SWN FESTIVAL

Various venues,

Cardiff

20-23/10/2011

When The Fly enters hour three of a coach journey to

Cardiff with a dead laptop and broken headphones, Swn Festival already finds itself with a fair amount of work to do to stick a smile on this writer’s face. But where Huw Stephens goes, good music follows. And stepping off that Godforsaken, mobile-Hell and into the warm, aural embrace of Creatures of Love does wonders for a broken soul. Dark, gothic electro given wings by singer Bonita McKinney’s haunting Madonna-esque vocals and captured by the stuttering freeze-frame of strobe lights; the

London four-piece are the perfect start to a lost weekend in the Welsh capital.

Racehorses and Niki & The Dove cruise by without tempting The Fly’s ears but the brutal math-doodling of Brontide threatens to top the festival with a balls-out, death-stare stomp of a live set, that veers from film-score dramatics into snarling riffs, like Foals on a shuddering comedown.

Cymbals tweak the senses just as impressively with Talking Heads-tinged keyboard pop and soaring, singalong melodies, but ultimately it’s Saturday’s line-up at Clwb Ifor Bach that crowns the weekend. One-man knob-twiddling hero LA2019 creates soundscapes of futuristic synth-pop that fill the room admirably for his label mates Gallops, which wins The Fly over with 40 minutes of mesmerisingly jagged guitars battling against keyboards, seething electronica and a drummer who could paradiddle his way through a warzone. So good it is, that only one band at Swn can top it – step forward the exhilaratingly warped time-signatures and scatterbomb brilliance of Three Trapped Tigers, the growling Tyler Durden to Battles’ whimpering robot rock. Swn Fest, let’s do it again sometime.  

Matt Glass