![]() Her songs can feel light as air, but anchored by unsettling, cryptic allusions. As always, the moment when you start wondering if it might be getting a bit boring is swiftly followed by the realisation that you’d be perfectly happy for him to carry on choogling forever.Īldous Harding is another less-is-more advocate. Kurt Vile locks into a mellow mid-tempo groove with “Mount Airy Hill” and stays there for 75 minutes. Ethio-jazz legend Hailu Mergia helms a hugely agreeable set of languid, organ-driven funk. He’s also smart enough to know exactly which county he’s in, taking a very respectable crack at “Knuckle Down” by local heroes XTC. But for the most part his songs are more thoughtful and nuanced than his exaggerated party bro persona suggests. “The surcharge on your ticket is for extra psychedelia!” As part of a virtuoso trio with Andrew Scott Young on bass and the astonishing Ryan Jewell on drums, Walker’s certainly got chops, adding a jaw-dropping free-jazz freakout to the middle of “The Halfwit In Me”. “Siiiick!” he yells, after successfully negotiating a particularly knotty prog-noise coda. But songs such as “Optimism”, sparse and simple as they are, have a strange, hypnotic allure. It makes Jake Xerxes Fussell sound like Muse by comparison. On some songs she doesn’t even play chords, tapping out single notes to accompany her wan vocal melodies. Visibly trembling with nerves, she admits that this is the biggest show she’s played since singing at a police officer’s funeral. ![]() Jana Horn also plays solo, though not by choice: her guitarist was held up at the airport, necessitating an even more minimal set than usual. No, but at this festival, we’re not ruling anything out – after all, we have just seen a parrot and peacock hanging out together on a tree behind the press cabin. ![]() “Have you ever seen peaches growing on a sweet potato vine?” he sings. Jake Xerxes Fussell is another performer who manages to make it feel like he’s playing in your living room, with his unshowy but mesmeric folk fingerpicking. Even more impressive is that when she reappears with a full band on the Garden Stage two hours later, she manages to retain the warm intimacy of the earlier stripped-down set. Accompanied here just by a saxophonist and a giant dragonfly who keeps divebombing the audience to much amusement, it really feels like a special moment, particularly when Jenkins follows her own “Hard Drive” with a cover of the equally poignant Evan Dando song of the same name. Her raconteurial gifts also inform her gorgeously slow-burning, consoling songs. “I was asked to write an essay about my favourite movie – turns out I have a lot to say about Wayne’s World…” “But not for the reasons you think,” she explains. She hasn’t been getting much sleep recently either. For those feeling a little discombobulated and sleep-deprived, Cassandra Jenkins can empathise. It’s midday on Sunday at the bijou Piano Stage.
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