. If the following is a little unfocussed, or simply downright confusing, then I'm afraid that this is simply an occupational hazard of 'Thoughts on Music'.  It may completely mystify but, even if not a single person reads it, writing it does make things clearer to me and that matters.
There is some overlap between acts that appeared at Latitude and those to appear at EOTR.  I used that to try and minimize conflicts when I wanted to see more than one act that was performing at the same time. Here are three such that I did at least catch some of at Latitude. Someone asked, only a few days ago, for today's thought on Latitude... 
Oh, how I wish I could but writing a daily post still remains something of a distant ambition.  These photos are probably not the best but hopefully they convey at least something of the atmosphere and the musical variety to be found at such festivals...

This was simply perchance - I admit that I had never heard of her before - but that is all part of the wonderful festival experience. It is that moment; when something or someone impinges on your musical conscience for the first time.  I think that she is a late addition to the line-up at EOTR 2010.


The foregoing is not true of this band. Canadian psychrock five-piece 'Black Mountain' are on the cusp of releasing their third LP, Wilderness Heart, and I own and adore the previous two. This one is just a little different --- and no less awesome.

Stormy High.  Black Mountain live @ Latitude 2010, in the Word Arena.

I wasn't really close enough to do this justice but, let me tell you this, Black Mountain rock.  I can't wait to hear them again at EOTR 2010. The LP Wilderness Heart is high on my list of New Music I Want.

While the music is completely different, The Unthanks are another EOTR act that I caught only very briefly on the Obelisk stage at Latitude 2010.

I think a more intimate setting will suit both them and their music to perfection but that they, and many others of folk-influenced persuasion, played the main stage says a whole lot about music today... I can't wait to see the full live set.

That, of course, is not to say that the whole scene was for ageing folk-hippies...  This act is quite the opposite but on the other hand most of the little kids, there with their parents, seemed to find this act absolutely riveting...  It was the second time that I have seen them live - and for all the chaos [and the almost inevitable premature ending] - it was better than the first and only slightly less scary as I was further away from the front than when I saw them on the Sunset Stage at Latitude 2007.

It is strange to say this but, for all the chaos and strife, Crystal Castles has the same kind of attraction that the equally tempestuous and unpredictable Libertines did (and post-Leeds/Reading 2010 now have once again). Live, while it lasts, they are totally magnetic. The album Crystal Castles II (2010) is pretty flawless; what they self-destroy while performing live is really rather haunting when recorded in the studio and never more so than when recorded on vinyl.

The list of UK bands that I have seen/want to see is growing by the day.  Here are another few pictures from Latitude 2010. I have mentioned all these acts before.

The Good Natured live @ Latitude 2010.

Yuck - as well as their album I'm looking forward to their acoustic side-project as Yu(c)k. The band is performing at EOTR 2010 too.

As I am mentioning forthcoming new music I could hardly fail to include 'Without Why', which has now been released.  Rose Elinor Dougall made a good case for it at Latitude.
If you include acts from outside the UK the list is...
to be quite frank, almost endless.

History is more or less bunk. It's tradition.

That might be true, and much that Henry Ford said still rings true. This is particularly so for kids: "It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today." as published in Chicago Tribune in 1916. That I would say is a pretty natural state of mind and none the less so for kids.  Here are two more photos from Latitude 2010 that suggest one should never ever try and guess what music they might like...

Ear-protectors in place and rapt so of course this must be some child-friendly act? Nope, absolutely not... Crystal Castles!  On the other hand there is this.

Fairy-winged ones opining that this fuzzy-faced Californian band, Chief, is the new best thing in music. It is very good too but hardly revolutionary if one is old enough to have heard Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: Laurel Canyon for a new generation?

Havoc In Heaven - Festivals 2010

It is time for something more uplifting or, at the very least, forward looking. This is what I intended to post about yesterday but in some ways I'm glad that I never did as I have rather more to add now.
To start with I am going to indulge my liking for American music - the reason being that I feel justified in doing so. I don't feel any compunction about this - UK music is in fine form too, the trade is bi-directional and long may it last for mutual benefit. I'll start my list with artists that I'm looking forward to, and of an acoustic bent. On the UK side these obviously include Laura Marling and Mumford and Sons.

On the American side, and like the above both now confirmed for Latitude 2010, are the following:

The hat is probably more suited to the Manchester climate than that of California?

There have been parallels made in both cases, some of them quite tenuous, with Laura Marling. In all honesty I don't think that either side is likely to have any problem with the other. The really strange thing is that only a few years ago who could have imagined that, instead of hard-core rap, we would be trading banjo-wielding singer-songwriters?

Another artist and a stranger tale still is that of Jesca Hoop. We have long been used to UK artists eloping to the sunnier side of the Atlantic but she has now been co-opted as a Manucunian; the grey skies and drizzle perhaps being more conducive to song-writing? At least there is a good excuse to stay in and get on with it and, when it arrives, the fleeting sun will seem far more precious!
On the other hand hers is not a conventional background anyway; she is from a musical, Mormon family but later trod her own path and in time that included being live-in nanny for Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan's three kids. Now that is something - Waits' music is challenging in itself, his comments on artists perhaps even more so. I'm not sure if she plays banjo but I wouldn't rule it out...

Lissie, a native of the part of Illinois bordering the Mississippi River, most certainly does and without any need to apologize. She is performing on the 'Sunset Stage' at Latitude 2010. It is tented, relatively small and leaks if it rains, but is actually my favourite... I will never forget seeing Crystal Castles there in 2008 - it was possibly the most frightening live performance that I have ever seen.

Lissie is not going to be scary like that... but the reviews are already quite something and she seems to be setting-up-shop in the UK for what passes as our summer. If you want to catch her live, sooner rather than later, here's your chance.

That is not to dismiss the chance to witness a full set by Sweden's 'First Aid Kit' either. They had to cancel at Latitude 2009 but I did get to see them at EOTR 2009.

They are returning to Latitude 2010 supporting their first full-length album, 'The Big Black & The Blue', and for good reason.

Slightly modernised but only in a way that kept it relevant to the early 21st century their with-no-clever-tricks-at-all live take on 'Universal Soldier', written by Buffy Sainte-Marie and from the album 'It's My Way' (1964), was actually more devastating than it was sublime.

It was received with a resonance that befitted it - awe and total silence - and a rare moment when thoughts from the Cenotaph came to a festival.

Not many can do that and fewer those still in their teens - although many of those killed in The Great War were exactly thus.

Latitude 2008 - a festival update...

I got my ticket over a month ago, which is why I'm willing to share this! Tickets are still available I believe and this, in my opinion, is just getting better and better.

A band that has been going thirty years is something that I'd usually be ambivalent about seeing at a festival. If there were one exception - and a band that I really regret never having seen live - it would have to be Blondie. That said at Latitude 2007, while the top-link artists were headlining, some of the things that made the most impression on me were acts that I would never have heard live or, in many cases, I had never even heard of until I bought the guidebook on Thursday evening! I may well be better prepared this year but I really don't think that I will be any the less surprised and I can see that the choices between which acts to see will only be more difficult the second time around.