Friday 20/08/10 Green Man Festival @ Crickhowell, Wales

The Green Man Festival brings left-field and emergent artists to the fray, genre-crossing the seasoned and homegrown. It's a role call deserving valiant Dunkirk spirits, as torrential rains bathe the site in what resembles choc-shit-soup. Harrumpf!!! If it were cricket, the tarps would be out and the club tent chocka.

Matthew & the Atlas's nu-folk like Mumford kicked off the opening day with vocalist Matthew Hegarty providing a captivating stage presence, and songs like 'I Will Remain' and 'Within The Rose' are bound to bring debut 'To The North' greater attention. O Children, meanwhile, are gutsy, gruff and grim with 80's Manc-land tones.

Mountain Man prove elusive but Caitlin Rose steps up, pure in timbre and Gillian Welch-like, the endearing 'Learnin' To Ride', 'For The Rabbits', and home-on-the-range balladry are comfort to routine disaster. Erland & the Carnival perform for a second year, their vintage keyboards and drive make mince-meat of 'Love Is A Killing Thing', 'Derby Ram' and 'Was You Ever See' with extended wig-outs, whilst 'Love Is A Killing Thing' rounds off a rollicking set.

Dylan went electric and the world changed. Fionn Regan's gone electric and put out one of this year's finest albums, 'The Shadow Of An Empire', paying homage to jangly 60's folk-rock. An aesthete apart, opening with acoustic debut album songs, the contrast startles with Regan electric-strung and snarling through 'Coat Hook', while 'Violent Demeanour' is groovy and caustic in equal measure. With assonance and ass-kickin' toons, 'Genocide Matinee' makes a bolt, while 'House Detective' is a bronco hootenanny, but closer 'Be Good Or Be Gone' resides deep within.

Steve Mason's pulled it off, as 'Lost and Found' and the up numbers cut a groove, whilst it's hazy baggy nostalgia with 'Yesterday', and a daft anthem with the King Biscuit Time cheeseball 'I Walk The Earth'. 'I Let Her In' is earnest, but an anthemic 'Dry The Rain' lifts the spirits most aptly.

While Smoke Fairies' bluesy strains fail to hold attention, F**k Buttons make a stance - so, f*ck the song titles, let's party! Filthy, dirgy, sawmill rhythms; lazer-guided assaults and drones segue together, raising the roof with 'Flight Of the Feathered Serpent'. It's necessary and refreshingly dirty! Only DJ Yoda remains to cut/paste/mash-up the dance hall with VJ-ing to dazzle and confound.
 
On Saturday, Joker's Daughter bring bemusing hall-of-mirrors songs and wyrd arcadia rub up "yibber yabber" lyricism, but Besnard Lakes anchor the day - slashing the skies with guitar swathes, scaling castle walls with gutsy guitar, reverb and falsetto, their droving walls of sound make for a glorious cacophony.

With clarinet, trumpet, mandolin, and a melancholic bliss - there's many Fanfarlo mutterings! Power comes with 'Luna' and 'The Walls Are Coming Down', a mod-antique-folk-orchestral-riot to mirror Arcade Fire and Beirut while Simon Baltazr's vocals swoon like Alec Ounsworth. Delicious! Avi Buffalo prove less so. 'What's In It For' delivers, but Newsom-esque squeaky vocals and deconstructed jams feel strung-out and indulgent, only with verse and 'Summer Cum' do the band seem focused.

Wild Beasts are tight, thrashing through 'Two Dancers', wrapping Billy McKenzie-esque vocals with cod-opera's and mock-dramas - the Beasties play it cool with pitch and timing. 'The Fun Powder Plot' has the band leaping, playing bass with a drum stick, while 'Dancing On Our Tongues', 'All The King's Men', and 'This Is Our Lot'  prove their might and stature. Rousing the baying crowd on 'Hooting & Howling', there's reverential airs by contrast for 'Empty Nest'.

Neon Indian plug the draw act gap with avant-future-pop from 'Psychic Chasms' - it's an impressive holding act - part 80's jeans store from squeaky keys, modulating funk with blasts of synth lazers, sonic clashes and noise FX, 'Should Have Taken Acid With You' is the stand-out amongst MGMT/Ariel Pink-like grooves.

 Zoologically, there's furry happenings, and hooray blue skies on Sunday. Message To Bears are an epiphany fronted by Jerome Alexander. A panacea for sonic overload, MTB fashion glorious neo-classical chamber-folk suites like Dollboy or Digitonal, spinning fine yarns and polyphonic threads. Melodic and utterly transporting. Someone's had a serotonin-loaded breakfast - Darwin Deez. Packing self-choreographed lunacy and antics between songs, DD make for lo-fi bliss and take us through the cosmos, over asteroids and clouds, after the bomb and under radar detection - there's top twisted love-songs, rallying calls and singalongs, for "...everyday ought to be a bad day for you..." - any expectations are utterly exceeded!

Lone Wolf are spooky with cello, at times tribal with pounding drums, and broody with goth-folk. While 'Letters In My Name' is the stand-out, there's the Scott Walker kinship and stylistic alignment of art-rock. Speaking of which, Field Music usher their cubist prog-rock with logarithmic arrangements and Tortoise-like meticulousness. The ability to exchange instruments is noted, but it feels so studied, like Sunderland's answer to Supertramp or Wings.

The diminutive and blonde Laura Marling opens her song-book with urgency and 'Ghosts', her power lies in channelling that tremendous range. Belying her age, Marling can write on highs and lows, as on 'Goodbye England' - she's also a whistler par excellence, rousing on 'Alpha Shadows' and 'Devil's Spoke', but the fearlessness shows on judgement day song, 'Hope In The Air'. What a talent.

Here we go round the mulberry bush with Mumford & Sons. They kick like a cornball nu-Proclaimers act and have the hits lined-up, a jug-band bierkeller act with kinetic banjo and brassy fanfares, but beneath the folk-cacophonies there's a new-man tweeness that feels fake with all the open heart surgery talk. Sod it - let's stomp! Meanwhile, Silver Columns put the camp back into dance with Erasure-esque programming and Wild Fruit ambitions, it's 'Cavalier' shameless and 'Columns' for fun - pass that vocoder, it's Brighton, circa 1990.

There's no one to match Joanna Newsom for epic and execution, from 'Have One On Me' comes the magical ''81' and Mr Daddylonglegs creepery of 'Have One On Me' - while the band play it close, it's Newsom's harp and meadowlark voice that flutter through the on-slaught of rain. There's alliterative oldie 'Peach, Plum, Pear', and 'Monkey & Bear' from 'Y's' is encapsulating with trombone and lute, but the baroque gives way to the jazzy Kate Bush-like 'Easy', and closer 'Baby Birch' has Newsom the band-leader inspiring the drenched. So much, so fertile, so long Green Man!