So, it’s Saturday at T In The Park. By this point you will have indulged too much on the Friday night despite all your best intentions, you will have gotten lost at least once, you will have decided that you are immune to mud and/or sunburn, then realised your mistake too late and you will have changed your mind about what bands you are going to see three hundred and forty two times already. These things will come to pass. For the sake of keeping at least one eye on the road, here’s what’s going on at the sharp end of all this festival hoo-ha, Saturday on the T Break stage.
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Glaswegian guitar veterans who should need little introduction by this stage – they were in The Yummy Fur y’know. Looking forward to this one actually – you always get the impression they’re capable of being ridiculously successful, but are doomed to being perennial underachievers, but I quite like that in a band. It’s the underdog thing I think. Anway, they’ll be bashing out their sharp but jangling, couldn’t-sound-more-Glasgow-if-it-tried yummy goodness and you shall enjoy it immensely.
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Her cover of ‘Just Can’t Get Enough’ may have been the soundtrack to a Sun advert, but there’s more here, honest. Namely a whiskey-drenched voice that comes straight from the school of unfiltered cigarettes and Janis Joplin. It’s mainly hidden behind some folky lilting pop of some sort, but it’s always there, growling quietly in the background.
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Straighforward Hives-like indie rock, full of woh-ohs and big drumming and a Scottish accent. Will inspire fighting, probably.
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Ah, rock, how I love your sweaty posturing. Chugging, riffing, precise harmonising, occasional shouting, all at four hundred miles an hour. Through a desert. In a convertible. With a bottle of Jack Daniels. And a pair of blondes. The sort that wear a high heels with their bikini. On a boat.
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Pretty in a way that only Americans with guitars can be, Priscilla Ahn’s coming into Kinross all the way from Los Angeles, halfway through what looks like a comprehensive tour of European jazz festivals. So T In The Park probably won’t stand out on that tour then. Anyway, she drops sweet little songs featuring a lullaby voice and a gently strummed acoustic guitar, all dreamy and tree-like. And she has one track called The Boobs Song, which – brilliantly – is about boobs.
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That’s what Paisley should be famous for – country and western. Jill Jackson drops proper straw-flavoured, pedal-steel-y eyed Nashville, with a deep Parton-y voice that I’m actually quite fond of. God knows what you lot’ll make of it when you wander into the tent by mistake, out of your mind on disco aspirin.
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Super slick alt-rock in the Hundred Reasons fashion. Strap on the tattered black T-shirt and sweat through it.
Healthy Minds Collapse – Best Intentions
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Brilliantly, on their Myspace, alongside the de rigeur press and blog plaudits, they include two awesome, unattributed comments – “Primus”, and “Ren And Stimpy”. Both are accurate, but neither quite sums up the glorious lunacy at work. Quite patently going to be a screaming highlight this one, that will be witnessed by too few people, only half of whom will have a bastard clue what’s going on, what with the roaring, the horn section, the waltzes, the swearing and the forty-seven people on stage all going crackers. Ace stuff. I once saw a band called Dark Meat at SXSW one year, and this lot are the British version, if that means anything to you. Which it should.
Punch & The Apostles – I’m A Hobo
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Math rock is SUCH a shit name for a genre. “I know, let’s form a math rock band, that’ll get us chicks”. Gah. Anyway, this lot are one of them, but that shouldn’t stop you liking their staccato timings, occasional forays into experimental jazz noodlings through the medium of impoosibly complicated guitar work. Usually I write this stuff off as chin-stroking masturbation, but I find myself oddly attracted to it.
Trapped In Kansas – Our Bodies Are On Fire
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Named after heavy industrial lifitng equipment (“Bronto Skylift s the global market leader in truck mounted hydraulic platforms”, apparently), they too sound diesel-powered and unweildy and probably would look a bit out of place in your living room. They basically make a fucking hefty old wallop and will quite probably make you cry.
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How pleasant. Delicate, restrained, talented, multi-layered, and thought-through in the Sigur Ros mould on the one hand, they occasionally show hints of Ride or Swervedriver 90s shoegaze-y rock. The sort of band you could start listening to one minute, and not notice an hour go by to.
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Originally from Oban, Mike Nisbet’s now in the brighter lights of Glasgow, plying his throaty Waits/Cave-ish guitarisms to appreciative and – presumably – whiskey-soaked like minds in crumpled black suits.
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More wonky rock from Dundee. Entertaining stuff though, with some half-cut riffing and lopsided yelping throughout. Nice.
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