Summer Festivals – Longitude 2013

Longitude Line-up

The festival bar has been set, and set high.

Longitude’s Dublin debut is perfectly timed and perfectly primed to strike fear into competing festival bookers. This will surely inspire a flurry of promotional activity around the other marquee names as they compete for the limited numbers of festival goers on this island. Nobody can attend everything so choices will have to be made, there will of course be some over lap. So far the power-brokers of old – Electric Picnic and Oxygen – have remained muted, seemingly caught in a bizarre rumour filled limbo. Oxygen may return this year after having a much needed sabbatical. Electric Picnic has lost some of its momentum of late, there was even talk that it wouldn’t go ahead this year but that has been dismissed. However, promotional activity has been nearly non-existent, the decision not to release early bird tickets this year has meant little to no build-up for the Stradbally event. Still it can count on its die hard contingent who will be in celebratory mood for the 10th edition and they will see dwindling numbers as a positive of sorts, even if promoters disagree.

Boutique off-shoots like Body & Soul are small and should still attract growing numbers. Forbidden Fruit stands in direct competition with Longitude as an urban non-camping festival. Other camping options such as Indiependence and Castlepalooza have benefited from Oxygen’s absence but they’ll have a tougher year in 2013.

The Summer schedule is already filled with big single slots. New promoters Harmonic have been plugging their Iveagh Garden’s triumvirate of shows with acts such as Grizzly Bear, Tallest Man on Earth and Beach House. The National have been named for the Marquee in Cork and tickets went on sale this morning. Bruce “The Boss” Springsteen initially announced three shows in Cork, Belfast and Limerick. These sold out immediately as the “ageing rockers” cohort were eager to see one of the best performers ever take to the stage and continue to defy the limitations of being a sexagenarian, no matter what exorbitant prices are being charged. In lieu of the take-up, his promoters Aiken put on two more dates in Nowlan Park in Kilkenny to round off the Irish leg of his “Wrecking Ball Tour”. So there are the individual shows and now, with the weekenders joining the fray, it promises to be a bumper Summer for music fans.

Back to Longitude. It’s a sibling of the UK festival Latitude, which has been running annually since 2006, this is the first time the event is being held in Ireland and the event is run by promoters MCD. It is being billed as “more than just a music festival” but with this line-up the music will do the selling of tickets.  Whatever the “more” is will be announced shortly. Early Bird tickets are available from Monday March 4th at €130 for a weekend pass and €45 for a day pass. These prices will go up on April 7th to €150 for the weekend and €55 for a day pass. The festival is being held in Marley Park from Friday the 19th of July to Sunday the 21st.

Longitude have brought their headliners bill to the table first, so let the jostling for position begin. Those that are planning on staying at home this Summer have music and even the prospect of sun (predicted by some apparently infallible sage weatherman from New Zealand) to look forward to.   Whatever about the sun, the music gods will shine on 53.2775° N, 6.2697° W in July.

Tallest Man on Earth – Gig Review October 24th 2012 – Vicar Street

Emerging from a wilderness to enrich the audience

When Kristian Matsson appears on the stage in Vicar Street he looks bedraggled.  Wearing only a sleeveless tank top it is as if he has emerged from the hinterland that he draws upon in his songs.  Matsson ironically stands at 5 foot 5 inches tall but to his audience he is known as ‘The Tallest Man On Earth’.  His height matters little as his vocals soar.  The Swedish singer-songwriter released his first EP in 2006 and since then he has steadily collected fans around the world due to his captivating stage presence. This is his fourth visit to Ireland.

Matsson has released three albums and two EPs.  After his first full length album called Shallow Grave he was lumbered with the tag ‘the new Bob Dylan’ by lazy reviewers; such clichéd labelling has stunted many burgeoning songwriters.  However Matsson managed to find his own voice amidst the cumbersome comparisons and his stature has continued to grow.  His second album The Wild Hunt vastly improved on his first effort.  On this album he explored the folk tradition and put his own lyrical roots down.  Yes, he borrows but they all do; that’s what makes it a tradition.  He has taken the great expanse of the American West, the plains and its open promise of freedom, and transposed them onto lands he is familiar with: the barren Scandinavian landscape.  He sings of birds, fjords, streams, glaciers, canyons, highways, forests, mountains, hills and valleys.  The passing seasons decorate his verses and we can feel the changing light as Fall is ushered in.  A passion permeates this record as he imbues his stories of people with a sincerity conveyed by his raw and powerful voice.  He uses his musings on a wilderness unknown to his audience in order evoke grand feelings for what are universal themes of love, loss and place.

This tour is to promote his latest album There’s No Leaving Now released earlier this year.  He opened with a track from that album ‘To Just Grow Away’.   Next he brought the audience right into the gig with “Love is All”.  This stokes the audience into fervour.  It is an emotive ballad on love and the loss of it, “Love is all, from what I’ve heard, but my heart’s learned to kill”.  One might posit that Matsson committed these words to paper in order to let go of these feelings.  If that is the case then the irony is that due to its popularity he will forever have to sing this song to his audiences.  Like many in his repertoire, this song’s upbeat tempo belies the lyrics that accompany it.  The chorus utilises the entirety of his nasal vocal range, “Oh, I could rise / From the harness of our goals / Here come the tears / But like always, I let them go / Just let them go.”  Matsson revels in singing and sharing in past despairs – as he comes to the front of the stage, he urges the audience to sing along and with each pluck of his guitar he dips his scrawny shoulders; the hook in each chorus line is mesmerizing, “Uh oh..oh..oh.”

Matsson effusively praises a boisterous Dublin crowd.  He started playing in Ireland – as many do – in Whelans.  The next year he moved to Vicar Street playing there in June 2011.  Now it seems his visits are annual as the crowd returns to the same venue this time bringing their mates and packing out the house.  In between songs he repeatedly mumbles his adoration to an audience that have adopted the Swede.  He bemoans the tough rigours of touring and acknowledges what keeps him going, “I don’t like to do interviews and shit like that.  I want to write and sing songs for you.  It’s the crowd that keep me going and now I’m in fucking Dublin!”  He evens lets slip that he’d written a song that day inspired by his support act Crooked Fingers.  The crowd urged him to play it.  But sense prevailed as he admitted to the song being in its infancy. In giving his excuses he touches on the solitary nature of his craft,  “The songs need practice” he explained, “I need to sit in a corner alone and fiddle with my guitar in order to make them work, make them ready for the stage and you guys.  But you’ll hear it soon.”

Matsson trawled through the new album interspersing it with his back catalogue; it was at times difficult to differentiate the new material from the old but nobody minded.   For a few tunes he pulled up his chair at the piano before jumping impatiently back to the front of the stage with his guitar as if he’d missed it.  He wrapped up his set with ‘The King of Spain’.  In the lyrics he tips his hat to Dylan, “And I wear my boots of Spanish leather” clearly an acknowledgement of Dylan’s eponymous track.  It is obvious that he now carries such comparisons with ease, “Still I am not from Barcelona/ I am not even from Madrid. / I am a native of the North folk/ And that can mess up any kid.”  He sings this with his distinctive rasp fully confident in his own delivery, this is after all his own hit, and he cajoles the audience into following him on the caustic chorus line, “I wannnnna beeeeeeee the King….of….Spain!!!!!”  His voice is urgent; provoking feelings in the audience, moving them.  The Tallest Man On Earth is comfortable being part of a folk continuum, which he simply wishes to enrich.  Then comes ‘Revelation Blues’ which is the single off the new album and after he leaves the stage empty with just a mike, a stool and his piano.

The inevitable encore is greeted with a cacophony of yelps from the impatient crowd.  Matsson sings the title track off The Wild-Hunt before sitting at the piano once more for a cover of Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’.  The Swede’s art is envisioned and made far from the claustrophobic cities which he plays every night on tour but as he leaves and returns to his wild imagination his audiences are left contemplating the powerful echoes of ‘The Dreamer’.

Tallest on Vicar Street Stage

Setlist:

To Just Grow Away
Love is All
1904
I Won’t Be Found
The Gardener
Criminals
Lost My Shape (David Bazan cover)
There’s No Leaving Now
The Sparrow and the Medicine
Burden of Tomorrow
Leading Me Now
Wind and Walls
Like the Wheel
Where Do My Bluebird Fly
King of Spain
Revelation Blues
—
The Wild Hunt
Graceland (Paul Simon cover)
The Dreamer

Django Django

Electro-Funk Desert Storm Debut from Django Django

It’s appropriate that the first track is called ‘Introduction’ because what an introduction this eponymous debut has been for Django Django.

The band are a London based group of Edinburgh art college friends.  They have more than a whiff of experimental Beatles or Beach Boys to them but this is allayed and mixed with new electro-synth beats similar to Hot Chip: a potent mix.  Since they released the album, comparisons to Hot Chip starting out have constantly cropped up and that’s for good reason because they seem to display that same experimental abandon in the studio that so endeared us to their fellow Londoners.   The tunes navigate their way across an eclectic and exciting pop-dance landscape infused with their own distinctive and hypnotic vocals.

The compressed chant-like choruses, that are the main theme throughout the album, are heard first on “Default” and the electro-suspense created here has an addictive quality to it, “We just lit the fire and now you want to put it out/ Take one for the team/ You’re a cog in the machine/ It’s like a default.”  These vocals are immediate, jarring and force the listener to follow the rhythm driving the tune.  This is a ploy employed on most of the album to get into the listeners mind – and it works!

A layered synth sound pervades the record as it is furnished with looped electro beats and grooves, plucked guitar strings, crickets and much more that mesh together to match the chorus lines in their captivating intensity.  It’s an exciting and imaginative first outing for Django Django that has seen them on the festival circuit every since its release in January 2012 and whenever the revelry subsides slightly we’ll be hoping that they head back to their experimental abandon in the studio to further push the indie pop envelope.  One thing is clear from their meteoric rise and that’s that this band are restless, they don’t like standing still and they probably never will.

The song Zumm Zumm has a relentless chorus line, “Got to get to know, Got to get to know” and it’s fitting because that’s exactly what people need to do with this album.