It was odd, walking around Camden Town during Desertfest – the annual weekend-long celebration of doom, stoner and sludge metal (we’ll come to what they all are later). Odd in particular to see so many men wearing tall, brightly coloured pointy hats: the kind your mum rolled and stapled for you out of a piece of card.
While surveying the floor of the Electric Ballroom from the balcony, I eventually asked the chaps next to me what was with all the wizard hats. One looked at me as though I was an idiot. ‘They’re not wizard hats. They’re gnome hats.’ Oh, right. Why are they wearing gnome hats, then? Again surprise at my ignorance. ‘Because of the Belgian band. Gnome.’ Of course. Silly me.
The sound of Desertfest would be cosily familiar to the parents of attendees. Almost every band at every edition – whatever genre they adhered too – owed much to Black Sabbath. The stoner bands all sounded like the Sabbath of ‘Sweet Leaf’; the doom bands like the Sabbath of ‘Children of the Grave’; the sludge bands like the Sabbath of the song ‘Black Sabbath’ itself. They are all very heavy – everything is down-tuned – and all of them get a bit psychedelic, but only the stoner bands have any swing. No one playing in the other styles sound as though they’ve ever had sex.
Complicating it all is that the most exciting band I saw there this year were Hermano, who play within another micro-genre: desert rock (basically, any stoner or doom band with any connection to Palm Desert, California, home of genre forefathers Kyuss). Hermano are Desertfest royalty because their singer John Garcia – who in middle age now looks like Cam from Modern Family running a New Jersey waste-management firm – was also the frontman of Kyuss.
Desert rock bands play fast a lot more than the other sub-genres, and Hermano absolutely pummelled it on ‘Angry American’ and ‘Quite Fucked’: you’ll know the approximate sound if you’ve ever heard a Queens of the Stone Age record (another Kyuss offshoot). Guitarist David Angstrom now looks like an accountant – specs, side parting, sensible slacks – but there’s such delight in seeing a man like that cutting loose on stage with all the heroics in a way that there just isn’t when it’s someone who does it in stadiums all the time. They’re supple, too: ‘Life’ had an almost sensual throb to it.
I suspect the reason there are always millions of young bands doing this is that, at entry level, there’s no easier kind of music to play: all the drummer needs to do is keep time, very slowly, while the guitarist can hammer down on one or two chords for minutes on end, and the bassist need only play root notes. At the top end, of course, it’s different: Hermano know absolutely what they’re doing. But doom/stoner/sludge/desert is all about tone: make your guitar sound heavy enough and you’ve done a ton of the work. And that ease of entry keeps Desertfest vital and fresh: every year there are new bands from all over the world, and ten years from now one of them will be the headliner.
The Lemon Twigs, from the Long Island suburbs of New York, have spent the last decade creating perfect facsimiles of guitar pop styles from 1965 to 1972. If you gave me an album of theirs, scratched off the label and replaced it with one suggesting it was a compilation of sundry forgotten Americans of the 1960s – the Knickerbockers, the Cyrkle, the Mojo Men, Montage – I’d absolutely believe the new label.
They sound like the world’s most perfect living jukebox, and the melodies drip out of them – ‘My Golden Years’, ‘I’ve Got a Broken Heart’, ‘In My Head’ – arranged with jangling guitars and countermelodies from all four of them. I’d defy anyone not to adore them, but equally I find them impossible to fall in love with because I’ve heard everything they play before on one or another record made a very long time ago.
It struck me on the way home who they reminded me of: a fictional group. In Tom Hanks’s That Thing You Do!, a group of fresh-faced young Americans called the Wonders score big with the titular song in the wake of the British invasion in 1964. The Lemon Twigs are having the career the Wonders would have had if they hadn’t split after their fictional hit.
Comments