RAVE - Treasure Island Festival

The picture does little more than prove someone with a camera was at the Belle and Sebastian show last night.

Global warming my a**! Each year the Treasure Island Festival gets colder, and yesterday it was positively Arctic.

Thanks to Jonny L's generosity and poor social calendar management skills I got his VIP tickets to yesterday's event, which included Surfer Blood (4/10), Rogue Wave (5/10), Broken Social Scene (7/10), The National (8/10), and Belle and Sebastian (8/10).

The National were somewhat of a revelation. I had heard them criticized as "just another Joy Division wannabe band". It's true that whenever a singer sings deep and a bassist plays loud, critics sprout up like mushrooms and compare them favorably or unfavorably to Joy Division. The Strokes, Killers, Editors, She Wants Revenge, White Lies, Interpol, The National and many more sound like Joy Division. In fact, "sounds like Joy Division" is a well-trodden search path on Google.

While Matt Berninger is not exactly Ian Curtis re-incarnate, he does a passable job in the gloom and doom department, and proved last night he can do other, screamy snarly stuff too. All in all an excellent performance, and one that kept the cold out a bit.

Which is more than can be said for Belle and Sebastian.

I've been aching for years to see B&S live. The band has this magic combination of low-fi, low-down material and up-beat, happy delivery. In the studio they come across as sullen and introspective. Live, as we found out last night, they're almost trippy hippies, perfectly at home in San Francisco in the 60s.

But. Or maybe that should be b-b-but, it was so freaking cold last night. Stuart Murdoch bounced and gyrated to keep warm, and the band tore into many of their best-known (if anything from a band the majority of people have never heard of can be described as "best-known") pieces. B-b-but, the over-riding feeling was not one of warmth and fulfillment at having heard them. 

The best sensation of the night was getting back into the car and turning the heated seats on.