CARDIFF PSYCH & NOISE FEST | LIVE REVIEW
Womanby Street, Cardiff, Fri 24-Sun 26 May
The humidity probably had the biggest turn out for this, the second Cardiff Psych & Noise fest: on Friday the air was dry and there weren’t as many bodies to steam The Moon out, but by Saturday, as the powerful mind-numbing neurotoxins of day-drinking took hold, the sticky heat crowded into the little venue room above Tiny Rebel and pushed its way through the crowd until every new pint clotted in a sticky throat and every new body brought its own brand of heady radiation and odour. No-one was to leave that weekend without a headache that would ruin their bank holiday Monday, and the bands were only too happy to do their bit.
What is Psych & Noise Fest? I know it knows, but I don’t think it can articulate it. The weekend is a menagerie of heavy and alternative sounds, too indie to be a metal festival and too brazen to be kept on the same shelf as “indie” at all, the kind of music that can only uselessly be described as ‘alternative’, because that’s what it is. This fest is for people who get bored with other music.
Reflective of this is the no-star roster of the bands themselves: 60+ of them, ranging from Sonic Youth-esque noise-pop to doom metal to post-disco and back to straight-up noise, an assorted mix of new bands and radio-rejects that were always loud and always weird and never, ever boring, spread over Clwb Ifor Bach and Moon Club at one end and the Tiny Rebel upstairs at the other so that people could keep charging around trying to make sure they weren’t missing something that would rub them up the wrong way in just the right way.
While there were some who clearly knew what they were doing, striding that Tiny Rebel-Moon-Clwb Ifor path with all the confidence that whatever they needed was going to be right there for them when they got there. The fest was a lucky dip half the time, with all the while the dizzying possibility that something new and exciting could be in the next club, and the threat that something better could be being left behind. Saturday afternoon at Tiny Rebel sticks out among the fug (despite the actual fug): indeed, there were a number of bands that weekend who came on and caused the room to suddenly come online and take notice.
Free Beer & Bacon came in with their kooky pub-band name, plugged in, and declared themselves as the first major landmarks of the Fest with a burst of smouldering crossover-thrash. The three-piece casually strolled around their corner of the room, swapping between low-slung overdriven guitar and low-slung overdriven bass to set up an evening of heavy local acts for the Tiny Rebel, while the Moon and Clwb came up with the softer stuff.
Olanza could have flown in direct from the 90s Californian desert rock scene – the spit of bands like Yawning Man and Fatso Jetson with their sprawling reverb-led instrumentals – instead of from across the river in Bristol. At times, the crowd was smeared pretty evenly across all three venues, and probably Chippy Lane for tea and sips of water, so just judging what was going to be good from turnout alone would have had us in the front row for a lamb doner.
Some bands broke this rule. Twisted Ankle call themselves jazz but were really punky, angry, dissonant music in the footsteps of Scratch Acid or Steve Albini’s bands. Heavy bass, stony-faced commentary with track titles like Netflix & Loathing, and a given smile at actually how good their set was, Twisted Ankle really drew a line under the secret worth of Cardiff Psych & Noise Fest, as an exposé on the wealth of buried treasure under the Cardiff club scene and the scant media profile about to dig it up.
Live jungle drumming from Jaxson Payne [pictured] broke up the distortion pedal-based soundscape of the day and gave us our first dance; Payne tracks the classic jungle sounds to his electric kit and synthed his way to a surprisingly organic set in keeping with the rough live bands that had preceded him. The crowd broke immediately after, everyone rushing to get a place in Moon for the headliners of the Saturday: Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard, who packed the pokey little venue out from bar to entry way. MWWB are a doom metal band that have gone from making big doomy noises up in the Wrexham scene to touring Europe as the juiciest cut in the window in the space of three albums, their most recent of which wet the corners of reviewers’ mouths when it came out at the start of this year. Colossal guitar and drums are cut with soft, shoegaze vocals for a proper behemoth of a sound that built and crashed with its own pace (the band laughed that their 50-minute slot was only enough for five songs), and thanks to the community of the festival where bands and fans go support one another and mingle over pints, it was wonderful to find out that they were lovely people too.
CVC were a lovely surprise, a young funk rock band with heavy flavours of Steely Dan to round up the night who hit the magic trifecta of getting a shattered crowd of day-drinkers up again, getting them dancing, and then actually getting them singing their songs. In a festival of intense music for mostly musicians, it was great to wind up one of the days with something no-one couldn’t not enjoy, and CVC are well used to being that band.
words JASON MACHLAB photos NOEL GARDNER