Beats Per Minute returns to the sixth edition of Rotterdam’s rapidly growing city event, which remains refreshingly community driven.
With names like English Teacher and Lambrini Girls now achieving ‘household’ status, many upcoming bands – and particularly in the UK – have come to consider Rotterdam’s Left of the Dial a vital stepping stone in their development. It’s noticeable in everything this year that the secret is indeed out: over a 150 acts are playing across the city, spread across a meaty 20-plus venues.
Throughout its steady growth, Left of the Dial has maintained its status as a remarkably artist friendly event. After last year’s spectacle, the very hope lingered that the organisation wouldn’t sacrifice this culture-and-communion driven appeal for sustained growth. For there are too many showcase festivals that have regressed into corporatism and delegate-based gatekeeping.
It’s pleasing to know that the threshold to see exciting new music remains low at Left of the Dial. Even better is the sheer density of artists that bring something compelling and/or exciting to the table. This wasn’t always the case at Left of the Dial: especially in the early going, you really had to cherrypick the names of intrigue. Now we’re seeing shows that immediately feel fully-formed and tailored to the bigger stages.
Man/Woman/Chainsaw, one of the buzzier bands on this year’s lineup, awakened this exact sentiment when they performed at Rotown on the first night. This group embodies the steady shift we see in the fringes of guitar-based music. Make no mistake: funereal, shouty post-punk outfits are still in heavy demand at Left of the Dial. But we stumble upon an increasing tally of bands like Man/Woman/Chainsaw – excelling in dramaturgical genre-shifting splendour: usually with someone in the band sporting some archaic frilled garment instead of an overcoat.
In theory, absolutely thrilling stuff. As adventurous as their music is – veering from folk to dance-punk to even heavy metal blasts – Man/Woman/Chainsaw strikes as a somewhat predictable outcome of a zeitgeist where bands like Black Country, New Road and The Last Dinner Party frequently own the largest font on the poster.
Not a bad place to start by any means, especially already having so many glorious parts in place within the total sum. Seeing them play, you immediately realise they are undoubtedly next in line to break out. They stormed Rotown with the aplomb of a finished product – and within their maelstrom-like adapting of stylistics, you can’t help but expect a little more danger and individuality. Something tells me Man/Woman/Chainsaw are going to find their own lane sooner than expected.
The antithesis holds true for Mermaid Chunky: an outfit who seem to be an unfinished product by choice, but have stumbled upon their own thing. That thing being a funky idiosyncratic electro-pop duo who deconstruct their set with fun improv-sessions, messing around with an array of brass instruments, synths, percussion instruments and woodwinds nicked straight from a yard sale. Mermaid Chunky’s performance – despite being in the cross-hairs of James Murphy’s DFA Records – is still in its deliciously rudimentary, exploratory phase.
Quirky synth-pop jams get cut short by exultant poetry-slams delivered with a Dr. Seussian marvel. Their show reminded me a little bit of artists like Let’s Eat Grandma, Fever Ray or dj. flugvel og geimskip, who fuse the outré with the levity of pop in a similarly satisfying fashion. The crowd at WORM looked more confused than giddy, but you can nevertheless tell Mermaid Chunky’s charming tomfoolery is fertile soil for something more potent.
Both SHEIVA and Sam Akpro express an inner city grit in their work that reminds equally of the sepia-toned trip hop era as the chromatic experimental pop scene around Mica Levi, Coby Sey and Tirzah. It comes as little surprise both artists prowl the same circuits. SHEIVA’s set at Roodkapje – despite some technical difficulties that caused mild delay – exuded both piercing menace and a playful abandon. Akpro’s full-band performance at Rotown was a riveting, multi-layered affair, easing between cinematic atmospherics and caustic, serrated pop, with “Death By Entertainment” as the definitive summit.
We said it before in this article: knowing the bulk of what you’re gonna see will make some sort of impression, you end up in freeze-frame sometimes by this overwhelming abundance of choice. But it’s not as terrible a quandary as you think, since most venues are at an acceptable walking distance from one another. It feels safe to sometimes wing it and abandon the playbook, which this year, serendipitously, led us to some of the better performances. We randomly amble towards Arminius to watch TTSSFU, the project of Tasmin Nicole Stephens. We were told Stephens records self-produced dream pop with a conceptual twist – the EP Me, Jed and Andy, apparently, was entirely inspired by the love affair between Andy Warhol and Jed Johnson.
What we’re walking into is a decidedly more stormy white-knuckled tour de force. Stephens has that piercing look in their eye of someone who doesn’t suffer fools lightly. Even during gorgeous shoegaze workouts like “California”, you could feel something simmering beneath; a taut, righteous rage that finally spills out during the aptly titled closer “I Hope You Die”. Stephens runs off stage abruptly, refusing any hackneyed end-of-the-show pleasantries, and letting the audience sit with the last embers of discontent. I wish more artists would end a gig like this: loose ends don’t always need tidying up.
We open Day 2 at the Tr8t, where, deary, another shoegaze/dream pop outfit, performs. The nature of their music bends to the group’s personality, especially vocalist and guitarist Dottie’s, whose featherlight voice evokes a pastoral charm. All and all a solid gig, even though the drums rumbled a tad too loudly, disrupting the affable shyness that permeates the group’s songwriting. If anything, it’s nice to see a band revel in said shyness, and in the hands of deary, it becomes an understated strength
Belgium’s Lézard were a boatload of fun at the V11, making the light vessel’s lower deck shake with their fizzy cocktail of glam punk and disco wave. The foolish fun is punctuated further by the delightfully ostentatious stage shenanigans of Neil Claes and Myrthe Marnef. They have a ultra tight rhythm section in Andreas Duchi (bass) and Roel Deplancke, which opens an express lane for the band’s x-factor, synth player Viktor de Greef, to unleash unruly sounds with the glee of a dastardly cartoon villain testing some wacky doomsday device. Imagine Roxy Music possessed by the art punk spirit of Television’s Marquee Moon, and you’ll get an approximation of what Lézard bring to the table.
Wild Pink‘s appearance at Left of the Dial is a bit of an eyebrow raiser perhaps, since this festival has hung its head booking relatively unknown names. Wild Pink have been a more established unit, which may or not be a sign of things to come as Left of the Dial expands. In the basement venue of Tr8t, John Ross and his crew definitely show why they are further along than most. They are not much for snappy stage banter or overly performative antics, preferring to let the songs – the majority from brand new LP Dulling The Horns – speak for themselves. The room itself not only had remarkably crisp acoustics, the lighting was crazy as well. It was as if being part of an MTV music video, and having one of the better bands today doing their thing here was in fact a pretty surreal experience.
Arguably the biggest revelation this year has been Parsnip, who own the magical intangibles of sounding like some your favorite musical acts all at once. All the songs were brilliant, teetering between timelessness and rapturous novelty. I found myself intermittently reminded of The Clean, Rubber Soul-era Beatles, 50’s girl groups and Syd Barrett. The Australians have a spectacular gift of earworm pop melodies too, and the loose-limbed, slightly gauche fashion in which they frisk through their setlist immediately establishes this fuzzy intimacy in the room. Wonderful, wonderful band; I hope to hear a lot more Parsnip in the future.
On day three, Gia Ford played a spirited set in the same amazing-sounding basement venue where Wild Pink performed. Within the backdrop of Ford’s suspenseful character studies, the setting becomes all the more surreal. ‘Suspense’ being the operative word, by the way: Ford and her band members enthral onlookers with songs about pool boys with murder fantasies and widowed men with disturbing grief withdrawals. Ford’s songs court the darkest, most depraved corners of the human psyche, but are radiant and reverberating in their execution. Truth be told, the combination of scenery and sonics felt like being part of a work of fiction yourself.
Michael Ekow & May injected Left of the Dial with a sorely needed dose of pure pop euphoria. The project draws from an abundance of influences, ranging from trap to R&B to new wave, but performance-wise they keep it all refreshingly straightforward. The lady in the back fires up the jams, May flanks on the side doing random guitar solos over everything, and Ekow plays to his strengths as a charismatic performer who can make even the most stoical divorced dad types shake their money-maker. This show was all about good vibes and good energy. “Solo” is a bona fide jam, by the way.
At De Doelen Studio, Oh Boland kamikaze through their set in helter-skelter fashion, as a noise-ridden power trio of their ilk damn well sound. It creates a fun contrast with the affable Modern Lovers-esque swagger of Naive Set – who are celebrating the release of their unsurprisingly brilliant fourth album In Air Quotes. There seems to be a strong mutual appreciation between both bands: two units who – though in vastly disparate ways – stick to their wonderful particulars, unruffled by the shifting trends around them.
For every maven you encounter, you need a maverick to balance things out. The 160 Arcade Hall – formerly POING – is the perfect venue of Japanese avant-punk duo HYPER GAL. Surrounded by video game arcades and and pinball machines, they instigate a small mutiny, as sweaty bodies tumble over each other near the front row. At Roodkapje, Slow Cooked is, well, cooking up something special. The project founded by Louis Barby is a fun sight on stage: a cello player is usually seen in the context of some posh orchestra. But Barby grounds both his instrument and his performance to a last-call-at-that-trashy-bar-in-the-outskirts-of-town type of camaraderie. Slow Cooked brings a dry wit and thrifty lo-fi sensibility to the songs that reminds a bit of Arab Strap. A besotted rendition of the Vengaboys’ “BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM” was enough to topple the crowd into a hearty singalong.
That would have been a great ending to Left of the Dial 2024, but an intoxicating performance by Black Bordello wasn’t letting us off the hook. The band formed around Sienna Bordello seemed to have been ahead of the curve. Way before The Last Dinner Party happened, their songwriting and DIY-ethos was imbued with that kind of bon vivant theatricality – they’ve been known to host circus performers at their shows, so there you go. But what makes Black Bordello really great is that they are an unapologetically loud and menacing affair on stage, sounding at times like The Scream-era Siouxsie & The Banshees covering Kate Bush. We were witnessing both an ink-black passion play and primal punk show; Black Bordello’s set affirms the queer belief that opposites indeed attract.
So that’s lights out of Left of the Dial 2024. The Luchador Sky Dancers are going limp, and the afterparty bulges out far beyond Rotown’s capacity, rumbling on towards the dusk. It’s been a good one.
Photo’s: Guus van der Aa (Lézard, Michael Ekow & May, Mermaid Chunky) & Marcel van Leeuwen (Black Bordello, TTSSFU, Parnsip, Man/Woman/Chainsaw)
