The electronic highlights from this year’s End Of The Road festival
Despite focusing on indie and folk, End Of The Road – the best mid-sized UK festival, which takes place on the Wiltshire/Dorset border – is so diverse that it can easily keep the sine wave addict happy.
It would take a hard heart not to be won over by Adult DVD’s ebullient if geezerish electro rock with singer Harry Hanson’s canny synthesis of Liam Gallagher, Alex Turner and Damon Albarn scoring on chutzpah alone. I think it’s fair to wonder if, as the years press on, they will acknowledge the modernism, weirdness and queerness of the source material they quote so freely from – Orbital, Gary Numan, Hot Chip, Jeff Mills, Devo, Soft Cell – over that thundering punk backbeat. Because if they do, they could also secure themselves an actual future beyond being this season’s (very entertaining) LCD Blokesystem.
Failure to acknowledge the modernism, weirdness and queerness of the source material is not an accusation that will ever be levelled at Brooklyn’s Model/Actriz on my watch. Ostensibly a progressive post-This Heat art rock group, they use electronics to bolster caustic but propulsive grooves with hi-NRG, tough new beat, and panel-beating industrial techno. Vocalist Cole Haden – a disco diva with Norwegian black metal tendencies – is as comfortable with ballroom vogue as larynx-shredding screamo. Superb.
Colombian electro-auteur Ela Minus has been thwarted from appearing twice at EOTR, and the intensity she brings, being third time lucky, is sparkling. Cut through with pitch-bent, crystalline arpeggiations, she references electroclash, synthpop, IDM and French filter house, in a way that sees her step easily out of a long shadow cast by The Knife.
RÓIS look superb in identity-erasing black scarves tied around heads, and sound just as good with a musical core of synth-heavy post-rock forming a base for the Irish vocal tradition of keening – a Gaelic vocal lament sung traditionally at an Irish wake. The result is so nerve-jangling and epic that it makes Hans Zimmer’s score to ‘Dune: Part Two’ sound like ‘My Lovely Horse’. Which could come across as pompous if County Fermanagh’s Rose Connolly didn’t have the vocal chops to match it, which she does in spades. In closing, they make the cardinal error of covering the unimprovable ‘I Feel Love’. But, note this – they’re actually good enough to get away with it.
Another Country $$$$ are a clear highlight. A hiccuping, helium glossolalia of manipulated samples worthy of SOPHIE surf over lightly deployed live drum breaks and synth strings you might expect of Richard D James at his most plangent and emotionally resonant, not to mention the occasional pelvis-shattering bass drone.
Fractious inter-band relationships may bring Factory Floor’s set to an untimely end, but this doesn’t dent the fact that they remain one of the best live electronic groups of the last 20 years. Their new-found lush maximalism and reconnection with cascading noise could still be the herald of a new golden period for them, if they want it enough. Brutishly truncated or not, their set is glorious and crowns another triumphant event. Happy 20th birthday, EOTR!
