![]() Xenia Rubinos goes on stage 25 minutes late – but her 2021 album, Una Rosa, took five years and was worth the wait, and so is this. ![]() They delay the drop on The City – and with it, the gratification – and spin a magisterial take on Concrete Over Water that proves they are among the best we currently have. Jockstrap turn in the best set of the festival – what was formerly a chaotic mess of styles now thrillingly integrated into a compelling new whole. As he moves further away from the art rock of his early years, he resembles a particularly compelling Vegas showman gone tropical funk while in thrall to Springsteen’s Born to Run and the Lion King soundtrack. Perfume Genius’s Mike Hadreas is lush, bombastic, brilliant and ridiculous – often within the confines of a single song. Pop also lives at End of the Road in wild and adventurous forms. On the tucked-away Boat stage, whose bookers have excelled themselves, John Francis Flynn’s gorgeous renditions of traditional Celtic ballads comes on like a threatening thunderhead perforated with golden shafts of sunlight: lysergic synth lines, intermittent bursts of overdriven guitar, a clarinet saturated in tape delay and a treated tin whistle disrupt the atmosphere of these old songs without ever diminishing their power. ![]() His heartfelt, cosmic banter might irritate some at the Garden stage but no moonraking space cadet could be responsible for the biting satire of I Was Gonna Fight Fascism, his recent single with Soccer96. Channelling the spirit of Albert Ayler and Charles Hayward, the starry-eyed shaman of Stoke Newington, Alabaster dePlume, has the kind of ear-to-ear grin that you would usually associate with a 19-year-old who has elected to have four cans of Stella for lunch. Photograph: Burak Çıngı/RedfernsĮven the festival’s quieter moments have a distinct potency. Miles Romans-Hopcraft of Wu-Lu performing at End of the Road.
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