To The Farm My Friend, Tonight We Vacate Earth
For fans of post-rock, post-metal, math-rock and essentially all of the genres this newsletter covers, ArcTanGent (ATG) is The Event of the year - all of the big hitters of left-field heavy music, scheduled wall-to-wall over 13 hours each day across five stages. This year the festival celebrates its tenth edition with a stacked line-up including Explosions In The Sky, Meshuggah, Mogwai and more. It helps that it's possibly the best outdoor festival in the world, period.
OK, OK, admittedly I lack a depth of personal references for this claim. I'm sure Glastonbury is fine or whatever, if you can stomach your time spent in a camping city of 200,000 people, like a Deep Space Nine sanctuary city but where everyone's rich and there by choice?1 I hear good things about HellFest but schlepping abroad to camp seems like a lot of effort. And frankly, ATG ticks all the boxes for what I want in a festival. Great community of people? Check. Reasonable size? Check - around 10,000 people this year, perfect for my liking. Good weather? Haha, well - this year it was pretty good, despite the reputation of muddy quagmires and horizontal rain coursing through the stage tents. My wellies have remained mercifully underused for the past three years.
Look, if you're going to a festival to just chill, maybe hit the fairground and catch the odd band and headliner, this ain't for you. This is All Bands from 11am each day, nowt else to do, and frankly none of them are missable. Credit must go to organiser James Scarlett, who has lifted the curtain considerably on the mechanics of organising festivals in the 2 Promoters, 1 Pod podcast with Gavin McInally from Damnation Festival (bouncing around the upper echelons of the Spotify UK Music podcast charts). The approach to booking and curating top bands, to the point where as a pundit you have a clashfinder must-see for a fifth stage opening act at 11:30 am, is remarkable. This year the line-up expanded beyond the headliner curfew of 11pm with live Silent Disco sets till midnight from the likes of Karin Park and AK/DK (though my lower back was not up for this). The genres have drifted to the heavier side as the festival has grown, but there's still space for your fiddly-guitar weirdos and odd electronic acts amidst the likes of Electric Wizard.
Speaking of odd electronic acts - sadly this year presented the curveball of weird avant-jazz outfit Clown Core (who famously have played live shows from inside a portaloo) cancelling a few weeks beforehand, leaving a sub-headliner hole in the schedule and a five-figure hi-res Main Stage screen rented without a marquee act planning to use it. The response was to book Spiritualized at short notice - a suitably large band and nothing if not interesting as a replacement. The screen added a touch of gravitas to proceedings, a step up in production values and feel versus previous years, even if none of the bands used it to its full potential. ATG also landed a whale this year in post-rock legends Mogwai - one of the two most-wanted bands never to have played before (lamentably, it's unlikely The Mars Volta will happen anytime soon. Though we can dream...)
This might be my last time attending for a while for various (positive) life reasons. I have to say - it's been a personal highlight each year going with one of my best mates. Something like 100 bands over 3 years? I can probably count the average bands on one hand, if that. And a great excuse to fulfil the original goal of this site, which is to write about a shit-ton of bands you should go and check out. Enjoy that below, along with a playlist of all those and a handful of others I regret missing.
Listen to the playlist on Spotify | Listen on TIDAL
From the Pit: ArcTanGent Festival 2024
Fernhill Farm, 14-17th August 2024
Thursday
I can now claim to be a seasoned camper. Or at least, that my friend is, and between us get the tent up in record time to catch bucket-list band itoldyouiwouldeatyou open the Main Stage at 11 am. It's hard to overstate how important this band was to me during the early COVID lockdown - the frenetic guitars, Midwest emo vibes, and heartfelt lyricism covering LGBTQ experiences and screeds against prejudice ("far-right snowflake!") Frontperson Joey Ashworth owns the stage garbed in a bright red Mao jacket with matching hairstyle, backdropped by a hammer-and-sickle adorned with gender symbology. We get a bunch of new songs, but it's set closer Get Terrified that hits home hardest, getting me all nostalgic and emotional before midday.
Pleiades offer a quick, efficient hit of contemporary rock injected with a little post-hardcore in the throaty screams, like old-school We Are The Ocean meets Birds In Row aggression. Followed up with an excellent set from unpeople, formed from the remnants of festival legends Press To Meco - this is wall-to-wall singalong hooks and breakdowns off the back of a brilliant EP release earlier this year, even with the challenging sound conditions.
I enjoyed Hundred Year Old Man opening the Portals main stage last year, and their particular brand of slow-burning aggression captivates the PX3 stage at ATG, triple guitars creating atmosphere and viscerality with aplomb. Surprisingly effective, even in the sunshine. Also getting a repeat visit this year is blanket, who break out some of the best bits of their new album Ceremonia, bookending each song with humorous audio clips. blanket have always seemed a band in stylistic tension and visually this persists, with the frontman bedecked in shades, gold chain and sweatshirt; a sharp contrast to the sleeveless metal shirt of their drummer. But there's now a clearer purpose to their music, drawing on the heavier side of the 90s shoegaze scene.
We took a long break before one of the best sets of the weekend from Baroness, a band I have slept on for far too long. This is excellent throughout - reminiscent of the more post-sludge Mastodon sound, but with full-on rock swagger from their frontman, glorious vocal harmonies and duelling thirds guitar solos providing plenty of fist-in-the-air moments. Given the band's horrifying history in this area (having narrowly survived a terrible bus crash near Bath in 2012), it's a delight to see them finally grace ATG. Not sure what they made of the "I Can't Believe It's Not Baroness" merch from Curse These Metal Hands...
I was bummed to hear Clown Core pulled out - their mad avant-electro-jazz sound and abrasive visuals had promised to be one of the oddball spectacles of the festival. Instead we get 90s psych legends Spiritualized - an unusual booking for ATG. Despite the similarities of math- and post-rock to the prog and psych scenes, the latter had seemed a very separate prospect and it's fair to question whether it would work in this setting. On stage, they cut an anachronistic picture for ATG - musicians seated at the peripheries, a three-person choir dancing to the songs straight out of the Glastonbury Legends playbook. It feels a bit conventional, too normie-festival as the band crank through their back-catalogue like a typical rock band. But as the songs grow longer, stretching out into full-blown psychedelic rock-outs, it just about comes together.
Despite the expensive screen on the main stage, the best visuals of the weekend come from Belgian post-metal outfit Amenra headlining the Yokhai Tent, with dual projectors navigating the centre-stage king pole and bathing both backdrop and band members in eerie monochrome. This is an absorbing, heavy meal of a set - the sandpaper screams are at the extreme end, just outside of my tolerance zone, but across the epic post-metal riffs and pervasive sense of doom it is striking. The sort of thing you need a lie-down after.
After two years of mostly metal headliners we get not one but two legendary post-rock outfits headlining ATG. The first comes from Explosions In The Sky (who I saw live last November). The setup and setlist are very similar to that show - the band saturated in soft purple light, a mix of newer songs from last year’s End alongside a range of golden oldies. Post-rock as a festival headliner poses a challenge - it's better suited for closing your eyes (and there's little visually to latch onto here anyway), for waiting patiently through slow builds into epic pay-offs, the sort of thing that your average festival crowd will lack the patience for. ATG isn't an average festival, but even in an efficient 80-minute set, there are parts that don’t land for me. However, the epic soundscapes of Your Hand In Mine and The Only Moment We Were Alone, held back to the end of the set, are vast and cathartic enough to more than earn the admission fee.
Friday
ATG released a clashfinder spreadsheet months before the festival, providing the means to plan your entire weekend (give or take a few cancellations). It was clear that Friday was slated as tech-metal day - some of the world's best virtuoso guitarists (and bassists!) across the line-up, culminating in djent pioneers Meshuggah. So we braced ourselves for a day of polyrhythmic headbanging with a delayed start and much-needed rest.
We catch a little bit of Zetra to start off - a goth duo with the face paint and attitude to match, guitars and synths giving a wash of gaze-adjacent sound to match the darkened tent in the bright Friday sunshine. Then into the first clash-split of the weekend, beginning with The Sun's Journey Through The Night. This is full-on black metal with the white face/black body paint and masks to match, relentless double kicks and theatrical screams, marred by an uneven sound mix. Across at the Yokhai stage we caught the tail end of Blackshape - riff-heavy post-rock in the vein of Maybeshewill, somewhat more palatable in the burning sun.
Earlier this year I wrote about the marginalisation of bass guitar in the heavier technical genres when reviewing Periphery live. The best response is (obviously) to form an instrumental metal band with two bassists and no guitars. Hailing from Australia, The Omnific are enormous cheesy fun, trading bass-tapping solos and low-end riffage atop the goofy stylings of their drummer, who took every opportunity to hype the crowd and dad-dance at the front of the stage. I'm a sucker for a well-executed silly concept and The Omnific did not disappoint. We followed up with a brief hit of Iress from the neighbouring Bixler stage, a haunting powerhouse female vocal atop crashing power chords, like a less subtle A.A. Williams.
My favourite discovery of the weekend was Three Trapped Tigers, who I had mentally and erroneously filed as "another math-rock band that I'll get to someday". This was a mistake - TTT mix the freneticism of math-rock with jazz fusion (including Pat Metheny-style vocalisations), electronics and ridiculous powerhouse drumming. A sensational set that we only caught the second half of, and bittersweet as one of their final ever shows, the band calling it quits after a short tour this November. Between that and the quality on display, it was obvious why the Main Stage was rammed.
Another bucket list band next - Night Verses, whose recent album I reviewed last October making a first UK festival appearance (their only previous visit as support for Tool). Instrumental metal with more ridiculous drumming quality and a unique guitar sound, Nick DePirro showcasing eight-string low-end djent riffs and siren-like guitar slides with enormous talent on the likes of Vice Wave. Lots of cuts from the new album and sadly no appearance of Copper Wasp from In The Gallery Of Sleep despite the dedicated efforts of a sign in the front row. Not that the crowd minded, moshing hard to the heavy breakdowns of Plague Dancer.
We skipped on Frail Body despite their blend of post-hardcore and black metal on this year’s Artificial Bouquet making for one of my favourite albums of this year. Instead we took to the Main Stage for Ihsahn, formerly guitarist and vocalist of black metal legends Emperor. Ihsahn’s set is a blur of Nordic metal with the harmonic twists and turns of prog, calling to mind Between The Buried And Me at their weirdest. Definitely worth revisiting their self-titled album release from earlier this year.
A double-header of my favourite instrumental guitarists preceded the headliners, beginning with Animals As Leaders (reviewed in full last December). The band are on great form here, tearing through the trickiness of Gordian Naught and Monomyth to a captivated and game crowd that predictably finds itself pogo-ing and chanting along to That Riff from Physical Education. There’s a fair bit of background guitar tracking to supplement the sound of the songs, but it never detracts from the insane fretboard mastery of Javier Reyes and Tosin Abasi - who made a point to ask the audience for a ‘shrooms hookup for Meshuggah.
Plini headlined the second stage - yes, I did see him last month; no, I have zero regrets about watching either set as they were both fantastic. The chill tour setlist is trimmed of all fat and space to focus on the more dynamic fare, but Plini continues to cut a relaxed figure amidst his incredible virtuoso skill. “How are you doing tonight? No, that’s… You gotta save your energy for the best band in the world, Meshuggah. No cheering, just smiles. Relax.” Relaxing when faced with the intensity of the likes of Moonflower may be somewhat challenging, but we were certainly able to luxuriate.
So yes, there was a lot of hype from bands and crowd alike for Meshuggah. For the uninitiated, Meshuggah are one of the most important metal bands of the past 20 years, making commonplace the use of extended-range guitars with eight or more strings, and the hallmarks of the djent sound - zero-one riffs atop complex polyrhythms. I was aware of their strong influence on my favourite artists (and the memes around their “hit” song Bleed), but beyond that, my knowledge was limited.
The pervasive feeling you get from a live Meshuggah show is fear and dread - all-encompassing in both the incredibly crafted stage show (band members backdropped against flame imagery; an astonishing lighting rig setup that makes a mockery of the digital screen) and the music. It’s endless heavy riffs, repetitive and all-consuming, with the throaty roars of Jens Kidman as good as you’ll ever hear of the form. We get mind-bending guitar solos from Fredrik Thordendal, all weird chromaticism and bends that leave you uneasy, uncomfortable. The loudest crowd roar of the entire weekend greets the triplet syncopation riff of Bleed, which proceeds to punish you with its blistering speed and relentlessness for seven excruciating, exquisite minutes. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed the whole thing, even with the occasional repetitiveness of the set.
Saturday
We kicked off a huge ArcTanGent day with TORPOR, a sludge metal three-piece fronted by a guy who looks like your dad on his day off from the accountancy firm. Their auto-descriptive doom sound made the likes of Hundred Year Old Man seem fast and breezy. I doubt you could suggest a better way to spend your time at 11am on a Saturday.
The early state was necessitated by the toughest three-way clash of the weekend between FORT, Codex Serafini and Maebe. In the end I sacrificed FORT in favour of the other two bands who had firm favourite album releases last year. On the smallest Elephant stage, Maebe were having a blast - three guitars twisting over each other in layered riffs and energy, all fun fiddly fretboard work and giddy smiles atop big cathartic instrumental songs, especially on their single 50 Words For Bro. It was a shame to leave early, but I was well-rewarded - Codex Serafini were excellent live, the band garbed in red robes with black face masks, weird ritualistic vocal yelps from their frontwoman atop surprisingly danceable beats and blasts of saxophone. It’s an odd sound, very avant-garde and likely not to everyone’s taste, but I loved it.
Topping up our goth quotient for the weekend on the Main Stage was Hexvessel, again with the face paint and appropriately chilly backdrop for their occult Finnish sound. Over on the second stage we got to hear Vower - formed from the ashes of Black Peaks and Palm Reader, the tent was packed despite a lack of publicly released material to date. This was a fantastic set - the influence of those two bands clearly audible in the highly modern post-hardcore sound but with a keen ear for melody and hooks. If the quality here is anything to go by, this band could become huge.
Saturday’s Main Stage schedule from here on out is insane. Bossk, SCALER, And So I Watch You From Afar, Electric Wizard, Mogwai - show me a festival of this size that can put on a stronger run of bands. Bossk kick us off with their second set of the weekend - Wednesday’s show was reportedly a more eclectic affair with covers and guest spots, but we get the Bossk Greatest Hits on the Main stage: Kobe into Heliopause, some Atom Smasher, and a shoutout to the 2 Promoters, 1 Pod podcast theme with Lira to close. As when I reviewed them in May, their sound is tight, groove-heavy, immaculate; this time we get a cosmic spectacle on the screen to match, NASA footage and hyperspace travel animations to help you fully absorb The Riff.
SCALER (formerly known as Scalping) are at the vanguard of ATG’s growing embrace of more electronic music - having headlined the Wednesday last year they return with a mid-afternoon Main Stage set of weirdness. There’s a lot more guitar evident in the live show than on their recordings, and the pounding kick drums of new singles Loam and New Symbols are their best material - the more dread-filled weirdness of the other songs illuminated by synthetic body horror screen animations slightly less accessible, but no less compelling.
Given the outrageous run of bands, the plan was to take a short break at this point, but this was thwarted by God Alone distracting us by smashing it on the Elephant stage. I need to give their 2022 album ETC another go - there’s a fair amount of math-guitar wankery goodness here amidst the frenetic industrial elements and sharp tonal pivots of the title track, as well as a couple of new songs that show great promise for a future release.
And So I Watch You From Afar (ASIWYFA) planned to do a full-album set of their new release Megafauna, which is a good album with a very good closing track. We were in the mood for something a little more laid-back, opting for Outlander on the fourth stage instead. Their new album is a big step up, all laconic vocals hidden underneath gauzy guitar textures that draw from the growing heavy shoegaze trend. It gets a good showing here, the band taking on the slot with aplomb as a late replacement band even with a smaller crowd.
At this point in the evening there are no bad bands and too many clashes to count, plus the need to eat. So whilst Brontide were doing their comeback thing, and earthtone9 were returning to play songs from the festival’s namesake album, we grabbed some curry and watched Thot play an excellent set on the Elephant stage. Thot have a bit of everything - a six-piece with male and female vocals, lyrics in both English and French, big singalong hooks and growls, crunching guitars and gnarly synths. It’s an excellent set from a curious band.
Time for Electric F***ing Wizard. Legends of the British metal scene for their sludgy stoner riffs and Satanic schlock horror imagery. It’s a great show - the band blazing out riff after riff amidst a haze of weed smoke, the screen filled with psychedelic imagery and Video Nasty B-Movie clips from the 70s and 80s. Honestly, this isn’t so much my thing, but the quality here is such that it’s impossible not to enjoy the whole affair, the band seasoned performers of their trance-like grooves.
More clashes - post-rock legends Caspian against Slift (who put out an excellent heavy psych record this year) and Colossal Squid (electronica project of Three Trapped Tigers drummer Adam Betts). After much gnashing of teeth, we went for Caspian, who rewarded us with a crowd-pleasing set including the three opening songs of their early, heavy You Are The Conductor EP. Flowers of Light off their 2020 album On Circles might be one of my favourite post-rock songs, its steady snare build augmented with glorious melodic phrases in the best example of push-pull dynamics. But we get a real treat with Sycamore, which closes with more and more drums and drumsticks brought onto stage as the entire band migrates to hammer away together, crowded around the drumkit. A worthy penultimate set of the weekend and a step above their previous performance two years ago.
I’ve probably seen all of the big cinematic post-rock bands live now barring Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sigur Ros - across three years of ATG and other shows I’ve done 65daysofstatic, Explosions In The Sky, This Will Destroy You, Caspian, Mono, Maybeshewill. The other gap, until now, was Mogwai - arguably the biggest of the lot. Famed as much nowadays for their prolific TV and film soundtracks as for their studio releases (with 2021’s As The Love Continues making it to an unlikely #1 spot on the UK album charts), this was easily the most-anticipated set of the weekend for me and for many of the ATG faithful, eager for over a decade for this booking to happen.
The Scottish band may well top the lot. Mogwai have avoided the sonic traps of their US counterparts, whose winning formulae can become a little rote in their dynamic builds. The mesmeric repetition of Rano Pano builds and builds and keeps on building ridiculous layers of distortion as it winds across a captive audience. There’s the abrasive noise rock of Old Poisons juxtaposed against the glossy brilliance of Kids Will Be Skeletons and the almost poppy Richie Sacramento. This band can do it all, even with zero stage charisma (though the bathing in technicolour lights is incredibly effective, challenging Meshuggah and 2022’s TesseracT for best light show awards at the festival). There could be no more fitting band to close out the tenth edition of the Best Music Festival.
This Month’s Playlist
This is by far the most niche reference this newsletter will ever make.