LIVE
Stars in Their Eyes
CONSTELLATIONS FESTIVAL Leeds University, Leeds 12.11.2011 By Kate Parkin ▼
Photography by Bart Pettman
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Now into its second year, Constellations Festival is a welcome late contender in the festival calendar. Small and gutsy, the previous line up boasted sets from a very sweaty Les Savy Fav, Broken Social Scene,and the ear-splittingly loud Sleigh Bells, as well as an eclectic mix of local bands. Not just for students, the crowd run across a wide spectrum, this year drawn in by appearances from Yuck, Islet and Steve Malkmus and the Jicks, with a welcome return from Leeds favourite sons Wild Beasts. Peering out from the gloomy recesses of the lecture theatre are local electro-prog merchants Hookworms.They wander around the darkened corridors of our collective brains, spreading a dense glitch-laden fog of confusion before singer Matt Johnson tears through, screeching and howling. Proper psych-rock freak out for the digital age. A more stealth-like hit of the year, the geeky charms of Zulu Winter captivate the restless crowd, who take time out from perusing the running order to indulge in some self-conscious school disco shuffling. A few ludicrously cheap beers in, the crowd are feeling more free and easy, and it’s all the better because Cardiff ’s Islet [above left] don’t do standing still, strutting through the crowd shaking their tambourines at passing bystanders. The combination of buzzsaw keyboards and
heavenly voices shouldn’t work this well together, but when clashed against intricate layers of percussion it makes for one of the best performances of the night. At the softer, less experimental end of the scale, Stealing Sheep sit prettily and bring a delicate folk-laden charm to the smaller Mine stage.Thundering drums power the beating heart underneath as we swoon and fall in love with this Liverpool-lady trio. After quickly popping over to see some of Steve Malkmus and the Jicks self proclaimed ‘post-uni rock’, the schedule (hastily written scrap of paper stuffed in my back pocket) has gone slightly awry, so we battle through the crowd to catch a glimpse of hardcore quintet Eagulls. Still visceral and exciting, their sound feels tighter than past shows, and grabbing the audience and pounding them with hails of distortion they leave us dazed and thirsting for more. Taking a short break from the action I check out the ‘pop up cinema’ showing films and shorts by Sheffield’s Warp Films.The sound is down and there’s no proper seating, so it’s back to the music and Leeds post-rockers Vessels who are on roaring form, looping beats and switching instruments with polyrhythmic ease. In a town with a huge appetite for new music they still leave crowds open-mouthed. Creating
a hive of activity around rattling percussion, they shift from gut-clenchingly heavy to delicate at lightening speed. After a swift jog to the main venue it’s disappointing to see that Yuck [above right] are running behind, and plenty are pretty vocal about how they feel.The band work hard to brush off the bad feeling and succeed, because with Yuck’s dreamy low-fi it’s hard to be angry for long.The sway of a 1950s pop song, ‘Georgia’ and ‘Milkshake’ are akin to drifting through a cloud of marshmallows and I float out on a high. And that leaves, for us anyway, headliners Wild Beasts who return to Leeds as adopted local heroes – a far cry from their student days “strolling round Woodhouse with a fuck off angry look on their faces”. Manipulating ‘Two Dancers’ into a banging dance tune, they ramp up the drums and add extra synth layers, provided by Sky Larkin’s Katie Harkin. Songs new and old alike are greeted with equal fervour, as haloed in a fog of lights singer Hayden Thorpe plucks and teases out his voice for the final throes of ‘Lions Share’. When a band can elicit this much love from a crowd it’s hard to see where they can go from here, but with a band as creative and exciting as Wild Beasts the result will be more than worth the wait, and the same goes for next year’s