Electric Picnic 2008, a MySpace Tour - Sunday
August 19, 2008 by Aidan Hanratty
Filed under Anablog, Video of the Day archive
Sunday’s line up explained, through a MySpace linkaggedon…. Let it be known that I abhor the use of labels, so this was a painful exercise.
[Previously - Friday's acts; Saturday's acts]
Sunday 31st
Absentee; James Ford-produced dark, melancholic indie-pop. Think The Magnetic Fields, only British.
Adrian Crowley; Irish singer-songwriter folk music stuff. Hot Press love him.
Black Lips; Flower punk. Or so their Myspace says. Rough around the edges, and all the better for it.
Candi Staton; She sang Young Hearts Run Free! And You Got The Love! Unmissable.
Céilí House Allstars; The name says it all really.
Chromeo; One half is A-Trak’s brother. The other dresses like Cee-Lo. They sound like Prince with a vocoder and a sense of humour. A bit Marmite, they’ll probably draw a HUGE crowd.
Conor Oberst and The Mystic Valley Band; Basically a Bright Eyes project without producer Mike Mogis, this doesn’t deviate much from his folk-tronica template. Not a bad thing, mind.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYewptydkvE]
Cowboy X; An Irish take on indie-tronica.
CSS; Brazilian flavoured pop-rock turned generic indie whine. If you’ve seen them already (and no doubt you have, you can afford to miss them). If not, they can be good fun live.
Deadmau5; Tech-electro flavour of the month. Pronounced Dead Mouse.
Dengue Fever; Indie-rock with a Cambodian twist. Hence the name, I guess…
Dublin City Big Band; I can’t find a link for these guys, but I imagine they play Glenn Miller and Gershwin favourites. Fun for all the family then.
Dublin Gospel Choir; An Electric Picnic staple, expect these guys to rouse you out of your hangover on Sunday morning.
Emmy The Great; More folk-pop. Seems to be a lot in this vein on Sunday…
Farmer’s Market; Some noodly jazz for your inner beatnik. Don’t be fooled by Famer’s Market on the Picnic website, it’s a typo.
Faust; 70s Krautrock. Important.
Florence & the Machine; Mournful, slightly distorted indie-rock.
Foals; Their Myspace says that they are SNOTTY ART SCHOOL DROPOUTS HUNGRY FOR THE DOLLAR, so who am I to say any different?
Gemma Hayes; Husky-voiced Irish indie-pop darling.
Get Cape.Wear Cape.Fly; British acoustic guitarist. Recently covered Justice’s DANCE, with surprisingly good results.
Grinderman; Nick Cave minus The Bad Seeds plus some other guys led Bad Seeds side project. Not my thing, but I think I’m in the minority.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sshpJbeNF4U]
Hadouken!; Their album title, Music For An Accelerated Culture, says it all. Comparisons to Mike Skinner aren’t that valid; think less Streets, more Street Fighter.
Ham Sandwich; Kells-based indie-pop.
Hayseed Dixie: Bar fight music. The sort of thing you’d expect to hear in the bar where The Blue Brothers do Rawhide.
Hercules & Love Affair; DFA-based future-disco. Sexy as hell. Antony (of the Johnsons) won’t be around, but don’t let that put you off. This will be great.
Iarla O’Lionaird’s Invisible Fields; Irish music. I don’t profess to know much about this kind of thing, so I won’t say any more than that.
Ibrahim Electric; Meandering Danish jazz-funk. In a good way.
Jah Wobble’s Chinese Dub; An experimental foray charting what happens when dub collides with Chinese folk music. This could be very interesting.
Johnny Flynn; The blues and country end of the singer-songwriter spectrum.
Leila; Moulin Rouge era-sounding nightmare-pop on Warp. Looks like a definite highlight to me.
Lou Rhodes; Delicate, heart-on-the-sleeve style folk music.
Mahmoud Fadl’s United Nubians; Master Drummer from the Nile. Gives world music a good name.
Martina Topley-Bird; Super-collaborator turned solo artist. One to see if you like your intelligent female pop like that of Santogold.
Mark Geary; Token Irish-American singer-songwriter nonsense. Don’t we have enough of these guys?
Micah P Hinson; Deep-voiced country warblings.
Michael Franti & Spearhead; Revolutionary Californian reggae-soul.
My Bloody Valentine; What can one say? The reason a lot of people are going I’d wager. Your friends will probably mock you if you miss this.
Pivot; Noisy, Australian post-rock-tronica. Nothing like the other Aussie acts in town for the weekend (ie Midnight Juggernauts and Cut Copy), but a little variety never hurt anyone. Worth a look.
School Of Language; Bizarre vocal experimentalists.
Sex Pistols; Probably only worth seeing if you want to tick them off the list of acts you’ve seen. Unlike MBV, I can’t see any valid reason for them to re/perform.
Sinead O Connor; Again, not much one can say on this front. She’s a bit nuts, she courts controversy, but she also recorded this.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rO8JWbG6bVw]
Stephen Malkmus; He was in Pavement. Lots of people like him. Karl talked to him recently, so have a read to see where he’s at these days.
The Congos; More reggae, coming from some guys who worked with Lee “Scratch” Perry and Max Romeo in the 70s. Old school.
The Dodos; Slightly twee indie-pop tempered with a heavy dose of live percussion.
The Gossip; Apparently these guys have been around since the 90s, but only hit big with a certain anthem two years ago. Go for Standing In The Way of control. Then see what else is on.
The Roots; Hip-hop with real instruments and “music”. Drummer/producer ?uestlove is an arrogant nutter, but that hardly matters when he helps to put on such a show with this crew. All rappers should aspire to be like this.
The Urges; Dublin-based psychedlic garage music. Sounds like something you’d hear on a Tarantino soundtrack.
These New Puritans; An English indie/nu-rave/noise band who wrote a song about Elvis. But apparently not that one.
Turin Brakes; Yawn. This one is for the Franz Ferdinand fans out there.
Wolfgang Haffner; Funky nu-jazz. That’s not always a bad thing!
Yacht; Experimental noise from Portland, Oregon. Sounds like fun.
Actually, the other guys in Grinderman aren’t just “some other guys”; they’re all influential members of The Bad Seeds, especially Warren Ellis.
Thanks Kevin, duly noted.
Christ Aidan, well fair on the Irish folk scene aren’t you?
Adrien Crowley is basically Patrick Kelleher with more conventional production. Is it now necessary for a singer songwriter ep to pump out a little fuzz and be arranged primarily from samples to be considered credible?
Emmy the Great are a terrifically fun little tweefolk act, with a huge underground following in the UK.
Michael Franti & Spearhead are stunning live, and could well end up being the highlight of Sunday.
My ignorance may certainly have failed me in that regard. It’s not a question of credibility, rather of taste. Which, objective as we may try to be, is always an issue. I mean, Vashti Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day is probably my favourite album, and there’s no fuzz or sampling to be found whatsoever. But I’m jaded and bored and I’m not easily impressed anymore.
It just so happens that it’s hip to hate on singer songwriters. We’re still in the backlash from the over hyped Hansard years - never mind that much of the music (say for example the first four Frames albums) was excellent. That shit tires me out, the bizarre consensus that unless something is electro, alternative techno, retro or ironic indie it’s of no value. I’m not saying that it’s insincere, but it’s a taste that most of the Irish music blogosphere have acquired, and its smug expression is frankly boring at this point - just like much of the third rate electro played at most club nights in Dublin. Alls I’m saying it - don’t judge a group by it’s genre.