10 Photo courtesy of nme.com LCD Soundsystem Does James Murphy put any effort into being cool? Taking to the stage all in white, he addresses the crowd regarding the bands”™ mass-use of sunglasses: “Hi, it”™s very sunny, we”™ve not turned into LA arseholes, so sorry about this”¦not that I”™ve got anything against LA!” Photo courtesy of DrownedinSound.com Having to content with a deflated crowd following England”™s World Cup knock-out earlier in the day was not a problem, as classics Daft Punk Is Playing At My House, Tribulations and Yeah get the crowd jumping. With the sun setting on the final day of Glastonbury, high-energy disco-indie freakouts were just what the doctor ordered”¦ and if you were watching Orbital, who followed LCD on the Other Stage, the doctor is just what you got. The headliner on Sunday was Stevie Wonder, catch my review of his set, along with the other headliners and a Glasto review overall, here.

Post author By James TAE
Post date July 5, 2010

Photo courtesy ofÂ gigwise.com

The final instalment of my Glastonbury coverage, I look at some of the acts from the Sunday of the Festival. We focus on Everything Everything, These New Puritans, Gang of Four and LCD Soundsystem.

Everything Everything

Manchester-based Everything Everything blend a heady mix of Foals, Battles and pop sensibility to create a mind-twistingly catchy set of songs. They drew a good crowd to the John Peel Stage early on in the day, and did not disappoint, with a short but impressive set of their best-known tunes to date. Their debut album Man Alive is scheduled for August 2010, so see these guys touring in the near future. 8/10

Photo courtesy of nme.com

These New Puritans

These New Puritans have always been ambitious – songwriter Jack Barnett reportedly learnt music notation in order to write the parts for the 3-part brass/woodwind ensemble heard on 2010 album Hidden (Angular/Domino, 2010). Multi-textured, ambiguously structured songs, cryptic lyrics and drums pounding louder than a 1000-strong Roman Army. And Glastonbury was to be no different.

Photo courtesy of nme.com

The aforementioned brass ensemble joined them on stage to play a reworking of Hidden”™s closer 5, before launching into the pounding We Want War. The pace from there never abated, a constant drum-cacophony pushing the band through a set containing songs mainly from Hidden, apart from penultimate track Infinity. Rarely addressing the crowd, These New Puritans allow their music to confound the listener, presenting us with a backdrop of dense beats and leaving us to get on with the job of working it out for ourselves. In the seering weekend sun, though, we just don”™t have the energy. 6/10

Gang of Four

Post-punk legends Gang Of Four were given a late afternoon slot following up-and-coming post-punk newboys The Drums. It was strange to see 56-year-old singer Jon King take to the stage following the sprightly boys of 20 minutes earlier, but they delivered an energetic, sneering set of their greatest hits. In particular, angry run-throughs of I Love a Man In Uniform and Damaged Goods were weekend highlights, eclipsed only by the appearance of a microwave oven on stage, and watching Jon King destroy it with a baseball bat in rhythm to the music. Fantastic. 8/10

Photo courtesy of nme.com

LCD Soundsystem

Does James Murphy put any effort into being cool? Taking to the stage all in white, he addresses the crowd regarding the bands”™ mass-use of sunglasses: “Hi, it”™s very sunny, we”™ve not turned into LA arseholes, so sorry about this”¦not that I”™ve got anything against LA!”

Photo courtesy of DrownedinSound.com

Having to content with a deflated crowd following England”™s World Cup knock-out earlier in the day was not a problem, as classics Daft Punk Is Playing At My House, Tribulations and Yeah get the crowd jumping. With the sun setting on the final day of Glastonbury, high-energy disco-indie freakouts were just what the doctor ordered”¦ and if you were watching Orbital, who followed LCD on the Other Stage, the doctor is just what you got.

The headliner on Sunday was Stevie Wonder, catch my review of his set, along with the other headliners and a Glasto review overall, here.

Tags Glastonbury 2010, James TAE, Live, Review

By James TAE

James TAE is a Music and Tech Journalist, Editor for Spotisfaction, and writer for God Is In The TV and London Tour Dates magazine. Follow him @James_TAE

View Archive

Photo courtesy of www.citypages.com Focussing now on the Saturday of this years Glastonbury Festival, I review DJ Parker, Nero, The National, Biffy Clyro, Foals and The xx. Parker DJ Parker was a tip from Spotisfaction contributor Craig Haynes. A DJ Yoda styled dubtronica DJ, who gained some recent exposure with Where”™s My Monkey, a humourous retake on TC”™s Where”™s My Money, he was too low down the bill to attract the crowd his upbeat set deserved. This was a little gem of a DJ set, and he should be looked out for in future. 7.5/10 Nero Nero played twice over the weekend, once in the saloon style bar known as the Pussy Parlour late on Thursday, and once in the Glade, early on Saturday. There was little to get excited about on Saturday – especially when old timer Adrian Sherwood, due on after them, crashed their final song during his set up. Thursday, though, found Nero at the top of their game.

Photo courtesy of www.wma.com Dubstep is maturing. The initial burst of dubstep a few years ago – fronted by Benga, Skream and others – stagnated somewhat, as these pioneers offered somewhat surprisingly downtempo releases. It”™s taken a few years for their influence to build, but there are now a new crop of dubstep artists who, having found a way to add textural influences from euphoric trance and techno along side the dub, heavy bass, and supermassive glitch two-step beats, are now drawing crowds and delivering electrifying sets. This weekend, along with Rusko, Nero showed that they are at the absolute pinnacle of the new breed of dubstep. 9/10 The National When the year is out and the aficionados are making their Album Of The Year lists, The National”™s brilliant High Violet (4AD, 2010) will be finding itself on most of them. Following on from their triumphant Royal Albert Hall gig in May, they return to the UK for Glastonbury, a festival they headlined, on the John Peel Stage, 2 years previously. In the dark, enclosed spaces of their own gigs, their downbeat, crooning songs squeeze touching melancholy into all four corners of the space; this time, though, they were appearing on the large open space of The Other Stage in the bright early evening of Saturday.

Photo courtesy of DrownedinSound.com Due to a combination of poor sound quality and the less-than-intimate space with which they had to try and communicate their sound to a festival crowd, their set did not hit the ground running. Fortunately, there seemed enough genuine fans to keep the set going, and the natural professionalism of the band was put into practice only 4 songs in when lead singer Matt Berninger jumped off the stage, microphone in hand, and furrowed deep into the crowd as far as his mic lead would carry him – a trick usually kept for much later in their performances, which became obvious when he jumped into the crowd for a second time later on (a fact this reviewer missed, having to leave slightly early to make it for the Special Guests) -Â but one that enlivened the audience enough that the strength of their fantastic songs could carry them to the end of the set. 7/10 Biffy Clyro Biffy Clyro were the not-so-secret special guests on The Park Stage on Saturday, and they had a lot to live up to following Thom Yorke”™s exceptional set the day before. The crowd had swelled to gargantuan proportions by the time their set was due to start, an army of Biffy fans turning up with customary “”˜mon the Biffy” flags.

The Biffy indeed take to the Park stage in the late afternoon and jump into a thumping rendition of That Golden Rule, the start of a rousing set of Biffy Clyro”™s most successful tracks. In particular, the melancholy Many A Horror and easy sing-along The Captain, used to close disappointingly short set – the only mark on an otherwise flawless set – were met with rapturous ovation from the huge crowd. While not quite the surprise of yesterday, but an excellent set. 8/10 At the end of the set, frontman Simon Neil climbed on his speaker one final time, and I had flashes of him landing awkwardly and falling over. Turns out I was quite the prophetic. Foals Hot-footing it straight from Biffy Clyro, I needed to catch Foals. Foals on record are somewhat of an enigma, their live shows expounding energy and musicianship. But their first record Antidotes (Transgressive, 2008) was surprisingly downbeat. Firstly, they got a little ahead of themselves in hiring Dave Sitek of TV On The Radio to produce it, only to reject his copy and remix it themselves, complaining that he”™d made it sound like it was “recorded in the Grand Canyon” (have you HEARD TVOTR, boys?). They also decided to eschew popular pre-release tracks Hummer and Mathletics, and these two things combined left an album that lulled a suprising amount, by building up tension in slower songs that had a dearth of upbeat songs to release the tension. Live, though, Foals continued to triumph, delivering adrenaline-rush, 1000-mph funk-punk.

The new album, Total Life Forever (Transgressive, 2010), was a realisation of the growing maturity in the band. The songs are louder, deeper (take a bow, Mr Sitek), more balanced, more energetic. It”™s still definitely downtempo, but you sense, when you see Foals live, that they”™ve got their craft exactly right now – explore songs and dynamics on record, but see them live to truly understand the band. Here at Glastonbury, Foals were in full swing, performing the new album impressively, transmitting their energy through their music and into the crowd, tighter-than-tight renditions of their growing catalogue of tunes, and the standard ”˜climb on the rigging and then jump into the crowd”™, a thrilling end to a fantastic party. See this band live, at all costs. 9/10 The xx The xx build atmosphere from sparse arrangements. It was going to be interesting to see how they coped with the loss of guitarist/keyboardist Baria Qureshi, and whether they would replace her minimal arrangements, or attempt to work out arrangements as a 3 piece. They chose the later, almost totally ignoring the parts of their former band member.

>Unfortunately, the gig suffered from a number of avoidable issues. Following the electrifying Foals set was going to be a real change of pace for a band so high up the bill, and with only one 40 minute album behind them, they were always going to be padding their set out. Which didn”™t match up well when they, conversely, chose not to replace the arrangements missing following Qureshi”™s departure. This had the result of reducing their already downbeat songs into something so empty it was half asleep. There”™s no doubting the strength of some of their songs, and the crowd did their best to keep the momentum of the gig going, but ultimately the set merely was a sluggish run through of the album. Not until Florence Welch joined them on stage to do a live version of their cover of You”™ve Got The Love did the stage come alive; indeed, Welch”™s take on the stutter-cut vocals heard in the remix was the most impressive things heard that night. 5/10 The headliner on Saturday was Muse, catch my review of their set, along with the other headliners and a Glasto review overall, here.

Image courtesy of cnet.co.uk For those of you out there with an iPhone (there must be some of you that haven”™t yet moved over to Android), there is an update to the Spotify app which now allows users to ”˜multi-task”™, ie. keep listening to music after switching to other apps. This will allow you to enjoy all our Spotisfaction playlists whilst checking your email, using fart joke apps, and the miriad of other things you can do on an iPhone. In all seriousness, though, this couldÂ conceivablyÂ replace the native iPod app, as one of the new features allows you to play your synced iPod tracks locally instead of streaming them through the cloud. That, folks, is a game-changer as it will drastically reduce the amount of bandwidth that Spotify on your iPhone will use (as long as your playlists contain tracks that you”™ve synced to your phone). There are a whole host of further updates to the app, including the ability to share links and playlists with other Spotify users, access Spotify”™s music controls from the iPhone lock screen, and use Apple”™s remote to control your music playback. The app is available for Spotify Premium users and is available now for the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS or the third-generation iPod Touch.