Live Review: ArcTanGent Festival 2023 – Saturday
Words: Matt Noble
Photos: Carl Battams / Joe Singh / Jonathan Dadds
Come Saturday afternoon, The World is a Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid to Die grace the second stage. With soft instrumentation and lovely Midwest emo-inspired melodies, their indie rock is easy on the ears and provides a nice soundtrack to the warm weather. The vocal lines are melodic and relaxing, though beneath the surface there's a steady undercurrent of inventive guitar leads, powerful drumming and mathy rhythms that has them feel right at home at a festival like Arctangent. The band boast a strong sense of harmony and they manage to keep it interesting as much as it's catchy. But whether you want to tune in to the musically creative side to them or just soak in the atmosphere that the Connecticut outfit bring along, there's evidently something for everyone here.
Deafheaven's set - performing the legendary Sunbather in full - is one of the weekend's most hotly tipped sets and there's a real excitable buzz in the tent before they've even gone on. The atmosphere reaches boiling point as the band launch into Dream House, and frontman George virtually plays the crowd like a puppet on a string. The band put on a visceral, impassioned performance to rabid moshpits towards the front, and especially in the more black metal-oriented parts there is a very real sense of fire, catharsis and intensity that the band bring into the tent. Otherwise, the instrumental ambient interludes, performed live, create a very cool and spacey energy to bring the mood up and down as the band require. The Pecan Tree closes the set spectacularly, with a particularly strong sense of emotion and dreaminess. Though there are some recurring issues hearing the lead vocals in the mix, these things can happen at festivals and it doesn't deter the band from giving it at least 110%.
Subheadlining the main stage are Igorrr, who come on backed by hectic electronic beats before launching into a filthy metal groove. I've never seen Igorrr before, or massively dived into them, though I have an idea what to expect. Still, the combination of baroque opera, avant garde industrial, electronic music and black metal - all within the first couple of minutes - has me right to expect the unexpected. The vocal layers and harsh chord sequences sound huge, backed by a grinding bass sound that makes for an unsettling experience. Igorrr uses some really cool scales inspired by Eastern music to inject different moods and shades into the material. It's like some kind of demented rave with a hundred things going on at once but somehow still working. Again, Arctangent really is the place for such experimental music like this and the crowd completely lap it up. Look at this or Zeal & Ardor at Bloodstock last week and there's little doubt that the weird and avant garde is alive and kicking in metal today.
After a little while, he warns the crowd that his band have reached the 'weird' part of his set - again, only would that wash as a festival headliner at a place like Arctangent. He rouses the audience into raising their lighters and torches for a ballad, and at one point the second guitarist doubles up on keys to illustrate the melodies with some lovely arpeggios. The backing vocals make the melodies sound colossal, sometimes to uplifting singalong prog, sometimes to add beef to something heavier. It's not one of Devin's high-budget shows today, which he acknowledges apologetically, but the blistering performance by the full band and intimacy Devin brings in involving the crowd stops the absent extra stage props from feeling missed. Plus, the raucous roar of approval from all as Devin puts on a stripy multicoloured coat shows he's got a few tricks up his sleeve as an entertainer as well as being an incredible performing artist. The band aren't short of whacky costumes and left-of-field instruments, even if the dancing animals aren't around today.
Photo credits: Carl Battams / Joe Singh / Jonathan Dadds
