Hinterland Festival

Various Venues,

Glasgow

30/04/09

Here’s an idea: plonk a hundred or so bands in a variety of venues in

Glasgow city centre and give them thirty minutes each. Great for the bands, but seeing more than five minutes of each band’s set seems nigh on impossible.

The Fly starts off at the Art School with a wonderfully spiky set from Glasgow noiseniks Fangs before racing to The Classic Grand (it becomes apparent that the most effective time management system is to stick to either Sauchiehall Street or the cluster of venues around The Arches), where Trailer Trash Tracys are doling out delay-heavy pop. 85 Bears are next on the venue’s downstairs stage, and their wordless disjointed noise-rock, rattling with thundering bass that Thor would be proud of, is both maddening and utterly captivating.

We head upstairs for the heavily accented indie-folk of Orphans And Vandals, and then much-hyped laptop-guitar wizard Geordie La Force appears. The unholy noises he summons are electrifying, but he veers into student arsing about territory when he intersperses his compositions with clips of

Animal
Hospital and Red Dwarf.

Next, we sprint up to Stereo for The Wave Pictures whose sharp-tongued melancholy easily provides the performance of the night, with ‘Strange Fruit For David’ generating a rapturous response. Tommy Reilly is next at King Tuts’, and The Fall are at The Arches, but both are hideously over-subscribed, so we opt for a peek at Copy Haho, also in The Arches, before sampling brutal Reuben-esque rock from Succioperro on blistering form (Classic Grand again), and round things off with the enjoyably buoyant Little Man Tate in MacSorely’s.

So does Hinterland work? Well, everything runs largely on time and the calibre of the acts is very high, and while the timetable is exhausting and some of the venues are too far apart, it has the potential to become a very worthy addition to

Scotland’s festival calendar.

Heather Crumley