Pith and the Parenchymas
With a large sheet on the ground spelling out their band name in red duct tape on the Barney Danson Theatre stage, Pith and the Parenchymas frontman Chris Love walked on stage barefoot.
He spoke words into the microphone, creating drone noise before the song went into full blown The Mars Volta territory with the aptly titled “Biology drone.”
The tension oozing from Love’s body as he hammered the keyboard was palpable, and the drumming from Josh Scammell was hefty.
Without taking a second to rest, the threepiece dove directly into “Say hi,” a number that could only be described as surf without delineation or limit. The wavy chord progressions from Love recalled a dystopian California, where a post-apocalyptic disaster had caused an exodus of surfers while the waves rolled on.
On “Self-reflection,” Pith and the Parenchymas showed their knack for scope in genre, taking us back to 1994’s Britpop explosion. This was interrupted by Love telling the small audience that they “planned to do one long set with no stops but something is wrong.”
There was an issue with his electric guitar, Love said, and then decided to do the rest of the set with his acoustic guitar.
“Just chill, you have another 70 years to your life,” a woman in the back said, probably meaning well but nonetheless coming off as incredibly patronizing.
After this setback, Love took out his frustration on his new guitar to the point where I thought his fingers would bleed. As he aggressively strummed away, he shouted “It’s just another trick of the body,” ascending into an early 90s punk vibe, becoming the male counterpart of the noise heavy riot grrl greats.
On their final song, “Shallow Water and Cold Sand,” bassist Damjam Markovic brought in some basslines that suggested Nirvana’s Krist Novoselic’s work on In Utero. This was quickly offset by Love’s melee of singing and shouting verse and chorus experiment, which effectively pulled it back into Britpop territory.
But alas, their earlier tech trouble continued to plague the band.
“Due to technical difficulties, that’s all we got,” Love said, unable to hide the disappointment.
Jake Bugg
He’s gotten comparisons to Buddy Hollly, Rob Orbison, Noel Gallagher, and Bob Dylan, but Jake Bugg vehemently denies that Dylan has informed his work.
And yet, that distinctive voice that has earned him the Bob Dylan of the East Midlands moniker was likely to have been the reason that the small River Stage crowd grew and grew.
A weathered cynic in the body of a young man, Jake Bugg’s boyish looks at the age of 20 have made him stand out in the sea of 20-something English musicians whose booze and chain smoking habits have aged them beyond repair.
He doesn’t sing about sexual conquests, unlike his contemporaries, but instead takes a page from the Arctic Monkeys’ book, evoking Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am Not, with lyrics about tragic lives and grim upbringings in broken towns. It’s a prevailing tendency of Northern Gothic, if you will. His hour-long opening set’s song encapsulated this ethos with “There’s a Beast and We All Feed It.”
Bugg flew into his second song of the set, “Trouble Town,” where he waxes poetic on the suffocation experienced while living in a small town, appropriating the Americana-reminiscent country genre onto his own experience of living in a council estate, or housing project, in England.
Opening the track with “Stuck in speed bump city/Where the only thing that’s pretty/Is the thought of getting out,” the crowd of Ottawa Valley-raised folks probably felt that they could relate to this thought.
During his fourth song of the set, we witnessed a more sentimental Bugg with “Me and You,” tacitly inducing a Donovan homage, whom the young singer-songwriter also admires.
The verses of Bugg’s two-album repertoire, a collection of introspective and highly personal ruminations, suggest a wisdom that most do not find until later, which prompts the question—is it put on? Is it a contrived homage to the lyrical astuteness of the canonical singer-songwriters of the 60s and 70s? Or has this Bob Dylan of the East Midlands simply found a way to conceptualize the human experience with so much sophistication?
Unlike fellow festival performer Mac DeMarco, who cloaks the angst and apprehension of instantaneous fame, Bugg wears it in his disposition. British headlines and social media are filled with quotes like, “People think I’m a grumpy twat,” and “Perhaps I’m not a nice person, but no one’s perfect.” Of course, these are simply the musings of a person with humility, a musician who eschews the veneer of gregariousness and unsolicited affection.
