A welcome new addition to the Cardiff festival calendar, Celebrate This Place is a cute two-day affair organised by the same team who brings us Sŵn in the autumn; featuring much of the same styles of music as its sister festival and also partly taking place across two floors of Clwb Ifor Bach.
As it is, Celebrate This Place takes place just one week before the partly Clwb Ifor-based Cardiff Psych & Noise Fest, with a lot of crossover in music style. Here’s hoping that there’s a consistent appetite among the city’s gig-goers for noisy, rowdy upstart bands to keep this gravy train going straight through into June.
Saloon Dion, for example, is exactly the sort of band that could have played next weekend too. At a first take, they’re a nice bit of rowdy distortion and energy to whip the cobwebs of a Friday evening off – but they also managed to charm us all in a callback to Britpop, and remind us that a new Blur album has just been announced. Even their slower songs managed to come across as potent and energised, not unlike Wire.
In all honesty, though, every other band in this review could have cancelled and been replaced by 40-minute sets of a squat man sitting on a stool on stage in silence, flicking beans at us from a tin: I still would have sat through it to see this next band again. In support of what I said earlier, I’ve seen Lunch Money Life play in Clwb at both Psych & Noise Fest and Sŵn last year, and they were just as good a fit here as they were then. Which is remarkable, considering I don’t even know how to describe them. Noise-punk-jazz? Whatever it is, it’s a bit of me.
Lunch Money Life are exactly what I want out of a live performance. Somehow both hypnotising and chaotic, I defy anyone to go to one of their gigs and not leave the room feeling at least twice as alive as when they entered. To close up this jabbering, they’re one of the most exciting bands going right now, and I just hope they’re back soon.
The last time I saw Islet play was just days before the pandemic hit – not that I blame them, just that I’m wary – in this very room, and this set took me straight back to that time. Islet creates such a characterful impression at their shows, designed to transport the audience to some faraway place. When I spoke to the band for Buzz, shortly ahead of that show, they had recently relocated to a little house in rural Powys. Listening to their albums of playful, sometimes eerie psychedelic rock, in my head I filled that house with flickering candles, bundles of herbs, synthesisers and bubbling pots. That’s where I picture them when they’re flitting across the stage hitting tambourines and twirling to wailing synth grooves.
Acid Klaus, the final act of the evening, receives the lowest share of the audience, but everyone still around has an absolute belter. Pounding acid-tinged synthpop fronted by a Shaun Ryder/Mark E. Smith hybrid who hated (but really, loved) the attention, Acid Klaus had so much campy unrefined character that it was absolutely irresistible for a Cardiff crowd to instantly fall in love, and bear hug them to death with our trademark raucous dancing and jovial heckling. Another one that I would definitely recommend seeing next time they’re in town, especially if you’re with drunken company.
Celebrate This Place, Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff, Fri 19 May
words JASON MACHLAB photos JAMIE CHAPMAN
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