Were there many great bands playing at Laneway? Yes. Shame we could barely hear any of them.
Take the teenage wunderkind Raury. His music – a strange hybrid of hard rock, folk and hip-hop – is wonderful in recording, but live and standing 50m back from the Red Bull stage it sounded like a wash of unintelligible white noise.
Still, there was some fun to be had from the singer songwriter from Atlanta, Georgia. The pocket rocket with a cheeky grin, bared his naked chest and wore a jaunty straw hat: an all-rapping, all-singing Huckleberry Finn.
And when a couple of his more recognisable singles, like the uplifting spiritual God’s Whisper, managed to make themselves heard through the muddy sound, the crowd raised their hands in congregation-style appreciation. “I am the Saviour! Saviour! Saviour!” they sang aloud.
Mid-afternoon took a 90s-inflected turn care of Courtney Barnett and Mac DeMarco who delivered a double dose of slacker rock via Melbourne and Montreal. Both clearly satisfied their attendant fans (some of whom were dressed in decade-appropriate dungarees or floppy black hats) and both gave value-added sets including, in DeMarco’s case, a spirited Steely Dan cover.
London act Jungle were one of the few acts that sounded definitively better live at Laneway than in recording. Hit tracks like Busy Earnin’ danced between Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger and Scissor Sisters, which is to say perfect party music – funky, upbeat, with plenty of percussion and instrumentation to colour the air.
But the British collective were outnumbered on the setlist by stripped back, sex-infused, alt-R&B and electronica acts: looking at you Banks and FKA Twigs, respectively hailing from the US and UK, who went back to back on the main stages as the sun was setting.
The sweet spots in terms of listening pleasure seemed to be tiny golden circles that only a thousand or so could squeeze into. There was a kind of invisible line in the Banks moshpit: on one side she sounded like a sub-par, muffled acoustic act playing in your neighbour’s backyard; opposite, she suddenly come into sharp focus to reveal her stormy brilliance.
Likewise, while one of our team was rapturous about St Vincent’s soaring vocals, stage poise and, at times, almost Prince-like guitar style, a colleague further back could only enjoy the last of the three. Just as well Future Islands had already made her day, with lead singer Samuel T Herring performing at his uninhibited, sweaty, and exuberant best.
In the case of the much-touted FKA Twigs, the problem lay more in the material. She has fantastic stage presence and dressed in black bondage, dominatrix style, has a slithering sexiness. But the pace was painfully slow. Slow can be sensual, but draw it out for too long and the audience runs out of steam. There’s nothing worse than a lover found snoring.
A friend called her “MIA on ketamine” – we needed pepping. Her kind of music is difficult to reproduce live and clearly Twigs hasn’t quite “solved it” with her three-strong band, who mainly thumped away on drum pads. It took away the richness of songs like Two Weeks, and left us with nothing but improv falsetto over minimalist accompaniment.
It is a problem Laneway runs into time and time again, while the hipster musical landscape is filled with so much production-heavy electronica. These are not fun and raucous instrument-led acts, who can trade in a bit of sound-quality with vibrant and energetic stage performances. This is intimate music, suited to small venues and damn it, laneways, not open-air fields and gardens.
With night deepening, some of the dancier acts took to the stage, but again, the speaker dials simply weren’t turned up loud enough. Good dance music needs crisp, clear and big, thumping speakers that will send shockwaves through your body.
We asked festival organiser Danny Rogers about the volume timidity, and he pinned the festival’s suburban setting and high winds (that blew the noise straight into the surrounding neighbourhood). “This is something that will be closely addressed next year and is definitely at the top of the list thing of things to improve on the outside stages,” said Rogers via email.
No wonder the plug was so promptly pulled at 10pm on the Flight Facilities set. Quite literally. Mid track, in fact.
Two of the last acts of the evening were Caribou (Canada) and Jon Hopkins (UK), both makers of sophisticated and complex dance music. Caribou is subtle, emotive with twists of the unexpected. If he is the modern-day Moby, then Hopkins is the incarnate of the Chemical Brothers, building aural landscapes that gradually transition in texture: from crunchy, noisy duststorms to something ice-cold and blip-filled, or dramatic soft-to-loud highlands.
Which acts did you most enjoy? How did the sound affect your festival? Share in the comments below.
• Laneway festival is in Adelaide on 6 February, Melbourne on 7 Feburary and Fremantle on 8 February
