At festivals it’s almost a given that you convince yourself of an insectoid ability to carry thirty times your body weight in beer three miles to where you pitch a tent/tee-pee/Fischer-Price ball pool (I’ve seen it done) in sludge and hope it doesn’t glide away over the course of the weekend. Getting sneakily ushered through the back door of a warm, dry pub by a wildly gesticulating bald man with a massive grin and a moustache is therefore probably the best start to a festival you can have.
So begins the much-loved Brainwash Festival at The Library pub this year, with Castrovalva being the first band we see taking the sort-of stage and getting the floor rumbling. Distorted bass forms the anchor to most of their grimey songs, which is matched by keyboards, shrieks and raps from a singer who looks like the UK’s answer to Jonah Hill and has an unnerving ability to slither through the crowd and get in your face no matter how far back you stand. There’s more than a hint of the late Test Icicles to both their sound and image, and as they are pretty much omnipresent in Leeds, they know how to get a local throng geed up. Sadly however, Dananananakroyd seem to have lost the ability to keep the home fires burning wherever they lay their hat and their act flops almost as badly as their guitarist’s fringe. At one point singer John Baillie Junior attempts to organise an infamous manoeuvre designed to smash audience members together in a violent embrace, which on this occasion ends up more like a Wall Of Indifference. As a break-up gig it’s anti-climactic, but it doesn’t stop the band smiling and grinning their way through it and they make an embarrassingly nostalgic point of thanking the Leeds crowd for having always been good to them. Leaving The Library feeling a little disappointed and deflated, all that was left to do was trudge home, make a hot-chocolate, don slippers, get a solid eight hours sleep and wait patiently for the real meat of the music the next day. (Yeah, right).
Those who managed to crawl out of bed and down to the Brudenell for the start of Saturday’s line-up were never going to be inspired by band names. Circles kick-start proceedings, followed by Shapes who set the technical rock onslaught tone for the next ten hours, playing crashing numbers full of flourishes that whilst technically brilliant fail to satisfy, sounding cheaply artificial at times. It’s time to literally go underground to Royal Park Cellars after this as the questionably titled Wot Gorilla?, offering no clues as to the genesis of their name, attempt to brighten up the gloomy basement full of hangovers with indie-rock full of flare and jangle. Emerging from the cellars feels like a rebirth, ears ringing, nostrils stinging, pupils contracting to deal with the world, and we head back to the comfort of the Brudenell for &U&I, a three-piece borne from the ashes of Blakfish and much more to the point than their previous incarnation. They still have a sneer on their faces (“save your breath, ‘cos it’s not worth the air you’re breathing”) but it’s a less pretentious one, and singer Thomas Peckett laughs his way through the small pauses between most of their songs. They strike a great balance between punchy, raw-boned riffs, trashy noise, and quieter gang-vocal led breakdowns, not as inventive as some of their peers on the same stage but much more gratifying in its familiarity at a tender three in the afternoon.
Keeping it local for an afternoon snack, Hyde Park’s favourite sandwich shop have Slipped their way into a usually hidden annexe of the Brudenell games room to offer hot bliss wrapped in bread, preparing us perfectly for the onslaught of Blacklisters. Drawing the biggest crowd of the day so far, their vocalist adopts a stage persona suggesting he’s very angry about something but has taken far too much diazepam to do anything about it, and they quickly get to grips with a meandering wall of noise that’s difficult to comprehend. The band have progressed as performers massively over the last few years, and songs such as ‘Swords’ are now super tight balls of fury that shoot, Street Fighter-like, from the stage. Their newer material seems to be moving away from being so heavily Jesus Lizard influenced and they are clearly developing a character and confidence of their own which looks very promising. Back to the odd little set-up in the games room for a refreshing Idea Shower, a three-piece who keep terse vocals low, making their vocalist strain for recognition over the cyclical tin-can riffs and tonnes of reverb. Backs to the small audience, and with the band playing two-feet in front of the crowd on the floor, it would appear that they’ve found some equipment lying around and just decided to go at it, until you clock the lovely array of vintage amps and pedals that singer/guitarist Matt Johnson gives a good kicking during the last tracks.
Only our watches tell us it is evening in the outside world, as once again the windowless Brudenell eradicates time and space, and embracing our cocoon we head to the main room for the unfailingly disturbing spectacle that is Kong. It’s a huge accolade that, considering the amount of similar bands billed today, the opening riff to ‘Blood of a Dove’ is the one that still clings parasitically to my memories. This is horror B-movie soundtrack territory, but there is no sofa to hide behind. Closing our evening at least, Lite are the big brother of today’s math-rock family portrait. Head and shoulders above most of the competition, it is clear why they’ve been invited back to Brainwash as they are the perfect summation of today’s bill. They also have a factor that a lot of bands of a similar ilk are missing; a sense of tongue-in-cheek fun that shines through in cheeky riffs like that contained within ‘Duck Follows an Eccentric’. Sometimes they almost sound like a post-rock influenced Lemon Jelly and have a similar ability to make people jump about to bouncing bass and electronics. What followed these Japanese rockers in the form of LA’s The Icarus Line is already the stuff of legend (including such juicy images as the lead singer taking off his shirt within thirty seconds, air thrusting simultaneously), but unfortunately this reviewer was not present to chronicle such debauchery, and certainly not one of the lucky ten left in the room by the time they had finished.
Where Saturday’s bands had been mostly intent on turning brains to goo with technicality and incomprehensible song structure, Sunday thankfully leant more towards a beauty in simplicity. Tubelord, surprisingly playing at the spritely time of fourteen hundred hours, belted out a host of songs from their new record bursting with potential. Perhaps on early as a ploy to wake everyone up, choice pieces of banter with the audience included the cool, ‘What would you rather have? Our new album or ten Maxibons?’ Catchy melodies grease their way into your head, and their singer surely wins Best Dressed Brainwasher, donning braces, tweed trousers a little too short at the ankles and a country bumpkin-esque curly blonde fro. A look immortalised by a friend as ‘Amish chic’. By contrast, Super Luxury positively embrace modern technology over gristle and bone for their drum duties and whilst ‘Pickering’ (as their beats machine has been dubbed) is warming up, they kindly offer liquid refreshment and excitement in the form of ‘Exotic’, a dubious E number-laden Lilt alternative. It’s cold too! Thirty seconds in their singer is hanging from a girder and scissoring a bemused looking man’s neck in an uncompromising Gladiators-style attack. Thriving on repeated bluesy riffs with a hint of cock-rock, feedback and inaudible screeches, the band physically attempt to burst through the ceiling of the cellars a number of times, thwarted solely by their own slippery tropical juices. On the other hand, Arthur Rigby and the Baskervilles seem totally happy confined to the warm lights of the Brudenell’s gig room and offer a little mid-afternoon comfort and solace in the form of lush folk with a lesser spotted brass section. Traditional nostalgic folk lyrics full of wistfulness and a singer with a voice capable of thawing the coldest cynic make for a cosy atmosphere which the mostly seated audience happily soak up.
It seems like aeons before all the necessary equipment is set up for Trio VD to join forces with Humanfly, but boy is it worth the wait (which isn’t exactly taxing; we’re still in the best pub in Leeds). The world of jazz Trio VD occupy often limits the bands that inhabit it from playing with musicians of other genres, whether due to the tastes of the venues or audiences. However, they offer something to hardcore jazz fans and hardcore hardcore fans alike, and are equally at home at Brainwash as they no doubt were at the Marsden Jazz Festival the weekend before. They play one movement of schizophrenic jazz thrash utilising some kind of hive mind to switch instruments and tempos throughout their slot. Their music is so head-melting that if someone told you they had played for three minutes or three hours in length, you would have a hard time telling who to believe. Humanfly take their turn from the floor next, making the audience crane their necks to watch as they show off some of their newer material. Tight as ever, their sound seems to be going in a heavy outer-space rock direction, showing they’ve still room for evolution, having already changed so much since earlier classics like ‘Carnival Of Trouser Snakes’. The collaboration with Trio VD that follows this set is driven mostly by Humanfly’s powerhouse of a drummer, seated amongst the seven other musicians and controlling the ebb and flow of saxophonic doom metal that takes shape. All involved seem a little bewildered by the noise they are creating at times and are obviously swimming slightly out of their depth, having apparently not practised any of this before. A bold move indeed to say they are playing to a few hundred people, and it all comes crashing down in a comedic anti-climax when Trio VD get a bit too big for their jazz boots, wringing sheepish grins from all involved.
We head down one last time to Royal Park Cellars for the freshly formed False Flags. These guys have members of some of the greatest noise mongers to have graced Leeds’ basements and backrooms, and belt out some excellent metallic hardcore in the blood-gushing vein of Will Haven. ‘Phone My Wallet’, their last song in a disappointingly short set, goes off with a bang being the only song to currently grace their Bandcamp page, and the audience is left feeling like they have just committed to an hour of The Godfather before falling prey to an unexpected power cut. However, fresh local bands showing so much potential is an exciting and promising way to end a masterfully curated and executed festival and makes coming back next year to see how they will improve a necessity, not an option.