Photo: Richard Gray
Attending End of the Road is like being in a three day tracking shot, a panoply of uninterrupted sights and sounds until everyone folds up and troops away on Monday morning, leaving nothing but the festival's echoes in its discarded cans.
It has peerless food, a compact site, stewarding with a light touch, miraculously habitable portacabins and is a bastion of civilised revelry that Sunday’s torrential mud churn tested, but couldn't dispel. If the art installations are too twee for some, the deftly curated line up is for many the high point of the festival season. 2017’s headliners all put in a solid shift on the Woods stage from the resurgent Slowdive, to Mac Demarco, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Father John Misty: a virgin performer at the apex of the chain, who admitted that he was out of his comfort zone and 'trying his best' though this wasn’t 'his bread and butter’. But where EOTR excels, and where the real pleasures lie, is in the exciting discoveries lower down the bill and this year they were bountiful.
Bo Ningen kicked off the fun on Thursday night. The raven-haired Japanese androgynies, who used to be the musical equivalent of a child running round and round in circles until it collapses, have added some sober guile to their mix while retaining the frenetic, ear splitting chords they wear as a badge of honour. With a riotous sense of theatre they were a colourful counterpoint to the peacocks strutting the festival grounds.
Larmer Tree Gardens appeared twinned with Melbourne with three bands from the Aussie metropolis on the bill, the pick of whom was Lowtide, whose dreamy vocal textures, so typical of contemporary music, washed over 80s Goth basslines and soaring guitar riffs. In fact, the influence of Generation X irrigated much of the festival. All We Are borrowed New Order and Japan-inspired rhythms to create airy, danceable synth pop. The stand out of this year's electronica was Pixx, whose Annie Lennox-like voice added grit to her exhilarating, life affirming melodies and justified the rave reviews for debut album The Age of Anxiety.
Many bands segue between genres, which is a strength in some, but augurs a crisis of identity in others. Nashville's Aaron Lee Tasjan, in Friday's first slice of Americana on the Garden Stage with its adjacent proscenium arch, ingeniously lifted riffs and quotes from the pantheon of rock and welded them to his witty monologues of life's disappointments. There was also a counter punch to Trump, 'I Love America Better Than You.' Ryley Walker, whose early acoustic promise is in danger of being eclipsed in a dirge of instrumental digressions, was less compelling. 'Those last two were indie numbers in the hope we can make some fuckin' money,' he dryly quipped. Scott Hirsch's bluesy ballads knocked hard on the door, not faintly as he had modestly intimated. 'Valley of the Moon', the meaning of the word Ohio, was a melancholic delight. The pungent identity of the Deep South, of course, is never in question and Lucinda Williams delivered a blistering set of country and powerhouse rock late on Friday.
Singer songwriter Aldous Harding's facial contortions made her look subject to G forces, but the mood was haunting and contemplative. Julia Jacklin did not abandon the stage, in contrast to Green Man, where no one turned up in the rain. But in the congested realm of the folk chanteuse Courtney Marie Andrews was queen, her pristine voice simply spine-tingling.
Indie troubadours Band of Horses, Real Estate and the precocious, Beatles-infused Lemon Twigs all performed their trademark gear switches. L A's Starcrawler treated the Tipi tent to a dose of windmilling and pure, punk mayhem in a secret after hours performance. But the most thrilling chords were the four guitars of Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, caning it along the motorway, so to speak, in perfect kinship with their alliterative name.
On the experimental side, delicate Tasseomancy promised much and Sinkane's fusion of almost all the tropes of black music was irresistible in Saturday's sun. The glam rock theatrics of HMLTD and Foxygen less so.
The intimate Tipi hosted Radio 3's Late Junction on Friday night and provided one of the festival's most notable performances, the riveting fret work of Cretan George Xlouris on the laouto, in collaboration with former Dirty Three drummer Jim White. Xlouris White was finger picking delirium of the highest order. Two days later Toot Ard from the Golan Heights eclipsed even this with their mesmerising lead and sax riddles under the Big Top's suspended elephant. Their first album of pulsating desert rhythms is out in November and will be one to catch.
Inevitably punters sample at festivals and the constant coming and going along the paths that open up in audiences, like songlines, must be dispiriting for artists. But so many acts were thunderously received that the 'comedy of man', to cite the Fagin-esque Misty, will have felt less absurd, at least for a moment or two.
