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Of the Lion is again Bill Trevaskis solo with noise. He begins with a guitar, but its purpose is mostly to provide the seed for a festival of modulated feedback. There is also a keyboard, but it's not used for anything much like notes. The noise swells and fades and evolves with a fair amount of interesting long-term structure. One of the older Abbey regulars, fingers firmly in ears, yells at Bill to turn down, which inspires him to turn up and drive the guy out of the room. It's that kind of set. After a while, he inserts a drumstick under the guitar strings and starts whacking it, then screams into the microphone of a little toy keyboard. And then, rather mysteriously, he removes his mask, puts on a cowboy hat, picks up the guitar, and sings us a song. The hick Americana caricature that he puts on to introduce the song is perhaps a bit broad and obvious, but the song itself is good and provides balance to the noisefest that preceded it.
Over on the main stage, Geoff Hayton is also playing solo with guitar. Geoff's songs are lovely, kind of gentle, poppy things. And when you listen closely, they're sweet ballads of atheism and solipsism. They're also often funny. Geoff's a great guitar player and a decent singer. His upper register gets a little strained-sounding, but the bottom end is warm and rich; I wish he'd write for it more. His set goes by quickly, and he seems as surprised as I am when it's time to wrap it up.
Alas, that is all the review that I wrote in a timely fashion. We stayed for Bunk 9, and I remember liking them—in fact, I remember that I was worried as they were setting up, since they had a lot of keyboards and laptops, but they didn't sound excessively electronic to me. (The laptop seemed to be primarily a patch bank for the keyboard, which was used sparingly and well.) I vaguely recall good songs, good guitar, and cute guys. I'll have to see them again to form a more stable impression.
Then we went over to Great Scott, where I again saw stuff that I have to describe from fading memory. Brown Recluse were three people with at least two violins and I think an acoustic guitar. No drums at all, and a strong gypsy waltz feel to their fairly gentle songs. Good fiddling.
Full Moon Partisans were, I believe, from San Francisco. They mixed straightforward rock songs with an Eastern European feel, and in fact, some of their songs were in Russian. Their singer elevated them to interesting by virtue of his bizarre singing voice and stage presence; he distinctly reminded me of Plen-T-Pac from Double Dong, not that that's going to mean much to most people.
Wildlife were the band that we went to Great Scott to see, since Matt from our beloved and lamented Clickers plays guitar and sings in this band. A three-piece, they had an initial effect on me much like the one that Clickers had had, oddly enough: at first, it just comes across as a lot of shouting and banging, but as you listen more intently, you realize that there's a LOT going on in there. It's strong, raucous, compelling stuff that I'll want to see and hear again.
