Avant-Garde Epiphanies In Tilburg: Roadburn 2011 Reviewed (The Quietus)

Jamie Thomson reports back on the finest that this year’s Roadburn festival had to offer, from Swans to Sunn O))) and Godflesh to Ghost.

Once a year, the cream of the world’s avant-garde, experimental, drone and doom bands converge on a small town in southern Holland under the guise of the Roadburn festival. Even by the organiser’s own high standards, this year’s line-up was bursting at the seams with big hitters. After negotiating a 130-mile cycle journey to get here from London (of which I will document at a later date), I was here to navigate a festival bill about to buckle under the weight of its own heaviosity, and one that threw up some interesting dilemmas (Pentagram vs Circle; Earth vs Corrosion of Conformity; drinking all night vs a decent sleep for once). Here’s how I fared:

Thursday

Alcest’s album Ecailles De Lune was one of my favourite records of 2010, so I was determined to kick off the festival on a high. Ethereal and dreamlike, this was shoegaze black metal with the emphasis firmly on the shoey – only towards the end of the set did they unleash the blast beats that drag their drowsy invocations into darker territories. Niege – Alcest’s creative force – and his backing band may have been slightly intimidated by the vast expanses of the main arena, but it barely showed when they really let rip. Anyway, Roadburn had just started, and I was in far too good a mood to start splitting hairs.

As well as residing at the 013, a remarkable venue with three perfectly soundproofed and perfect sounding rooms, from the 3,000 capacity main arena to the tiny Bat Cave up in the heavens, Roadburn – for the last two years – has spilled over into the Midi theatre a street away. It was here, appropriately nestled beside the spectacular two-spired church in Tilburg’s main square, where I discovered my new favourite band.

Ghost‘s psyche-pop take on the high-camp satanism of early Mercyful Fate, adorned with huge hook-laden choruses, performed by a group of cowl-laden masked monks and sung by a dead pope with skullface makeup, was utterly irresistible. And remarkably, they passed what I indelicately call the “piss test”. Despite the call of nature requiring ever more urgent attention as the set went on, I steadfastly refused to miss a second, something me and my kidney specialist will no doubt have a good chat about in the future. “The last time I did that,” I told friends afterwards, “was when Wino and Spirit Caravan did a bunch of Obsessed covers about seven or eight years ago. I think everyone was wondering why I was dancing so strangely by the end.” But, here, only hours into the fest, the piss test had a new champion.

Back at the 013, Wovenhand gave what people described as a “lifechanging” performance – I can only guess at the veracity of that statement, as I’d already had my life changed by David Eugene Edwards some years ago. However, it was a glorious thing to hear his sultry, southern-fried madrigals fill the arena, watched with total awe by a rapt audience. And for a man that seems to bear his burdens so heavily, it was a surprise to see how joyous he was. On more than one occasion he started chanting some spiritual invocation, only to bat it away with the flick of a wrist and a “Tsk. Oh you!” expression on his face. Praise be, indeed.

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Tags: Dave Eugene Edwards, Ghost, Jamie Thomson, Roadburn, Roadburn 2011, Roadburn Festival, Roadburn Festival 2011, The Quietus, Wovenhand

This entry was posted on Friday, April 22nd, 2011 at 4:24 pm and is filed under 2011, Festival News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.