Constellations Festival returned to Leeds for its second year with a line-up that read as impressively on-point and forward-thinking, offering up a set of bands whose relationship to the inevitable 'indie rock' tagging is at best dubiously functional. The press releases and well-designed website indicated an organisational ethos focused as much on staging and design as simply getting the bands together, an admirable foregrounding of elements too often conceived as para-musical accoutrements, but which in the case of an all-day event can dramatically affect the experience, for good or ill. The primary challenge offered to prospective attendees by the line-up, however, was a time management and schedule arrangement puzzle of taxing intricacy—making full use of Leeds University Union's bewilderingly labyrinthine set of venues, the organisers' commitment to avoiding straight-up clashes or momentum-sapping downtime meant that catching a full set by any given band required missing half or a quarter of two or three others, leading to exponentially perplexing decisions as to which fraction of which bands to catch, and in what order.
Luckily, the first choice was fairly easy, with only two stages running when the festival opened at 2pm, and one of those occupied by Leeds' own Hookworms. The band have been experiencing a steady increase in attention for their bludgeoning mix of hypnotic locked-in rhythms and ear-splitting layers of guitar and synth, and on this evidence deservedly so. By far the loudest band I saw all day, their set was a strange mix of seduction and assault, embracing that bizarre but effective paradox of shoegaze and coupling it to a commitment to following the internal drift of the songs. Structurally, everything was orientated around the deceptively straightforward repetitions of the bass and drums, whose odd syncopations led to a kind of non-linear movement, a cyclic groove rather than a race to the finish. And once you were caught in the eddy, there was nowhere to go—the walls of heavily-treated, tremolo'd guitars rose and fell, all texture and tone rather than melodic progression, exploring the interior space of the songs for as long as it took. Vocals, similarly, intoned and declared more often than sung, echoed and drifted somewhere within rather than standing clear on top, occasional repeated phrases seeming more mantric than denotational. Hookworms weren't there to tell you anything. By the end my blocked sinuses seemed actively compacted, and I needed to get some air. I'd consider making it a point of principle that any band that will affect your respiratory system as much as your auditory one is worth taking seriously. It would seem I wasn't the only one to reach this conclusion—the cavernous Riley Smith Hall gradually filled out throughout their set. It certainly boded well, so early on a Saturday afternoon, and marked an encouraging opening to the festival.
Their set was also a first opportunity to get a look at the stage set-up, teased in the promotional material as sounding 'pretty spectacular'. It was perhaps too early in the day to get the full effect, with some daylight still creeping in between the heavy curtains, and certainly later on it was more fitting and successful, but the overall experience was still somewhat underwhelming. A large number of white spheres hung down above the stage (a constellation of them, presumably), onto which were projected a variety of colours and some images of what appeared to be guitar fretboards. Technically, it was very impressive, with projection mapping used to target different colours at the different spheres with amazing precision, but the response was more one of intellectual curiosity (“I wonder how that works?”) than aesthetic appreciation.
After Hookworms had finished, I figured I could combine a period of convalescence with checking out the film and video part of the program, which was in the capable hands of Sheffield's Warp Films. Located in the Terrace Bar, it doubled as a chance to sit down and get a drink and some food, which unfortunately was to its detriment as much as anything. It was an expectedly noisy environment, with people displaying wildly varying degrees of interest; the films were projected onto a screen at one end of the room with little to draw any special attention to them amongst the various other screens displaying adverts for clubnights and drinks promotions. The few 'shorts' that I caught were actually music videos, and some of them were fantastic—particularly the hilariously explicit video Eric Wareheim produced for Flying Lotus' 'Parisian Goldfish'. It was essentially watching above-average music television in a bar, which is by no means a criticism, but it did seem like a good concept somewhat hampered in its execution. I can't imagine how well, for example, the showing of Harmony Korine's 'Trash Humpers' later on in the day would have gone. Nevertheless, it was something enjoyable to look at while grabbing food or taking a break from the music, and spoke to an attention to the details beyond the musical line-up which made me so well-disposed towards the festival in the first place—though perhaps not quite sufficient attention to secure the expected payoff.
Now, back to that line-up. Next I caught another local band, Double Muscle, in a venue called 'Pulse' which, in more than five years of living in the city, I had no clue was housed in Leeds University Union. At no point in the day, I would like to emphasise, does navigating the Borgesian recesses of this spatially-impossible venue become any easier. This might sound like hyperbole, but I invite you to go along and listen for yourself to the echoing voices of those still lost somewhere in its intra-dimensional gaps and Menger-Sponge voids. Having somehow fortuitously ended up in the right place, I see a tight and competent three-piece play intricate and abrasive noise-rock, a nicely varied mix of fleet-fingered bass and strange, looping guitar lines which fail to be married in a particularly compelling fashion. Perhaps it's the fact that I'm consistently distracted by the use of a headless bass, which still to me seems like a bizarre optical trick rather than a functional instrument, but the songs do not cohere into notable or distinctive wholes, leaving the experience somewhat flat without there being anything particularly negative to say about it. The material is certainly well-played, and a busy and appreciate crowd accumulates throughout the set, but I leave searching for the most tepidly positive adjectives to describe it.
Eagulls have been playing all over the place recently, and Pulse is packed out in the early evening with people wanting to catch them. Yet another local band, and it speaks to the festival's immense credit that there is such a clear focus on music being made in the area without it by any means seeming to reside in a nepotistic localism, but rather indicating a genuine conviction that there is a huge amount of exciting stuff going on nearby at the moment. Eagulls make the point perfectly, being easily the most thrilling thing I see all day, a wash of pure rampant energy, spilling out in every direction just to find somewhere to go. The band conjure up the long and potted history of garage rock with perfect sincerity, blitzing through yell-along bursts of surfeit melody and bristling distortion with out a backwards glance or much of a pause for breath. The highlight was a nod to their influences with a stunning cover of the Wipers' 'Mystery', which by itself is a dead-cert to win me over to fervent proselytising on their behalf. Eagulls were perhaps odd ones out amongst all the more thoughtfully progressive (in the loose sense) bands who dominated the line-up, but their music spoke more to an unmediated joy than anyone else's. Having said that, I wouldn't want to set up any banal dichotomy between smart electronica and stupid rock and roll, quite the opposite. Earnestness and energy are irrespective of instrumentation, but it just so happened that Eagulls pushed my heart-rate higher than my (valiantly) cold-suffering self had any right to expect.
As evening fell and it approached a more seemly hour for live music, The Antlers took to the stage for what was personally my most anticipated performance of the day. The Brooklyn band are riding high on the success of 'Burst Apart', this year's critically-acclaimed follow-up to none-more-bleak breakout hit 'Hospice', and have been engineering some strange combinations of melodramatic alt rock, wall-of-sound post-rock crescendo bombast, and wandering mood-driven electronica. They seem like a band that haven't found their sound yet, in the best possible sense; an intuition clarified by their evident intent to rework and redefine their songs in a live context: the songs' unabashed emotional intensity is projected to scales approaching arena-rock, without ever betraying a sense of either arch-brow irony or overwrought sentimentality, or stretched out to open-ended and exploratory conclusions that the band themselves seem to be just discovering for the first time. Peter Silberman's falsetto is a strange, piercingly affecting thing, almost inhuman at points, yet stops just short of unpleasantly shrill, cutting easily through even the loudest of the band's many amplitude-ramping emotional payoffs. Between these moments of somewhat familiar but not strictly derivative catharsis, there are more subtle explorations of varied tones and instrumentation, songs which move slowly, developing through accrued textural nuance and the fragments of Silberman's lyrics which can be snatched out of the reverb. The heavy use of electronic percussion seems perfectly fitting rather than bolted on, enabling the band to explore more carefully and assiduously the spaces the songs are allowed to open up. It is this strange, unresolved multiplicity of directions that makes the band so compelling, and which ensures that their tendency to stick at the bleak and desperate end of their emotional range does not descend into indulgence—or at least, doesn't stray into an insufferable and self-regarding indulgence. Because perhaps the best thing this band has to offer is the sense that an earnest emotional intensity need not be opposed to innovative music-making, and that indulgence is not in itself strictly a bad thing. It is fitting then that band end their set with the most over-the-top moment from 'Burst Apart', closer 'Putting The Dog To Sleep', in which Silberman pleads 'prove to me / I'm not gonna die alone' while the band pulls everything it can get its hands on into the mix to attain one final plateau of intensity. Ambition married so disarmingly to collective catharsis parries in advance the incisions of a critically-distanced analysis: The Antlers are a band I just have to admire.
As the festival's ostensible climax approaches, the inevitable drift of set-times messes up any attempt to pursue a clear schedule, and by the time I head over to see headliners Wild Beasts the show is well-underway, all of Stylus' three levels are packed and every clear balcony view taken. The band's curious mix of low-key rhythm-focused minimalism and baroque sensuality, the latter largely dependent upon the vocals of Hayden Thorpe, is a surprisingly successful choice for closing out the festival, neatly obviating the risk of narcotising the audience at the end of a long and busy day of music by the compelling consistency of mood across a series of tempo-shifts—from slow and subtle electronic crooners to high-energy concoctions of weaving post-punk rhythms and catchy melodies. Suitably and, frankly, unexpectedly impressed I head back over to the Riley Smith Hall to catch other headliners The Big Pink, who start a good thirty minutes late to a nearly-empty audience. Understandably somewhat nonplussed at first, nevertheless they slowly mount the energy behind their unashamedly pop fusion of mutant day-glo electronica and punchy guitar rock, and what little crowd there is responds with a euphoria that speaks to a full day of hard drinking. They are swimming against the tide, however; though initially a more obvious climax to the day, with far more hooks and far greater volume than Wild Beasts had offered, they fell foul of finding themselves beyond the tipping point, playing to the afterparty of stragglers and die-hards rather than to a fever-pitch of enthusiasm.
If the festival itself had a major flaw, it lay precisely in this: trying to do too much at once within fairly limited confines. But, again, this is hardly the most blameworthy of flaws. This was a festival which combined bold and varied programming with a clear if not strictly explicit commitment to seeking out the outer edges of indie rock, without by that same token asking you to relinquish the desire to get drunk, dance, and sing yourself hoarse. Logistical issues occasionally made the task of figuring out where to be, and when, more difficult than it perhaps needed to be, but these were largely inevitable corollaries to the sheer amount of content the organisers had tried to include. I came away exhausted, craving bed rest, but hardly disappointed, except by the bands I'd had the misfortune to miss. Roll on next year.