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Sunday at Sŵn then and it’s starting to feel like a scene from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. You wake up at Dempsey’s, Kaz Bar, the Gate. You wake up at Tafod, Clwb Ifor Bach, Buffalo; post-rock, hip-hop, folk. Lose an hour, gain an hour.
“I am Jack’s aching feet.” Indeed. Over the weekend we’ve travelled miles walking between venues. Sometimes, as with Kaz Bar and Clwb, which are tugging distance of each other, you can be back and fore three or four times in an hour. Sometimes we forget what venue we’re in and you have to look up at the décor and remind yourself you’re actually miles away at the Point in Cardiff Bay.
Sometimes we turn up at Tafod, forget why we’re there and have to return to Clwb. Don’t take this as a complaint by any means – we are absolutely loving this weekend, and we’d happily lobby Sŵn for more gigs, not less – but it certainly wouldn’t harm if we had Jack’s raging insomnia as well – at least it would ensure we’d get to see a few more bands.
We’re not characters from a cutting-edge, literary satire, however, so we sadly miss the Sleeveface workshop at the National Museum and Scrabble Sunday - the day’s pre-gig activities – in favour of a well-needed come-down after last night’s antics at Tafod. Was that Legowelt or Cian from Super Furries mashing our minds with bass-hungry electro at 3am? We still don’t know, but our ears are still rumbling with the memory.
We do make it to Barfly in time for the excellent Tubelord though. Deliciously- disjointed and shouty, the Kingston trio come on like a splatter of colour and post-punk, all spiky choruses, frenetic energy and euphoric stage-bashing. They’re rather excellent and the perfect warm-up for one of the bands of the weekend, the genius-entitled Dananananaykroyd.
Dananananaykroyd are absolutely, ridiculously, awesome live. They’re a frenzied mess of guitars, hair, half-naked bodies, breakneck hardcore and grin-inducing mischief. They’re like watching a Woody Woodpecker-fronted Fugazi, or ‘Super Fuzz Bigmuff’-era Mudhoney body-slamming At the Drive-in. They have two drummers, but one of them spends most of his time in the crowd, shouting along with the other singer, who also spends most of the gig in the crowd. They’re like Beastie Boys at their most hardcore doused with the pop love of Life Without Buildings. At one point they spilt the Barfly audience in two, explain how at this point metal bands would expect a wall of death, but they will be demanding a wall of cuddles. So, as they launch into their next frantic, headrush of a song, the crowd run at each other and a mass Barfly-wide cuddle ensues.
In short, Dananananaykroyd don’t so much play Swn as slay it, rip it apart, cuddle it, kiss it and send it on its way with an affectionate tap on the bottom. We leave the Barfly silently, in awe, doubting anyone’s ability to come close. How wrong we are.
A quick nip across town to catch Georgia Ruth Williams’ delicate, harp-led folk at the Reardon Smith Theatre and we’re back at Clwb for Iceland’s Skatar, who instantly damn all stereotypes about Icelandic people being svelte and pixie-ish by looking like a Sunday league Welsh rugby team stuffed into spandex. Interestingly the inherent contradiction their garish stage-wear offers is equal to the wondrous, unique racket that Skatar rush through in a bizarre and gobsmacking set. It’s like they’ve swallowed a musical Encyclopedia and are frantically spitting it out, a page per second, a genre per bar, going from Electric Six to the Bronx to Celtic Frost is under twenty seconds, before bashing our heads in with hook straight from the rulebook Thin Lizzy hook. When the Large Hadron Collider has figured out the universe, maybe it can get on to the real business, and figure out how these guys write their songs.
Skatar’s set feels so much like being pulled apart by horses that it’s only apt to get to Kaz Bar and see Leeds’ Pulled Apart by Horses themselves. Like Dananananaykroyd earlier, they have no respect for the boundaries of stages, which is great for the Kaz Bar crowd who find themselves constantly greeted by screamer-guitarist Tom Hudson diving on to the floor, withering on his back and battering out slab-heavy riffs between their feet. It takes
Stabbing anger, grinding ferocity, vitriolic, jarring adrenaline. It can only be Future of the Left, and only Future of the Left can fittingly put an end to such a glorious weekend. Andrew Falkous has always had the same sardonic approach to an audience as a wound-up Bill Hicks, and tonight it’s no different. Something is seriously bothering him and gleefully we’re all the better for it.
Guitar slung typically low, Falkous stabs at the strings, eyes popping as he eyes the crowd. Even when he’s at the keyboards – one of the inspired additions that (whisper it) could take Future of the Left beyond the acclaim of Mclusky - he hammers at the keys with all the intensity of a pitbull at a piano. To his right bassist Kelson Mathias pulls at that grinding, hungry groove that underlines their whole purpose. While behind them Jack Egglestone does a sterling job keeping them together whilst doing everything he can to pulverise his kit.
Yes, it’s as ferocious as wild dogs infected with rabies and hate, but Future of the Left’s quality is how they underline such a visceral approach with the most immediate, infectious songs, not in their visceral delivery of them. There’s a definite acknowledgement of the ability (whisper it again) of pop under that brutalism, and for that they’re as much inline with the Pixies as anyone else.
They finish with an incendiary ‘Cloak the Dagger’, Kelson crashing through the crowd and swinging up onto the lighting rig before actually hanging upside down, still playing bass, while the crowd reach up at him, displaying their Sŵn wristbands and signalling an incredible weekend in Cardiff coming to a beautiful climax. This is your Sŵn, and it’s ending one minute at a time.
