All Points East: Victoria Park, London The National | Fleet Foxes | Mogwai | Public Service Broadcasting | Perfume Genius 26th August 2022
As summer winds down, Nils van der Linden ping-pongs from stage to stage at All Points East, catching performances from the likes of Villagers, Lucy Dacus, Perfume Genius, Public Service Broadcasting, Kurt Vile, Mogwai, and Fleet Foxes, before The National triumphantly close the day.
The National aren’t your typical festival headliner. Their catalogue’s not big on rousing “wooah-oh” choruses. Their lyrics are opaque at best, often further obscured by mumbled delivery. They’re sometimes wilfully obtuse, following their most commercially successful album, 2013’s Trouble Will Find Me, with more challenging, introspective work.
They’re not the type to give their fans LED wristbands that light up en masse at shows, let alone encourage synchronised arm waving or clapping. There are no lasers, no fireworks, no pyro.
And yet, over the past decade, they’ve grown into arenas and the headline slot at events like All Points East. Like Nick Cave, they’ve made the transition seem easy by doubling down on the intense emotions they trade with their audience. Sure, they’ve beefed up their sound — the guitars roar and cut like never before; the brass feels fuller and more vibrant than ever. But it’s singer Matt Berninger’s typically visceral performance, amplified in stark black and white on the giant screens, that creates and sustains the human connection. As ever, he fully inhabits those obscure lyrics, beating his head and his heart, twisting his whole body to conjure up some untapped fervour, hitting his temple with his palm, kneeling to pound the stage with his fist.
Of course he disappears into the crowd during Mr November to share his microphone with the masses for the ever-unlikely euphoric singalong “I’m Mr. November, I won’t fuck us over”. And there’s always time for his dry banter — from the state of his parents’ 55-year marriage to the differences between hard news, soft news, and fake news — to further cement the bond with the thousands standing captivated in Victoria Park after a full day of music across multiple stages.
It all begins on that same East stage some nine hours earlier. Rae Morris, joined by just a drummer and a multi-instrumentalist on keys, bass, and cello, kicks off the second Friday at All Points East with an effusive set full of chat, smiles, and carefree twirling in her white summer dress. The highlight is the high-energy Under The Shadows, complete with Running Up That Hill interpolation, that perfectly captures the last days of summer.
Taking a calmer approach over on the West stage, Cassandra Jenkins in mirrored sunglasses, white button-up shirt, and black suit looks as cool as she sounds. Her gauzy vocals are typically backed by a languid groove, ethereal keys, and saxophone textures, with recent single Pygmalion and the particularly dreamy New Bikini sounding especially refreshing in the heat. But it’s sax-led set closer Hard Drive that stands out for its spoken vocal, that also — inadvertently — sets the scene for tUnE-yArDs.
Over on the main stage, the trio are all about unexpected vocals. And loops. And bleeps and bloops. And distortion. And grooves. Joined by a drummer, the duo of Merrill Garbus (singing/samples/drums/synths/keys/ukulele) and Nate Brenner (bass), bounce through an eclectic set built around her voice. Typically, she’ll layer up vocals before the rhythm section kicks in and the songs spin off in varying directions. Gangsta channels hip-hop, complete with rapped vocals. Honesty pairs electro with a capella singing. Powa transforms from relatively straightforward indie rock ballad into something more trippy (complete with some falsetto). And the glitchy retro soul of hypnotized boasts a chorus that soars magnificently.
Just as eclectic, but an entirely different proposition, is the bubbly Valerie June on the West stage. From Tennessee, her songs channel country, gospel, blues, bluegrass, and all-out scuzzy rock. A complete reimagining of What A Wonderful World, featuring a tasteful horn arrangement, even shows off her abilities as a banjo player. But it’s the ’60s-leaning soul of Call Me A Fool that sounds particularly gorgeous, even without the studio recording’s string section, while revealing her impressive vocal range (from timid to Tina Turner).
Villagers, fronted by Conor J O’Brien on vocals, guitar, and occasional trumpet, sound somewhat more restrained on the East stage. But, then again, the singer specialises in masking the weight of his lyrics with beautiful melodies and earnest delivery. Just pay attention to acoustic ballad Hot Scary Summer and shapeshifting Becoming A Jackal. It’s only really during Circles In The Firing Line that his emotions burst to the surface, the song quietly ebbing and flowing before O’Brien straps on an electric guitar to thrash out a refrain of “They’re fucking up my favourite dream” as aggressive as it is surprising.
Less intense is Lucy Dacus. Looking very casual in what must be the outfit of the day — T-shirt and trousers covered in rainbows and candyfloss clouds — the singer-guitarist and her band seem to be having as much fun as the West stage audience. Not even a technical hitch derails their enthusiasm as they bounce through a set that contrasts the unbridled energy of The First Time and Kissing Lessons with quieter moments. Partner In Crime pairs synths, jangly guitars, and a searing solo with autotuned vocals, while Thumbs effectively strips things back to some atmospherics as Dacus sweetly offers to “kill him if you asked me”. Night Shift restores the balance and ends the set with grungy guitar elation.
Guitars dominate Kurt Vile‘s performance on the East stage. Rocking denim on denim (and what looks like a Waylon Jennings T-shirt), he leads The Violators through a set that muscles up songs drawn primarily from his two most recent albums, 2018’s Bottle It In and this year’s Watch My Moves. Loading Zones becomes a full-blown Neil Young ragged rocker. Palace Of OKV In Reverse picks up a blistering end solo. Mount Airy Hill (Way Gone) really emphasises the widescreen sound the guitarist brought to The War On Drugs. And Pretty Pimpin unashamedly goes all-out Lynyrd Skynyrd.
While Vile lets his songs do the heavy lifting, over on the other side of Victoria Park, Perfume Genius ups the charisma. In a tank top, not unlike the one he wears on the Too Bright album cover, he alternately walks around with purpose, stands with hand on hip, slides across the stage, leans into the microphone, and dances slinkily. While his lyrics remain deeply personal, musically he’s evolved from fragile lo-fi home recordings to technicolour indie pop that’s brought to life tonight by a band as slick as the staging. Describe broods with its big, distortion-heavy riff and blurred vocals. Fool jangles when not looking inward during an ethereal interlude. With their chiming guitars and keys, Without You shimmers and the vivacious On The Floor goes down like a cocktail on a day like today. Slip Away is even better, its world music rhythms sounding like So-era Peter Gabriel.
But while the singer spins around to those irresistible beats, it’s time to swing by the North stage just as the audio-visual spectacle that is Public Service Broadcasting launch into the electropop of Sputnik. Like many of their songs, it pairs audio from old public information films with original music typically compared to the likes of Kraftwerk, New Order, and Can. On their albums, the results are inspired; live they become transcendent. Backed by strobes and screens, often showing the actual archival footage they’ve sampled, they’re all dressed in white. The stage is littered with drums, guitars, keyboards, and various other gadgets, picked up in turn as the music morphs from shoegaze (Blue Heaven) to krautrock (Spitfire) to the kind of musical maelstrom you’d expect from Mogwai (All Out).
As if on cue, Mogwai themselves take to the East stage at about the same time, sounding as seismic as ever. Last-minute replacements for King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard, their titanic sound is perhaps not best suited to daylight hours, but these Glaswegians were never going to turn down the volume. They’re certainly helped by the main stage’s impeccable sound setup, but it remains a mystery how four middle-aged men (and a touring multi-instrumentalist) can seemingly effortlessly whip up such a storm with just drums, guitars, keyboards, and the occasional vocal.
Masters of the slow build, as adept at melody as brutality, they soar through I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead, glisten on Hunted By A Freak, and careen along with How To Be A Werewolf. Remurdered sounds particularly ominous, Drive The Nail thrashes and turns like a nightmare (in a good way), and Like Herod sometimes savages (in an equally good way). But it’s the gleaming Ritchie Sacramento that shines brightest tonight, almost eclipsing the slowly setting sun.
Fleet Foxes, over on the west side of the park, embrace the dying of the light with a rousing 75-minute set that packs in one joyful campfire-adjacent song after another. Led by the beanie-wearing Robin Pecknold on guitar and vocals, the core band are joined throughout by a horn quartet (The Westerlies) bringing the number of people on stage to 10. The reinforcements, who contribute additional backing vocals when not blowing on trumpets and trombones, provide the extra dimensions demanded by most recent album, Shore. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the reflective Wading In Waist-High Water (featuring guest vocalist Uwade), ebullient Sunblind, majestic A Long Way Past The Past, florid Going-To-The-Sun Road, and Big Red Machine collaboration Phoenix (featuring a guest appearance from Aaron Dessner).
But the finest, most spellbinding, moments remain the sparser, folkier outings from earlier in their career. Built around the complex Crosby Stills and Nash-style vocal harmonies that Pecknold and his bandmates seem to pull from thin air tonight, songs like Mykonos, White Winter Hymnal, and Helplessness Blues are simply breathtaking.
The same can be said for The National. Without a new album to promote and 20 years of music to draw from, they dig deep and feverishly into their back catalogue. Opening with the trio of Don’t Swallow The Cap (urgent), Mistaken For Strangers (edgy), and Bloodbuzz Ohio (uplifting), Berninger and the rest of the band perform like they’re taking nothing for granted. A threatening The System Only Dreams In Total Darkness and barreling Day I Die both sound more angular (and dangerous) than before. Rylan, featuring guest vocalist Eve Owen and plenty of horns, burns way brighter than it does on 2019’s I Am Easy To Find.
The elegant Pink Rabbits, gentle caress Slow Show, and impeccably crooned I Need My Girl bring the tenderness. Fake Empire brings the pomp. England brings the London namecheck. Terrible Love brings the steady build in tempo and passion.
And, with all the big boxes ticked, the headliners are confident enough to pull out two shiny new songs: the Tropic Morning News (Haversham) — “lots of guitar; great chorus” say my notes — and the recently released Weird Goodbyes — with Pecknold taking the Bon Iver part. Even braver, perhaps, is to end a festival show with an extended rendition of a quiet 2004 EP track that casual fans here tonight have probably never heard. But the gamble pays off. About Today is greeted with open arms by diehards and newcomers alike, a triumphant conclusion to a triumphant day.
Words by Nils van der Linden. You can visit his author profile for Louder Than War here. He tweets as @nilsvdlinden and his website is www.nilsvanderlinden.com.
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