texan goodwill-magnets explosions in the sky are a sort of budget-price classical-pops version of mogwai. i'm not sure why they're curating, especially as their profile in the uk is rather limited. but best of luck to them: they appear to have decent taste in the sort of pitchfork-approved acts that you're likely to have heard of, with a couple of japanese curveballs for flavouring.
unlike last year's dirty three-curated cro-magnon beard-fest, there's not much that links acts like raekwon, animal collective and jens lekman together, complacent hipster endorsement aside. but if i can't be arsed to post mp3s for all of them, head over to the hype machine, where they'll all be playing happily together.
anyway, some things that occurred to me on friday.
- bill fay rules. he wasn't at ATP, though i wish he had been. but we had his eponymous 1967 album on in the car. it's like nick drake and van dyke parks teamed up to sing about vegetables. in a good way.
- papier tigre sound like fugazi. i'm not sure what they were angry about, but it sounded worth being angry about. they're french, if that helps. punk, without being dream-punk or spazz-punk, or dance-punk or what-have-you. good stuff.
- upstairs for a dose of mono. if oxford's best ever band, the workhouse, were young, japanese and stand-off-ish, they'd be called mono and all the hipsters would be raving about their sonic cathedrals of sound, like they are about mono. anyway, having seen these guys do their butterfly-in-a-hurricane schtick makes seeing explosions in the sky seem pretty redundant, so off to cook tea.
the workhouse - 'boxing day' (from flyover)
- incidentally, this year hipsters have seventies hair, like in the partridge family or the brady bunch. just so you know.
- dinosaur jr's amps go up to 11, but j. mascis' treble knob goes up to 12. lou needs to fight his corner. it all looks like a lot of fun. best late 80s alt-rock reunion? best ever reunion album?
- sunset rubdown are like arcade fire but with lots of polka dots and elton john, which is perhaps better than arcade fire with blue-collar rock aspirations, in short doses at least. their bio in the official ATP programme is a list of other bands that members of sunset rubdown are in, all with ridiculous and forgettable names. what will become of all these accordion players when the histrionic canadian indie bubble bursts?
- phosphorescent wins best new band of the festival. i don't know if he's new - he's had enought time to grow a big ol' beard, after all. but i hadn't heard of him, and he rules, in a will oldham-meets-spiritualized way. will GMS bother with iron and wine after having seen this guy? you'll have to wait and find out....
here's a song of theirs:
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