Day One of Castlepalooza 2009

Review Snapshot: The first day of this boutique festival was a mixed bag, a kind of rollercoaster tour of today's Irish indie. Altogether a great night, with just one or two low points.

The Cluas Verdict? 7 out of 10

Full Review:
This reviewer has always had a kind of love/hate relationship with Castlepalooza: though in all honesty, it’s not the fault of the festival. The first year it was my cheap, leaking tent and 14 hours of heavy rain; this year, the tent situation was circumvented by booking a very un-rock’n’roll B&B, it was the stomach upset, seemingly mild food poisoning from eating a dodgy chicken burger at the festival, which led to me shuffling off early on Sunday back to said B&B.

It’s hard to criticise a festival as selfless as this one. With a conspicuous lack of big corporate sponsorship (with the exception of HMV and Metro, whose presence were still unobtrusive), the whole weekend is run by volunteers and all to raise money for the restoration of the beautiful castle at which it is held. Not only that, but with the majority of all acts at the festival Irish, the organisers showed themselves to be dedicated to Irish music. On the other hand it is a boutique festival, and though eco-shops, workshops and a spa are a unique idea for inclusion in a festival, this one has begun already to descend into cheap gimmickry.

I finally reached Charleville Castle in time to catch Holy Roman Army at the HMV stage. Disappointingly for such a hotly-tipped band, they completely failed to make any kind of impression beyond leaving you vaguely questioning the point of having the sax just doubling the synth through most of their final songs. The Ambience Affair however, made a far greater impression by playing one of their best gigs so far. Some problems with sound and some beside-stage carpentry meant a delayed start, but The Ambience Affair simply and utterly absorbed the attention of the audience. A musician who has the layered structure of rock down to a fine art, Jamie Clarke’s guitar loops and samples really do create an inimitable ambience, part Final Fantasy, part small-club band.

Staying in the HMV tent after such an uplifting experience was perhaps ill-advised. The introduction promised an affair that was ‘the most deborched…and lecherous’… really The Rocky Horror Picture Show Live was nothing but embarrassing, for the people involved and everybody watching. Cue quick exit to the main stage and Angel Pier, a band with a lot of promise but a disappointing lack of stage presence. They are nonetheless a considerably stronger force than even one year ago, Angel Pier have a melody-driven pop-rock mix which is clearly still maturing.

Dark Room Notes, long a favourite of Cluas, didn’t disappoint. Even though their singer looked more trendy banker than rock god, the band is one of the few who can create an album-perfect sound without compromising live energy: energy is what DRN is all about, and while We Love You Dark Matter was one of the best releases of the year, they have definitively proven that their electro-indie was meant for the stage. Similarly, next band Super Extra Bonus Party simply live for performance. SEBP, though fallen quiet since their initial splash on the scene a few years ago, have a sound that is surprisingly refined and immaculately honed for the stage: club beats vie with heavy distortion and thumping rock basslines. In fact, SEBP would easily have qualified for putting on the best show of the weekend, were one - if not two-fifths - of the band being incredibly annoying onstage at all times (headbanging and generally cavorting in what just seemed a very contrived way).

From here, day one of Castlepalooza began to go downhill, starting with a steep dip: Skibunny. With a complete absence of a personality of any kind, the kind of lyrics that most people stop writing at age 14, some simply quite poor music and some cringey on-stage interaction, the duo’s only redeeming feature was their halfway-decent backing tracks. Never again. It was hard to fault the headlining David Kitt’s performance, but easy to fault the choice of line-up that led to his slot. As always he proved himself a brilliant musician and songwriter, assisted by Somadrone’s Neil O’Conner and playing some mean geetar. But as the build-up of heavy beats through Dark Room Notes, Super Extra Bonus Party and Project Jenny Project Jan made way for subtle grooves, loud aggression for nuance, and the crowd’s gentle inebriation for all-out pissed, Kitt simply failed to hold sway with most.

Anna Murray

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This is supposed to be a series of blogs that look at the individuals who populate Irish indie gigs and yet, in this particular entry, Key Notes will be profiling the type of person who would never be seen alone.

Introduction:
scenesters are far too cool for capital letters.  The time you and I waste searching for the shift key (or, worse still, caps lock) is time they can spend getting their fringe just right.  Indeed, such is their dedication to this, they only purchase products beginning with lower case letters, such as iPhones, iPods and, well, you get the idea.  It is one of nature's great mysteries that scenesters are very self-aware and yet, almost always unaware of their status as scenesters.  As such, they are amongst the most deluded of the Irish indie gig goers.

How to spot one:
For a start, you won't spot just one as scenesters are the cattle of the Irish indie scene, roaming, as they do, in herds.  The male of the species tend to speak at a higher pitch than the average Irish male.  This may have something to do with the fact he appears to be wearing his 15 year old sister's jeans.  Beneath these ill-fitting jeans you're likely to find pointy shoes or white canvas trainers, depending on the scenesters mood before he left home.  The torso tends to be covered with an equally tight fitting t-shirt adorned with the logo of a band the scenester may never have actually listened to.   The very worst scenester ends up looking like a Jonas Brother!

The female of the species loves Urban Outfitters, indeed, in a survey carried out by this blog recently, 82% of female scenesters listed Urban Outfitters as their favourite shop.  The remaining 18% pretended I didn't exist.  The female scenester will, therefore, often be seen without a drink in hand, having spent 85 euro on leggings that look exactly like those her older sister threw away before the start of Italia '90.  Female scenesters often bald quicker than non-scenesters due, in part, to their penchant for wearing hats indoors.

Behavioural Characteristics:
scenesters will spend 90% of every gig talking amongst themselves, about themselves.  They will spend the remaining 10% attempting to cheer and 'whoop' louder than anyone else at the end of songs while shouting for the band to play the one song they know from that album the NME said was the best thing since last week's album of the week.

It should also be noted that almost every scenester appears to be in a band though, strangely, you won't have heard of them as they've never actually played a gig or recorded any material.  They do have a 'really cool' name though, probably beginning with 'the.'

What they are likely to say:
'What was that support band wearing; it should have been my band up there.'

What you are likely to say:
'Look love, they have a set-list that they're going to stick to, no matter how much you shout.'

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The wider world’s perception of music from France is still based on a clique of ‘French touch’ electronica bands who’ve been around for over a decade. International audiences seem to be enthralled by anything French that goes ‘blip’ or ‘bleep’, flavoured with varying degrees of dreamy synths or skuzzy guitars.

But to our ears it’s all starting to sound tired. The new Phoenix album, ‘Wolfgang Amadeux Phoenix’, gives the impression of a band happy to consolidate rather than innovate. Air’s new track, ‘Do The Joy’, sounds like most Air tracks off their last two records – incidental music for some boho existentialist arthouse movie. And what have Daft Punk been doing lately?

‘Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix’ was produced by Philippe Zdar, né Philippe Cerboneschi, one half of Cassius and another member of this clique. Perhaps less well known internationally than their peers, Cassius (right) can nonetheless point to two cracking singles in their back catalogue – the banging remix of ‘1999’ and the slashing guitars of ‘Toop Toop’ from 2006.

Now Cassius are back with a new song from a forthcoming E.P. ‘Youth, Speed, Trouble, Cigarettes’ is the title and complete lyric of the track. It starts with an air-raid siren and features a catchy ascending-scale figure duplicated on guitar strums and a thin synth line. The lyric is shouted by teen-sounding voices, recalling ‘D.A.N.C.E.’ by Justice, the most recent off the assembly line of French electronic duos.

All this is packed into the opening thirty seconds – but the whole thing just repeats itself for the remaining three and a half minutes. It all feels a bit laboured, as if that one decent hook has to carry the whole track. Perhaps a canny remix can breathe some life into it.

The B-side, ‘Almost Cut My Hair’, is as mundane as the title suggests – dancefloor electronic that bangs out one keyboard riff ad infinitum. Or maybe your correspondent is just completely bored by le French touch and yearns for something exciting and new to happen here in Paris.

Judge for yourself – here’s ‘Youth, Speed, Trouble, Cigarettes’ by Cassius, set to extracts from Harmony Korine’s ‘Gummo’:

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