It’s the light fantastic as festival ends on high note
Festival Music
performed a version of At The Heart Of It All, the Sorley MacLean-inspired title song from the band’s 30th anniversary album. The orchestral arrangement by band co-founder Donald Shaw added depth and breadth to the composition, as it did to the Gaelic waulking song, Cha Teid Mor, before a moving rendition of the late SCO cellist Kevin McCrae’s rendition of Ae Fond Kiss closed the half.
The fireworks themselves, provided by Pyrovision, were kicked into life by the martial drama and night sky choreography of James Macmillan’s Stomp (With Fate And Elvira).
The harp of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty conjured up clusters of magic night-flies crisscrossing each other before erupting into slow-motion cascades of light.
For the finale, Peter Maxwell Davies’ An Orkney Wedding,
With Sunrise galloped its way through a rowdy, woozy and at times comical evocation of communal excess. Piped on its way by Robert Jordan’s glorious denouement, such an explosion of sound and light was the perfect conclusion to a spectacular three weeks.
Jonathan Geddes
IF ANDREW Savage ever ditches music, then perhaps he could find work dishing out waspish barbs somewhere. The Parquet Courts singer and Napoleon Dynamite look-a-like has a particularly cutting tone, whether chiding impatient fans wanting another song delivered more quickly, or drily introducing a track as their “banger”. Some of that attitude was needed when this gig suffered a false start because Max Savage’s snare drum was not working properly.
The tones of the elder Savage, and his co-vocalist Austin Brown, sometimes suggest cynicism, but the band is a propulsive, emotive creature. They played for just over an hour with confident self-assurance
– a group who know they are good.
And they are extremely good, certainly one of the best guitar groups on the planet now.
Brown and Savage make a compelling duo, Savage the more aggressive and full-throated vocalist, Brown almost spoken word at times, waving a hand lazily on Captive Of The Sun’s hazy pop, and fiddling awkwardly with his guitar during the storming One Man, No City. That track, the night’s best, started slowly before building to a torrential wall of noise, while others eschewed niceties in favour of an immediate hit, like a rapid Sunbathing Animal that provoked crowd surfing (and a stare of frustration from security down the front).
There was a frantic rowdiness provoked by the sharp guitars of Master Of My Craft or the magnificent riff on Bodies
Made Of, while for the dreamers there was Instant Disassembly, a woozy, lengthy jam of a song.
It all invites comparison to what has gone before, but Parquet Courts succeed in sounding fresh, representing an invigorating present rather than nostalgia. That’s what great bands do.
Music