Oya Festival Report: Thursday [Stephen M. Deusner]

Photos by Eirik Lande (unless otherwise indicated); text by Stephen M. Deusner

In the middle of Medieval Park are, fittingly, medieval ruins-- the low-lying remains perhaps of a house or public building. They're essentially stone walls forming a layout of rooms, and throughout the festival, people congregate here to find good seats, a place to rest, or just to escape the crowds. Plus, the main ruins allow a pretty good view of the Enga stage. Part of me thinks this is cool, like having an odd, old installation in the middle of your festival. Another part of me-- the American part of me that rarely sees any building more than 100 years old-- is horrified.

"They're not special ruins," an Oslo friend assures me. Besides, they've been here for nearly a millennium, so I don't think a few Tool fans are going to damage them.

Gogol Bordello

It's from this unique vantage point that I watch the first part of Gogol Bordello's show. They take the stage to rapturous applause, and immediately women begin dancing like Stevie Nicks and guys start doing high kicks, which seems like a new, slightly more involved version of pogoing. It proves especially tricky for the shirtless backpacker with a beer in each hand, who merrily sloshes suds in every direction.

The band's self-described "immigrant punk" plays well in this setting. Tall and lanky, Eugene Hutz is a magnetic personality onstage, sporting blue-suede ankle boots and an open red shirt that he eventually rips off to play the cymbals with. Despite the band's exaggerated movements, the show seems tame at first; there's a security area in front of the stage (flanked by signs that read "No Crowd-Surfing"), so Hutz won't be riding a drum into the audience today. But things pick up considerably once the cheerleaders emerge. Ultimately, theirs is an endearingly homemade show, held together by scarves and personality.

Malajube



Photos by Stephen M. Deusner

That Balkan backbeat still reverberates as I hoof down to the Vika stage for Malajube. The cultural contrast between the acts is immediate and immense. Where Gogol Bordello are colorful, multilingual, and manic as they retool rock tropes, the Quebecois quintet are much more reserved. They sing in French, sport drab indie t-shirts, stand intently in their places. Their songs mix Queen-style drama with ambitious post-rock noise, and in the open air and with the sun in the eyes, they sound lusher and larger than on record. It feels somewhat appropriate that the fans watch from beneath convenient trees or from within kiosks, finding shade wherever they can. In this environment, Malajube sound fairly cerebral, playing from the head instead of the gut and best absorbed while sitting in the grass and nursing a beer.

CocoRosie

CocoRosie would seem like one of the more divisive bands at Øya, but every Norwegian I've talked to loves the Casady sisters. Sure enough, when I give up the shade of the Malajube show, there is already a crowd watching intently as the band members do their soundcheck. One woman even shouts, "We love you, CocoRosie," which prompts an ambiguously slight wave from Bianca Casady.

There's an arsenal of instruments on stage, from Sierra Casady's harp to Bianca's table of toys. Re-entering the stage dressed as construction workers, complete with hard hats and reflector vests, they work a determinedly catch-all aesthetic, contrasting beauty with ugliness, high-brow operatics with pop-culture toy instruments. Over a black t-shirt Sierra wears a gold one-piece swimsuit that looks like a valkyrie breastplate; Bianca is decked out in B-boy attire: a sideways Yankees hat, billowy Pit Bull t-shirt, and baggy denim. These hip-hop elements bring them dangerously close to minstrelsy, but it's not Bianca's rapping that's the problem, just her appropriated outfit and gestures.

Their unconventional beatmaking may be the most compelling aspect of the show. They sculpt rhythms from harp, acoustic guitar, and an array of toys and bells, which reverberate into a drone bolstered by a guy beatboxing behind them. Unfortunately, CocoRosie create the same cavernous space for just about every song, which makes their strange set seem a little repetitive. They break the solemnity only with "Japan", which here sounds like a demented "It's a Small World (After All)".

TTC

An interesting counterpoint to CocoRosie is TTC, a Parisian hip-hop crew who are likewise appropriating black American music, but to very different ends. TTC are traditionalists intent on translating the style to their own French concerns. In front of a beer-soaked crowd, they re-create old-school flows and rhythms, down to the technique of ending their lines in unison. Of the three MCs, Teki Latex has the best stage presence, thanks to his hoarsely aggressive voice and hulking charisma.

Justice

I've been warned that the Justice show will essentially be an outdoor rave, and sure enough, the most visually stimulating part of their performance is Xavier de Rosnay's Olivia Newton-John t-shirt. It's essentially two guys standing behind a black table flipping through CDs, which is the first common observation/criticism about electronic acts at festivals. The second is that the show would be better suited to a smoky club at 2 am. I can neither argue with those assertions nor with the overheard remark that they're no Daft Punk.

Nevertheless, de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé work diligently to overcome these limitations, blasting the audience with a continuous volley of bass. They indulge slow fades and triumphant crescendos, and there's a sly wit to the way they tease the audience with snippets of "D.A.N.C.E." long before they actually play the song. The nearly all-female audience responds by singing along when they can. Well, just on "We Are Your Friends", but still. The only egregious element is the heavy-metal riffage on the final song-- showy elements in an unshowy show.

New Young Pony Club

I've missed the midnight sun by a few months, but even in August it doesn't get dark in Oslo until around 10:30 in the evening. 7, 8, and even 9 pm. look the same as 3, only slightly cooler, as if the breeze is timed. The upside is that without the natural stimulus of darkness, your body forgets to be tired and you develop a hardier stamina for the long day of shows. When New Young Pony Club take the Vika stage at 8:40 p.m., it looks and feels like 5.

The band has two guys and three women, but based on stage presence, it might as well be an all-female band. Nothing against guitarist/producer Andy Spence or bass player Igor Volk, but they're immediately upstaged by their bandmates. Keyboardist Lou Hayter, whose entrance in a strapless green dress prompts immediate cheers from the guys in the audience, does a stoic hip-lock dance throughout the show as she adds icy 80s synths to her band's songs. Singer Tahita Bulmer, sporting a half-shaved head that looks like an Annabelle Lwin approximation, performs limb-flinging dance moves that test the strength of her tight purple dress, and her vocals are strong and disco clear, drawing not from punk but from 80s synth goddesses like Madonna and Bananarama.

But any band like this is only going to be as good as its drummer, and Sarah Jones rides her high hat relentlessly, pounding out disco rhythms that propel songs like "The Bomb", "Grey", and "Ice Cream" danceably forward. Onstage as well as on record, New Young Pony Club distill post- and dance-punk sounds into their purest pop forms, and if the teenage girls dancing giddily all around me are any indication, this band will blow up well before !!!.

Tool
Even more than it loves Nine Inch Nails, Norway loves Tool. I watch the show from a hill on the opposite shore of the pond, but from this angled vantage point, I can't even see the band, who stand so far back on the stage that they're out of sight to anyone off to the sides. I'm told that Maynard James Keenan keeps his back to the audience most of the time and that the band don't allow any press photos of live video feeds. So the only people getting shots are those fans holding their cell phones high above their heads, and the only compelling visual element is the crowd itself, which is so impressively dense and sprawling and excited that for a few seconds I wonder if I'm wrong to dismiss the band so cavalierly. Fans even line the bridge that runs parallel to the festival grounds; they didn't have to spring for a day pass but have a better view of Tool's show than many who did. Granted, they also have an unobstructed view of several guys urinating in the pond, backlit by Tool's strobe lights.

Jazkamer




Festival Grounds





Photos by Stephen M. Deusner

Dan Deacon to Unleash Ultimate Reality DVD
Also plays NYC scavenger hunt

Manipulated, neon-colored versions of clips from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies set to Nintendo-game-style music: What else could it be but a Dan Deacon DVD?

The Ultimate Reality DVD, out this winter on Carpark, consists of a Deacon collaborative performance with fellow Wham City collective member Jimmy Joe Roche [above left] and two live drummers, one from Ponytail and one from Deacon's frequent tourmates Video Hippos.

The performance pairs a 40-minute Deacon composition with Roche's "psychedelic montage of Arnold Schwarzenegger films that is projected at a monumental scale," according to a press release. It premiered at last summer's Whartscape Festival in Baltimore, and has since appeared in various other galleries and museums on the East Coast.

Two clips from the DVD are linked below.

Deacon continues his live madness tonight, August 10, with his appearance in Manchester, England, and he has added a few more tour dates as well.

By its varied, manic, and haphazard nature, one of those shows is a perfect match for Deacon himself: a September 2 performance at the end of New York magazine's Labor Day weekend scavenger hunt.

More info about the event, including the mention of the $1000 prize for the winning team, is in the flier after the jump. [MORE...]

Angels of Light Prep We Are Him LP

Former Swans main man Michael Gira will return with the fifth full-length with his Angels of Light project on August 21. The record, titled We Are Him and set for release on Gira's own Young God Records, is the follow-up to 2005's Sing "Other People"; it also features quite a host of guest musicians.

Previous Gira collaborators Akron/Family served as a backing band to lay down basic tracks for the album, and other contributors include Christoph Hahn (Swans), Bill Rieflin (Swans, Ministry, R.E.M.), Julia Kent (Antony and the Johnsons), Eszter Balint (Stranger Than Paradise), Steve Moses (Lambic), new Young God signee Larkin Grimm, and "Spinning on Air" host David Garland.

To celebrate the album's release, Gira will play a solo show at NYC's Highline Ballroom on September 14. Marissa Nadler and Castanets round out the ace bill. [MORE...]

UNKLE Play First Tour as Live Band

On the heels of the recently released War Stories, James Lavelle has turned UNKLE into a live band for the first time ever and scheduled tour dates through to the end of October.

The band's next show is in Osaka, Japan on August 11, and they will make their North American debut in New York City on October 18, as part of the CMJ Music Marathon. [MORE...]

Twilight Sad Extend Autumns Tour Into Autumn

Photo by Kathryn Yu

Moody Glaswegians the Twilight Sad have extended their current tour of Europe to include quite a few more UK dates. Over two months more, to be sure, which will allow the quartet to play Autumns in one of its natural seasonal habitats. The Scottish upstarts open for fellow countrymen Idlewild on most of the newly-added dates.

The next Twilight Sad show is August 17 at Aarhus, Denmark's Pop Revo festival. [MORE...]

YLT, Lekman, Danielson, Super Furries Play End Fest
Plus: Twilight Sad, I'm From Barcelona, Concretes, My Brightest Diamond, Midlake, Lambchop

The End of the Road Festival, going down over the long weekend of September 14-16 at Larmer Tree Gardens in North Dorset, England, touts itself as "an intimate music festival for just 5,000 people." Guess that kind of explains why glammy David Vandervelde is among the louder acts attendees are likely to see at the fest.

Still, you and 4,999 of your closest mates can mellow your minds to the strains of a seriously impressive lineup, which includes Yo La Tengo, Super Furry Animals, Architecture in Helsinki, I'm From Barcelona, Jens Lekman, the Concretes, the Twilight Sad, Scout Niblett, Danielson, Lambchop, Howe Gelb, My Brightest Diamond, Midlake, Joan as Police Woman, Richard Swift, the aforementioned Vandervelde, Loney, Dear, British Sea Power, David Thomas Broughton, Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter, Robyn Hitchcock, Brakes, Archie Bronson Outfit, Euros Childs, Devastations, the (Band of) Bees, Jim White, King Creosote, Viking Moses!, and a bunch of basically chilled-out artists. What, no Boyz II Men?

John and Yoko Give Peace a Song on DVD

On August 27, Fabulous Films will give a UK release to Give Peace a Song, a DVD document of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Give Peace a Chance" performance from the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal in 1969.

The performance was the culmination of a seven-day "bed-in" protest against violence in which John and Yoko moved into the hotel's 1742 suite and...sat in bed. Since we weren't there (or even born yet), we're not quite sure (though we can imagine) what else they did besides just sitting.

That's where Give Peace a Song comes in, as the DVD includes not only the performance itself but also documentation of the events leading up to it from various visitors, including some of the couple's own footage.

The Roots to Tour With Big Daddy Kane, MC Lyte
Also: Dave Matthews Band :(

Photo by Kirstie Shanley

Despite scattered talk of a new record, ?uestlove and his Roots keep on trucking behind last year's Game Theory. Not that we're complaining, especially since two of their next three dates are on the pretty sweet Rock the Bells tour.

After they wrap up those shows, the Roots will appear in East Troy, Wisconsin for two shows with...Dave Matthews Band. They will then try to wash that image out of our minds by leading the VH1-sponsored Hip Hop Honors Tour with Big Daddy Kane and MC Lyte shortly thereafter.

The Roots' next show is a non-Rock the Bells appearance in Salt Lake City tomorrow (August 10). [MORE...]

Professor Murder to Slay on Short Summer Tour

New York City, New York State's Professor Murder will enlighten the citizens of North America to their particular brand of whatever-we're-calling-music-with-a-lot-of-
cowbell-these-days on a recently announced tour.

The fun begins August 16 in Washington, D.C. and ends a mere week later, on August 23 in Montreal. With no full-length yet to speak of, these Pitchfork Music Festival graduates will still be out there in support of 2006's excellent Rides the Subway EP and the forthcoming "Dutch Hex" 12". [MORE...]

Deerhunter Add Dates Overseas, Play School Benefit

Photo by Kristin Klein

Deerhunter will take a break from feverishly blogging to tour very soon, and the Atlanta quintet have now added a European leg to take place later this fall.

The band's next show, however, is tomorrow (August 10) in their own hometown, and it's a benefit to help the city's Burgess-Peterson Academy pay for a new playground for its students. Deerhunter-affiliated acts Spooks and Chopper will open. Thanks to Trey Lindsay for the benefit tip. [MORE...]

Ryan Adams: Road Warrior

What comes after umpteenth? America's favorite book-cover-designer-guy, muse to Kings, emcee extraordinaire, and all-around homeboy Ryan Adams has squeaked a whopping six more dates with the Cardinals into his lengthy tour itinerary. "Easy Tiger," you might say, but this dude just keeps going!

Now Madison, Houston, Dallas, Birmingham, Lakewood, and NYC can get them a piece of that Ryan Adams action, and I can go back to having my toes fondled by the Pitchfork house pedicurist. [MORE...]

CMJ 07: Spoon, Xiu Xiu, Deerhunter, Deacon, Justice
Plus: Simian Mobile Disco, Jesu, Islands, Devin the Dude, Marnie Stern, Ponys, No Age

Start raiding the couch cushions for cab fare now! The CMJ Music Marathon-- NYC's autumn answer to Austin's spring music orgy SXSW-- announced its initial lineup today, and stakes is already high.

CMJ 2007 goes down October 16-20 in America's most populous city, spread across many of said city's hallowed venues-- venues which, as any industry vet will tell you, are significantly further apart than their counterparts down in Austin. Which means commitment is key, people. With that said, here's just a slice of what, in most cases, you'll have to decide between: Spoon, Xiu Xiu, Deerhunter, Dan Deacon, Justice, Simian Mobile Disco, Marnie Stern, Jesu, Islands (whoa, remember them?), Mates of State, Devin the Dude, No Age, the Ponys, Crystal Castles, Brother Ali, the Brunettes, MSTRKRFT, A-Trak, UNKLE, Little Brother, British Sea Power, Del Tha Funky Homosapien, KavinSky, Ruins, and more.

Complete schedule details are still emerging from the fog, but we do know Spoon is set to close out the fest with an October 20 show at Roseland Ballroom, while UNKLE creep through Webster Hall on October 18.

Do you have a news tip for us? Anything crazy happen at a show you attended recently? Do you have inside info on the bands we cover? Is one of your favorite artists (that's not somebody you know personally) releasing a new record you'd like to see covered? You will remain completely anonymous, unless we are given your express permission to reveal your identity. (Please note that publicists, managers, booking agents, and other artist representatives are generally exempt from this rule, but will also be granted anonymity if requested.)