Caribou
Mountains In The Sky
Sydney Festival, brought to you by imported beer. Rocking up early, a dj spins an interesting selection to a pretty sparse room/tent.
First live support, Mountains in the Sky, was quite a revelation. One man on keys, synths, technologies, another on drums, facing each other. Some fuzzed out loops of sweeping, timeless grandeur and a live breakbeat. This really surprised. I'd somehow gotten the notion that Mountains in the Sky was some kind of quiet, mellow, chill out thing, but this beast had teeth! Tunes swagger around and are given the time to grow and mutate. Fifteen, twenty minutes, these aren't radio-friendly pop tunes. But there is an undeniable pop quality even if it is a kind of pop that is not of this time. Or of this world. Lovely.
Caribou, I hadn't really paid close attention since the early days when Manitoba was a laptop muso. Now it manifests in the live environment with main man Dan on electronic drums and keys, occasional vocals and guitar, plus three anonymous players on drums, and two more guitars. The vocals were pretty muddled in the mix tonight, the other worldly pop aspect ruined by the sound. Apparently other Caribou sounds had some pretty spellbinding visual projections, but tonight all we had were pretty standard, typical live video jam. Nothing we hadn't seen before. Local support Mountains In The Sky had the visuals upper hand with cartoons of owls, butterflies, hedgehogs. Really sweet and even moving in parts. Or maybe I was just feeling emo on the night.
Anyway, I'm not certain what I was expecting from Caribou. Some kinda gltichy IDM. On the night it was more like spiralling arty prog pop? It was reasonably alright, most exciting when the two drum kits were played simultaneously. But in the end I felt they were outshone by the locals tonight.