Waves Festival Blog

Waves Vienna
Various venues, Vienna
28/09/2011 – 02/10/2011

With Ultravox and Mozart ringing in our ears, The Fly touches down in Vienna for the inaugural Waves festival. The opening ceremony gives us a glimpse of highly-regarded wunderkind Anja Plaschg, a.k.a. Soap & Skin, who deals in sweeping piano ballads and ‘Bachelorette’-era Björk electronics. Dropping the ‘tortured artist’ schtick could make her clear talent feel a little more human, but it’s a promising beginning. Things start to look even better when we head over to local institution Flex to catch indie rockers M185. As with Spoon and Wilco before them, the repetitive motorik groove of kosmische holds sway, but it’s the pulverising crunch of the guitars that anchor them in pop territory. Day one closes with a mutual love-in between EMA and a rapt audience at the Jack Rocks The Boat stage, with all that fuzzed-out euphoria neatly mirroring the drunken fug of the warm evening air.

Our heads are still swimming the following day, but all cobwebs are blown away as ace slacker-rockers Killed By 9V Batteries power through a phenomenally noisy set at Flex. Recalling Cymbals Eat Guitars and Pavement at their most wracked, they belt out the cheery refrain: “Home sweet home! Kill fucking everyone!” Gosh. For all their volume, however, it’s Copenhagen’s When Saints Go Machine who really get the crowd moving with lush electronic Knife-isms. Rubik’s fractured indiepop follows, moving from Shins-tinged indie to something a little more complex. They’re entertaining. And extremely hairy. Sadly, the much-feted Figurines’ pleasantly jangly charms struggle to capture anyone’s attention in quite the same way. Ah well, can’t win ‘em all.

Day three, and we’re rather unprepared for batshit Latvian duo Instrumenti, who normally play their ultra-melodic pop wearing panda heads. They conclude by informing us that we are now all Instrumenti, which is jolly nice of them, and that puts an extra spring in our step as we wander towards Café Dogenhof for a lovely set by ALASAC Duo. Their stripped-down alt.country turns out to be a quiet highlight of the festival thus far, as does Black Shampoo’s jaunty take on good ol’ garage rock. Glaswegian trio Haight-Ashbury provide the day’s only real mis-step, their brisk psych-folk falling a little flat for no apparent reason. We head up towards Fluc for fun with Die Eternias’ costumed freakbeat, but they can’t compete with electro-rockers Reptile & Retard. Something of a youtube hit thanks to the supremely silly ‘Speeddance’ video, their shirtless lunatic of a frontman whips the crowd into a frenzy.

British Sea Power pull out all the stops in a gloriously elegant set on day four. Noble ends the set handing beers into the audience while his bandmates turn beauty into sheer chaos – fun as hell, in other words. The Fly’s weekend concludes with some delightfully fizzy fun from Destroy, Munich, who all appear to be about 12 years old. Stylistically they’re indebted to Los Campesinos!, but you just can’t keep a good lo-fi popster down, let alone seven of them.

Thanks Waves Festival, you’re fucking awesome.

Will Fitzpatrick