It has been said that variety is the spicy saucy snack bag of life. For the Pandaman’s August Diary rarely has a truer sentence been typed, as we head out to the Great Outdoors for some seemingly endless end-of-summer fun.
First stop: the Wild Fields Festival in Norwich’s Earlham Park, up near the University of East Anglia. It’s a two day boutique affair and the Friday vibe is, quite frankly, jazzy to the max in the blazing afternoon sun. Shall we point out the sweet irony of one of the few shaded spots on the site being behind the Climate Change double decker bus? No, no we shan’t. JALEN NGONDA does that soulful thing with a guitar and a lovely Stylistics-styled falsetto; NUBYA GARCIA does that soulful thing with a white dress and some powerful saxamaphone solos; SAMPA THE GREAT does that soulpop thing with a great big phenomenon of red-dressed acrobatical dancers, like the US Olympic relay team letting their hair down at a mad Top of the Popped hoedown.
Headliners EZRA COLLECTIVE are on some mad kind of victory lap at the moment, hoovering up awards and acclaim for their tub-thumpingly exuberant mash-up of styles. Theirs is a honking, stonking mutation of brass and rhythm and bruised melody. Reach for the skas? Oh, go on then. It’s fierce, but also fiercely empathetic, with drummer Femi making up for the lack of any singer by raving about the communal vibes before delivering ‘You Can’t Steal My Joy’. As amiably cool and illogically fruity as the pineapple and raspberry cider in the Wild Fields fridge.
Second stop: Sunday at All Points East in Hackney. Small daughter Scout’s choice as a massive MITSKI fan, but being a modern online musical appreciator she also has a shortlist of supercool support acts to witness. They’re good, too: if modern online musical appreciation supposedly revolves around tacky TikTok trickery then the Mitski troops – and this is a seriously young crowd – are about to shatter the elderly’s cynical delusions.
Dare we say we saw Mitski play at The Victoria in Dalston in 2015? Oh, go on then. The crowd was 150 strong, the vibe was seriously emotional solo indie passion with just a voice and an electric guitar. Nine light years later Mitski is headlining the 30,000-strong throng, from The Victoria to Victoria Park, an East End odyssey if ever there was one, but the emotional passion still resonates across the scorched earth. She’s on exotic form as well, posing and preening and perfecting a billowy sort of sonic elegance which blows across the ecstatic teenagers like a well-mannered Bjork.
Those support acts? Oh yeah, Floridian ETHEL CAIN has a super-grungey looking band with her, which is smart because she peddles the kind of slow-moving sonic despair which would have had her out on a Sub Pop tour in the ‘90s, perhaps with The Afghan Whigs. A Southern Baptist upbringing instils her entirely victorious set with a darkly gothic fug – top fun, in so many ways.
Vermontians SIR CHLOE are similarly compelling, if a touch more hyperactive: fronted by Dana Foote, theirs is a spiky, beefy set with synths and shrieks and the odd scream. It’s like a lighter Garbage, a tighter Hole, with nods to ‘70s New Wave, and they’ve even got their own ‘Creep’ in the form of the mesmeric ‘Michelle’. Bonus points a’plenty for getting a tent full of teenies to sing “Make me behave like an animal!” Even SUKI WATERHOUSE, as shiny and slick as she is, gets in on the leftfield act by covering ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ and getting the biggest singalong of the day.
Third stop: the following Sunday at All Points East. No small daughter Scout this time, in fact scarcely a modern online musical appreciator in sight as the Victoria Park site is overrun by indie blokes of a certain grown-up persuasion to join the celebrations for Benjamin Gibbard. Rather excellently, as singer in DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE and POSTAL SERVICE, Ben is co-headlining with himself tonight as he celebrates the anniversary releases of ‘Transatlanticism’ and ‘Give Up’, both of which originally appeared in 2003.
Dare we say we actually released the ‘Transatlanticism’ album on fierce panda first time around, before Death Cab signed to Atlantic? Possibly not. He’s certainly brought along some cool old school friends: a frazzled YO LA TENGO, a sun-drenched TEENAGE FANCLUB, a boisterous SLEATER-KINNEY. It isn’t just indie hobnobs for the old boys either: a curious glitch in the running order sadly pits THE GOSSIP against PHOENIX, the former’s resolutely enduring disco shriek tussling with the latter’s impressively poised and immensely muscular continental groovery.
Sadly, Ben Gibbard’s co-headline slottery doesn’t necessitate a journey from the East to West Stages between the two sets, perhaps carried aloft in a golden sedan through the festival crowd. Instead someone eminently more sensible than us has decided Death Cab and Postal Service both play the West Stage with a 15 minute break between the two. Helpfully, Gibbard wears black for Death Cab and white for Postal Service – right down to the sweatbands.
It’s this kind of attention to detail which has sustained Death Cab For Cutie’s multi-yeared career, and which reached some kind of creative height amidst ‘Transatlanticism’s mighty peaks and troughs, with indierock vigour colliding with bona fide emo emptiness. And ‘Tiny Vessels’ is still one of the all-time great non-singles. I blame the record company. By comparison to Death Cab’s diligence the Postal Service has always been perceived as some kind of casual creative side order – Gibbard and electro producer Jimmy Tamborello never saw the point of making a follow up to ‘Give Up’, in spite of, or perhaps even because of, the fact that it is the second biggest selling Sub Pop release of all time – more than The Afghan Whigs, less than Nirvana’s ‘Bleach’.
Either way, that one moment in time is beautifully and bountifully recreated at this All Points East finale, with Jenny Lewis throwing some wispy shapes around Ben’s white collar guitar workings. There is a quietly exuberant rapture on stage and an enraptured crowd of mass cuddles out front, as this synthy, slightly dorky music created over two decades past curiously persists in tugging at the gently strung-out heartstrings.
Postal Service encore with an acoustic reprise of ‘Such Great Heights’ and a sumptuous take on Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy The Silence’. For once, we very much will.
THE PANDAMAN’S 2024 TOTAL: 323
