Tracks record

Hello there. Back from a fine weekend among like minded people amid the glorious infrastructure of Indietracks. Having got ten hours and less than halfway through the grand review we realised we were giving ourselves a potential aneurysm for nothing, so fuck that. Here are the bits we really want to mention, though, in chronological order:



- Allo Darlin'! Bit of a shame that the set of the weekend came from the second band on, but nobody plays ukelele with the enthusiasm of Elizabeth Morris and few have such craft about the summer-tinged joy of their songwriting either, so exuberant and full of excitable bounce while still packing emotional, evocative content. Max from the Smittens stands in on Dreaming doing Monster Bobby doing Calvin Johnson, while the maven tendencies of some of the melodies are acknowledged as The Polaroid Song incorporates a snatch of Walk Like An Egyptian. "I keep seeing people I know, which isn't because there's so many people here but because everyone I know is here" Elizabeth marvels mid-set, before the first of many, many onstage references to Fortuna Pop!'s Sean Price. The admiration is more than reciprocated.



- Lime Chalks and Jam On Bread, the two we saw of the fabled sets on a very warm train. Birmingham's own low-key harmonic folk-pop contenders opened our festival warm-up gig (went very well, thanks) and their lilting goodness and emergency radio editing of copious swearing choruses on seeing children present was a fine way to start the first full day, even if they did run out of rehearsed songs and have to improvise until reaching the station again. Meanwhile Manchester-via-Grimsby's own beardy ukelele troubadour, whose first gig we realised during the weekend we saw, got a packed out train for his (and Chris from Internet Forever on backing melodica and thighslaps) curiously unique cracked little odes to data entry, the perils of Wikipedia health research and the pain of being ineligible for release on Labrador Records. Stirring stuff. Forgot to get a copy of his new album, though.

- It took us a while to get into The Just Joans, we should admit, but by the end of their tram shed set we saw what all the localised fuss was about. The force of their tales of provinciality and heartbreak are too well mined to ignore, the new songs sound spot on and the four-part chorality brought into What Do We Do Now? hammered home the point. A triumph.



- Ballboy's drummer got married in the signal box on Sunday morning. For someone who works alongside Gordon McIntyre, perhaps he felt accustomed to life's rich tapestry. The band set on Saturday, vocal mic cutout notwithstanding, was great - three new songs, Elizabeth Morris doing the monologue on A Europewide Search For Love, a surprising cover of Beat Happening's Indian Summer. McIntyre's own solo set, filling in for absent church headliners, on Sunday might have been even better, mining the most touching of his work (I Lost You But I Found Country Music would have been a great set closer had he not got an encore) and drawing out a couple more new ones. Some day people on a wider scale will realise what a lyric writer he is.



- MJ Hibbett & The Validators were opening the main stage on Sunday, in Mark's opinion "the legends slot - will it be Tony Bennett? Will it be Rolf Harris?" Actually it could only ever be MJ Hibbett, sorting out the indiepop wheat from part-timer chaff with his songs of wryness (but, BBC, not strictly comedy) and great plain truth. He plays Leave My Brother Alone, a song that has been known to make people cry. He plays two tracks from sci-fi rock opera, forthcoming Edinburgh show and some time after that album Dinosaur Planet. Do The Indie Kid breaks all known records for taking up of the titular dance step, and features a surprisingly successful crowdsourced Music Of The Future. If your Twitter feed at around 2pm on Sunday featured a load of messages just reading 'happiness' or '#happiness', this was why.



- Everyone went on so much about the packed out The Specific Heats church set last year, where they blew up their reverb machine with the first chord, that we couldn't miss them this time around. It was a wise decision, as the becaped Brooklynites' superior psych-garage effortlessly blew many a more hyped contender for this summer of surf-rock away within a song or two, most of the set from a forthcoming album. Leader Mat Patalano draws all sorts of coruscating noise out of his guitar, the drummer never stops grinning, and for once the echoey nature of the shed seems to work in a band's favour.



- Somehow you knew the ever changing retro R&B (no, the original type) garage types The Loves would put on a show for their last Indietracks. For starters, they come out to the Star Wars theme with three dancers who proceed to strut their Ready Steady Go! thing to three songs during the set. Simon Love is wearing a cape. Next to him as emergency stand-in backing singer is Liz from The School. And so it proceeds through glorious semi-pastiche and Simon's banter ("this is from our third album, which recently went zinc"). Then they bring on Jesus, who looks suspiciously like Jimmy from the Bobby McGees in a sheet. They finish, in claimed honour of the Faces, by kicking footballs into the crowd "like a cut price Flaming Lips". It almost doesn't register that it all sounds better and more immediate live.



- We've finally worked out Internet Forever. They're the patent pending of noise-twee. See, you've got the keyboard sound, Laura's vocals and the sense that it's hanging onto the songs for dear life, and Chris on athletic stand-up drumming, then Craig stage right putting a great mass of guitar noise on top of everything. They cover Dire Straits' Walk Of Life without referring to it being a cover. They attempt to get a Twitter rumour that Nathan from Wavves has died going. They claim their website is on Geocities, but you'll need to leave a message in the guestbook (it's not, obviously). Pete Gofton appears to add handclaps to half a song. Much as they know about what's around them, they're a great mallet of dissonance in the middle of the indiepop.



- The cheering thing about Standard Fare is, even though they've been reviewed in proper newspapers and interviewed on national radio stations, they're still permanently surprised and not a little nervous to find people really like them and willingly turn out to see them. Then again, it's increasingly apparent that they have the aura of pop genius about them. They're aided by the reappearance, as seen at several popshows over the last year, of the Standard Fare Voluntary Dance Squad (pending group title), Philadelphia and Dancing in particular getting great swathes of people down the front moving. There's a new song, which we understand is called Suitcase, that's faster and equally fresh and contains a great Danny How guitar solo, and another new one that they hadn't finished so got Brad from One Happy Island to add a trumpet coda to before covering his own band's Mothball. Like their friends Allo Darlin', and Elizabeth is up near the front singing along, they're ready for prime time.



- Slow Club are embarking on recording their second album at the end of summer, with just some Japanese dates and a couple of festivals between then and now. Hence, riskily for a festival where they don't strictly fit in per se, much of their set is taken up with new songs, those played mostly mining their affecting ballad range. They seem a little uptight before Rebecca breaks a stick during Because We're Dead, the pause seemingly allowing them to relax and really take off. By Giving Up On Love her tambourine stand is on the verge of collapse. The intimacy the pair can bring to any stage is oft said but true, as is Rebecca's vocal ability. But who knew the properly famous and signed band would be among the most ramshackle of the day?



- The Pains of Being Pure At Heart were the final band on, the group taking the Indietracks ethos to a wider audience, and both before and during the set they were keen to talk up the unifying spirit of the event and the community into which they blossomed, thanking plenty of individuals as they go (and again with Sean Price jokes). The gods of electricity though aren't initially on their side. It's clear the guitars don't sound right early on, and after second song This Love Is Fucking Right there's a long pause to sort out whatever had malfunctioned. From then on you can almost feel their confidence and power grow until they really were playing to a level that the situation, and their own place therein, demanded. Three new songs were tried out, all edging back from the more synthy sound the last single suggested into more able waters. In terms of their own humbled demeanour, namechecking the Manhattan Love Suicides as the band that inspired them to form and one day make it over here to the festival, they eventually lived up to their heat.


These we also saw: Veronica Falls (decent enough, but sunk after the hopeless start that saw them play two songs they thought were part of the soundcheck despite being 25 minutes after their stage time), Everybody Was In The French Resistance... Now! (too obscure a concept to headline, but few can banter like Eddie Argos and his closing just thought up rewrite for the occasion Formed A Side Project ("it'll probably make the Israel and Palestine situation worse")), Red Shoe Diaries (very useful, but could only stop for two songs), This Many Boyfriends (enthusiastic), Linda Guilala (too clean and uninvolved), La La Love You (five excitable Spaniards in pink jackets playing Ramones-on-even-more-cheap-speed punk-pop with endless enthusiasm, perpetual motion, one member not actually playing the instrument he's behind and not much stylistic variation), Antarctica Takes It! (can't remember), The Smittens (joyful, but not as good at jangly power-pop as)..., Boy Genius (see before), The Orchids (dated), Stars In Coma (seemed to just get going with the danceability when they finished), Tender Trap (saw four songs, the last Talulah Gosh's My Best Friend), The Primitives (OK, maybe they didn't really have the strong back catalogue), Winston Echo (whimsy is a good thing), The Blanche Hudson Weekend (saw one and a half songs and the inevitable blizzard of feedback ending), Shrag (half the set spent talking to musicians in the merch tent, the other watching a set not as good at that they did there two years earlier), The Pooh Sticks (packed the shed out! People with signs! Only one song we know, and that, On Tape, never played live before! Ah, but what we saw of the rest of it was very decent) That means that through circumstance we unfortunately missed Foxes!, Paisley & Charlie, White Town, David Tattersall, Springfactory and Sarandon.



In summary: wonderful weekend by the abandoned stock, once again. And hello again to everyone we met. Any further questions?

Our photos in full

Indietracks 2009: Sunday

Back on site not quick/aware enough to catch the mesmerising promise of twenty minute set noiseniks The Manhattan Love Suicides playing acoustically on the train. In fact it transpires nobody does, as two of them turn up to confirm their split and play songs from their already formed new band. Meanwhile the main stage starts with Cola Jet Set, beginning a day heavy at least in its early part on 60s revivalism with early Beach Boys bubblegum surf pop and plenty of perkiness unbecoming the time of day. They finish with a spirited debut performance in English.

There's some question, which to be fair they help make apparent, as to whether Cardiff's swoon-pop machine The School are hungover. Indeed, there's some question as to whether they're just still drunk. While not yet at "if it's Liz Hunt and your granny on bongos" levels, the band's membership turnover is alarming, with the guitarist less than a week in the job and Simon from The Loves recruited to seemingly do whatever he fancies, which often seems to be an attempt to make Liz giggle. Still, everyone keeps their composure for long enough to play some songs from the debut album due in October and fine confections they are too, more confident as live performers than when we last saw them a little over a year ago, not too far from the charmingly smart wall of sound heartbreak exhibited thus far but no less poor for that. And just when you think they're going to have to do the set without either All I Wanna Do or Let It Slip, they play both together to finish.

The School clashed with MJ Hibbett, which caused some pain allayed by the fact we'd seen his warm-up gig for this, but it later turned out that demand to see his solo set on the train was such that there was a second overspill carriage called into action and Hibbett himself nearly didn't make it on. Plenty of people have since referred to it as a highlight of the weekend, and for pretty much the whole festival you couldn't walk into or out of the shed without seeing him deep in discussion with another group of admirers regardless of the weather. Well, there you go.

And still the Swedes come with their worn Smiths back catalogues. As with Cats On Fire, Northern Portrait frontman Stefan Larsen has Morrissey's croon and stage moves on rental while around him is the sort of louche Rickenbacker jangle that marked out the Smiths' first flowerings, their first flowerings, all Byrds-flavoured sophistication and knowingly lovelorn croon.

Did we mention the weather? Having granted a good Saturday, the rains finally came at about 4pm and stayed in various torrents right through to the death, which threatened to put a crimp on the day and at first put a dampener on the numbers out to see Lucky Soul. Such is the draw, though, that after an opening salvo of Woah Billy!, Lips Are Unhappy, Add Your Light To Mine and Ain't Never Been Cool the onlooking, sometimes dancing numbers gradually grew despite the horizontal downfall. They seem ready for prime time, tight and looking the part, the boys besuited, Ali Howard in aquamarine shimmying for all she's worth and deploying a tambourine with Steven Tyler-esque ribbons attached. That'd be a good visual in a stronger wind. There's four new songs - album set for January now, we understand - which while still identifiably Lucky Soul seems to be the next logical step on, all big Motown/Northern Soul/Dusty In Memphis grooves. Get Outta Town! in the circumstances is understandably triumphant as a closer.

Then something really interesting happens. Why is there such a sudden interest in the merchandise tent? Who's that in the corner being surrounded? It's Amelia Fletcher, Eithne Farry and Rob Pursey, just a Peter Momtchiloff (and obviously Matthew Fletcher) short of Talulah Gosh, and they're doing an acoustic five song set of Talulah Gosh songs, on a properly electric guitar at that. Their eponymous song, being sung along to from all sides (Liz from The School is trying to find a spare table to get onto behind us), might get the biggest reaction of the whole event.

Pocketbooks, some of whom are involved with the Indietracks set-up, have become big shots in this world, sounding like the kind of kids who would have bonded on indie dancefloors over Tigermilk. There's a fair wodge of Housemartins in here, kitchen sink social commentary dressed in cardigans and given a jangling guitar and nifty keyboard line to hold on to the melody with. They seem genuinely proud to be amongst all this, and their charm, effervescence and uplifting facade is rewarded fully by their public. That same public, largely corralled into the shed by the force of the rain (which means we miss BMX Bandits, Duglas T Stewart seemingly having come dressed as Vivian Stanshall, and Stereo Total, who provoke a stage invasion), aren't really sure what to make of New Zealand's Disasteradio. Which is fair enough on their part, as in this situation his semi-crazed broken 8-bit electro is as much about fitting in as Napalm Death would be.

Even in this weather the queue outside the church for The Pete Green Corporate Juggernaut, the band incarnation of Sheffield's "sparkly pop" singer-songwriter of note, is ridiculous, so it's to Help Stamp Out Loneliness, featuring members of the briefly lauded mid-00s outift Language Of Flowers. They're a band we can't make our mind up about on first showing - musically it's decent enough if not outstanding, a little Blondie, a little jangly (again, yeah, except these have actually had fifth Smith Craig Gannon playing with them), a little Stereolab, a little early 80s. The deal breaker, though, is singer D. Lucille Campbell, glamorous beyond reproach in a glorious metallic effect dress and a general air of Weimar cabaret/Dietrich era, with all the hip-shaking moves, plus a voice like a more nuanced Nico. Her presence, both aurally and stageworthy, provides a really interesting, distinctive element that stands out unfortunately mostly for the fact that it doesn't really go with the music, the band not anchoring it down with due gravitas - not in a dirtied up way, but in that it tries to be buffed to a shine when it'd work together better in a Broadcast or Au Pairs direction. Maybe, given they're two singles down, it'll hopefully come with time.

Art Brut live reviews are increasingly less straight up accounts and more just a list of things Eddie Argos said and did, which is fair enough as quite often the lyrical content of the songs is a moveable feast. Tonight he's going to throw us a curveball, though, starting with Bad Weekend "to make it edgy", around which he extemporises the suggestion to "be less twee! Stop sharing your sweets!" (receiving a mini-shower of Haribo for his trouble) before declaring we should all form punkier bands to play at his mooted festival at Bovington Tank Museum in October. A few songs later, realising that he's done a song about how great buses are (The Passenger), a song about mixtapes (Nag Nag Nag Nag) and has incorporated into My Little Brother a namecheck for Milky Wimshake, Argos concedes that he might be quite twee after all. Then he seals the deal spectacularly with a newly rewritten version of Modern Art dedicated to DC Comics "written one afternoon, drunk", in the middle of which he descends into what can properly be called a throng - if aided by the inclemency outside, for the first time the shed is full from barrier to doors - to detail his recent visit to the DC Comics head offices before launching back into the amended chorus to a huge pit. He could have coasted from there, but still to come was a dedication of Slap Dash For No Cash to MJ Hibbett and a bit in the middle of that song where he steps out and slowly repeats the lines "my sex is on fire" and "are we human or are we dancer?", carefully, repeatedly, in the style of Stewart Lee for greater emphasis. And then the big rock ending, during which Mikey Breyer, attempting a stunt drumroll, falls backwards off the stage. And of course they have to come back and do Formed A Band. Eddie seems as pleased to be playing to us hardy lot as many a much smaller band on the bill. And rightfully so, given his band had just torn it completely up.

Which, sending us all back into the gloaming, might have proved a problem. See, one thing about Teenage Fanclub, our headliners, is that for everything they do do, they won't go into all that business, more's the pity. What they will do is sunkissed melodic wonderment, and even if it serves to remind us of the Byrdsian rut they got stuck in for a little while, as a comedown from what had gone before it more than served its purpose. There's a couple of new songs (another album out in January) that could have come direct from Grand Prix, and when they lift - The Concept, Star Sign, About You - they really lift, not least when finishing the main set with Verisimilitude, Sparky's Dream and a genuinely coruscating extended Everything Flows, and finishing properly with a chiming take on The Bevis Frond's He'd Be A Diamond and Neil Jung. That's the other way to close a festival.

We're never quite sure what to conclude about Indietracks bar the obvious, namely that the work of Stuart Mackay and his volunteers cannot be underestimated. Whether it's the location, the populace or the sheer joy of pretty much all those who play, no matter what their prior experience, Indietracks does something to people that leaves them grinning, gibbering loons. See you at the carriage for more of the same next year? Good.

Photos

Indietracks 2009: Saturday

Downdime seem like the sort of band who would almost be hidden away to open proceedings on on the first full day of a festival like this. They're not actively bad, but then they're not immensely memorable, a flattened out jangle that in the end reminds us of nobody so much as Cajun Dance Party, as well as the impulse that it's too warm to stay with this for too long.

Little My are something entirely different. A collective made up of members of assorted Cardiff bands primarily including Silence At Sea, who played a fine set here last year, stretching to the lurking spectre of Gareth from the very un-twee Gindrinker, twelve strong today even before Liz from The School joins for a song, and all in varying degrees of animal costume from plastic ears to full suit. The numbers are filled out by all manner of keyboards, glocks, violin, shaky things direct from the classroom box and what may well be a bowed saw at the back. There's a heart to their impacted songs, though, never just sounding like a bull in a toy shop department. They've covered the Shins on one of their self-released EPs and it's their sunshine pop moments to which Little My aspire.

Strange thing, this Indietracks. Inside the famed corrugated iron church - for one of the few times all weekend, it getting crowded so quickly - is Ray Rumours & The No Eyed Dears, the current project of Ros Murray, formerly bassist in Electrelane. When she turns up behind the merch table later on in the day you're tempted to ask whether the days since that band went on hiatus aren't feeling a little longer. That, though, would be to overlook the captivatingly personal nature of her solo songs, deceptively simple lo-fi singer-songwriter constructions influenced by ramshackle folk. So ramshackle, in fact, that Murray apologises for the band not having properly rehearsed the songs, which accounts for the long pauses between them. Even so, the floating atmosphere they create allows their uplifting nature to wash over you.

Elefant's bill for the main stage starts, belatedly, with Japanese duo Sucrette, who sound like you might imagine J-Pop sounds like - kitschily playful keyboards, soft voiced singer (in Japanese, reading English language announcements off a piece of paper), sugar sweet like featherbed Europop. It passes the time in a gainful way. Tender Trap, not to be confused with any similarly named Australian electro zeitgeist jumpers, were always going to be part of the Indietracks constituency fronted as they are by Amelia Fletcher of Talulah Gosh, who pretty much trademarked a lot of all this, and later Heavenly and Marine Research (any other takers for the latter being her best band?) The patterned dress and tambourine, plus stand-up drummer at the back, scream jangle pop, but Fletcher and long time musical associate Rob Pursey know this stuff inside out. Not all that demanding on a mid-afternoon audience lazing in the sun, full of melodies and thoughtful lyrics on love, and with Fletcher's daughter Dora giving out stickers during the set. Can't say fairer. We will return to Fletcher later in the retelling.

Bostonians One Happy Island are, if anything, even more gleeful and infectious. Like their fellow American joyful indiepop exponents The Smittens, who were all over the place despite oru not getting to see their proper set this year, bittersweetness is something that occurred to them briefly and is hinted at lyrically but the music is so ridiculously likeable, with kazoos, electric ukulele and harmonicas to go with the furious clip of the drumming, the shared out lead vocals and the odd shot at harmony that the weaknesses are camouflaged in a coating of just going with it.

We're not quite sure what to make of the multihanded Fitness Forever, a rush of almost cartoonish in delivery summery lounge-Italo-pop, featuring members in judo gear and a captain's hat, that's virtually too much to take in. What, then, of The Frank And Walters? A band who, while never having actually split up, seem to exist in that pre-Britpop hinterland where bands like Kingmaker had big hits, it doesn't start well when the PA blows roughly three seconds in. Luckily it's a mere power cut that lasts five minutes rather than something terminal, at least it came before any momentum had been built up, and most importantly they'd brought a football with them. When power is restored, as much as their banter sounds like someone imagining what Frank And Walters banter might be like and the songs not from their commercial heyday pass most people by, and even some of those now come across with a James-like stadium ambition that seems out of place in this company, people are going mad for After All and This Is Not A Song, and that's the least you can ask. It does mean, though, that we miss the Specific Heats in the church, a set many go on to talk about not least for their reverb machine literally blowing up on the first chord. It's still hot in there, clearly.

Butcher Boy are, along with Pocketbooks, pretty much at the forefront of the UK leg of this whole indiepop 'thing' at the moment, at least in being those with the greatest capacity to break out. Fronted by John Blain Hunt, who ran Glasgow’s genre defining National Pop League club night for seven years, they Stuart Murdoch’s studied sophistication - maybe a little too close in truth, with the lush arrangements and Motown nods suggesting that If You're Feeling Sinister period - and add a dash of post-Arcade Fire headlong march for a result packed with drama and poetry. Hunt almost has a missionary zeal, and there's plenty who'd go along with him.

Here's an exercise in mixed aggregates. On Elefant's stage Speedmarket Avenue, peppy on record, are dragging horribly. In the church, The Lovely Eggs are nuts. In the nicest possible way, obviously, but just in case the songs about olives as part of the cosmos, carving insults into melons and the not at all self-explanatory Have You Ever Heard A Digital Accordion? weren't signposts that this may not be the most hinged band ever, Holly Ross' wide eyed enthusiasm bordering on quasi-insanity settles it. Songs are based around playgroundish non-sequiturs before devolving from gentle sing-song to noise freakout, all with singalong bits and actual hooks somewhere in the stew. They cover the song from Mike Leigh's Nuts In May, Ross wanders into the packed audience to relay Oh The Stars and then tells us how to differentiate between differently sexed peppers. It's a bit like the Moldy Peaches, yes, but only if relocated to Lancaster and dumped in a vat of children's books about animals with spiked drinks and only Metal Machine Music to listen to. In a very, very odd way, it's fabulous.

A hog roast! And they're stripping the whole sodding thing in front of you! It's like some sort of Viking offering.

Suddenly, there is soul dancing afoot. Cats On Fire's first album saw them, if in thrall to the Smiths and Belle & Sebastian, only such in a hugely likeable and danceable way. Their second earlier this year leant too heavily on the Smiths and was somewhat ropey as a result. None of that seems to matter here, partly because of what we saw the set was heavy on The Province Complains anyway, and partly because it's so joyous, both in a giving and receiving sense. At their best - I Am The White Manteled King, Higher Grounds - they just have it, and people are responding in kind. Singer Mattais Björkas dresses smartly, looks slightly foppish and has the full whack of Morrissey expressions, but then you kind of expect that. And then they go and cover Your Woman by White Town, whose Jyoti Mishra is here and has been a long term supporter of suchlike. An absolute highlight and proof that one bad turn can in no way derail an entire career.

If anything, Camera Obscura seem understandably more in their element watched by a crowd willing them on to greater things. They repay in kind, simultaneously looser and more confident than in recent showings - Tracyanne Campbell cracks a smile on a couple of occasions - and given the leeway to do a couple of slow ones for gentle swaying purposes mid-set, the payoff for the big numbers, Lloyd I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken followed by If Looks Could Kill a particular winner, is well worth the effort. Coming just as the sun starts setting behind the stage, it disproves this theory that they're a lacklustre live band while peaking with a kind of gorgeous epiphany.

Although an overrun briefly threatened and then avoided an awkward clash between all three, the church was too full for Wake The President, and attempting to listen through the wall, while successful to some extent in relaying their current confidence, was a mug's game ultimately. Oddly, though, even though the stage time had already been put back half an hour to accommodate Camera Obscura, the line check for Emmy The Great didn't start until after everyone had piled into the tramshed expectantly. By the time she comes on it's not quite right either - rumoured to have had a car breakdown en route Emma-Lee seems not to be in the right frame of mind and isn't getting into the spirit of things, the band are a keyboard player down and the wait, plus the fact she's technically following two defining sets of the weekend, means she's lost the vast majority of the crowd already. She doesn't seem to be sparking musically either, which might be partly because of how far back we end up but means we come away for the second successive weekend disappointed, albeit for different reasons, with expectations dashed. We don't bother stopping for La Caza Azul, but apparently it was a riot of very un-Indietracks music. Still, a day left.

Indietracks 2009: Friday

In just its third year, Indietracks has found a great big niche right at the heart of what we must by law refer to as the crowded festival summer. This year it's the same weekend as Truck, Camp Bestival, Secret Garden Party and any number of potential competitors, yet the fact the attendance numbers are exponentially growing is testament to many things: the idea, the reputation of its clientele, the fortunes of the music it covers at base level, and above all else the experience. Far away from 'boutique' labels, Skins kids or fashionista column inches, Indietracks exists in and of itself, so much so you almost don't want to give the game away.

So here's the first of three lengthy, detailed blog posts about it.

Truth be told, there was some foreboding on arrival at the Ripley end of the Midland Railway Museum. Indietracks, running as it does on a whole lot of communal spirit and togetherness, has always seen warm weather before, but the Friday had seen showers in the East Midlands, and indeed a couple of small rain flurries hit before the music - commencing half an hour after advertised without explanation, as would become a pattern with the stage throughout the weekend - coincided with things drying out. Still, any fears were allayed with some recce of the site, as while attendance numbers were understandably much smaller than the rest of the weekend there were still people catching up, exploring the site, band members taking in their surroundings etc. The indiepop community, clearly, won't let inclement conditions come between them and comradeship in the name of indiepop's extending tentacles. As we would see.

Elefant Records, in the year of its twentieth anniversary, had been invited to curate the main stage, moved to the bigger/proper outdoor area, and they'd decided the three band Friday was for showing off their more electronically minded catalogue. Or, in the case of Argentina's Modular, echoing the kitsch lounge music the presumably Elefant-sourced DJ played between bands for most of the first two days. The duo's parping keyboards, synthesized vocal interjections and callbacks to Jean-Jacques Perrey's experiments in musique concrète and Walter/Wendy Carlos' electrifying the classics are reminiscent of Stereolab's space age bachelor pad era, an easy listening retro-futurism that put here in a wide open festival setting doesn't really go anywhere but works as easy listening background. Which sounds like a bit of a wasted trip, coming all that way to provide mood music, but it fits somehow.

Not so long ago Rose Elinor Dougall was in a band who could play big shows in New York and Tokyo and sell out Shepherd's Bush Empire sized UK venues. Pleasingly, she doesn't seem bothered that her post-Pipettes career sees her pretty much starting from scratch, commenting "it's like I've been miniaturised into a toy railway set" as she surveys the rolling stock and steam train lines. While the coquettish glances and endearingly shabby dancing that made her the people's favourite in the band remain - you'll go a long way to find someone who looks cooler at handclaps - her music has moved away from the knowingly kitsch end. While still pop music of a sort, taking Stereolab's awkward retro-melodic nous and Broadcast's kaleidoscopic drone as a starter, you can also hear Sundays-esque wracked sunshine pop, Cocteau Twins textures and the darker end of the Smiths. The key extra ingredient is Dougall's voice, one that in this context seems unsuited to three-part girl group harmony; very English, deep and lushly powerful but also melancholically reflective in tone a la Siouxsie or Bridget St John. Her band the Distractions add something almost akin to turned down shoegazing textures (and special mention to bassist Georgia Lee for rocking a leopardprint all-in-one), but there's something at these songs' wistful, self-doubting heart that suggests relatively big things ahead.

Dougall's top Myspace friend is the night's headliners Au Revoir Simone, and it's easy to see the musical connection. The three Brooklynites don't have a great deal of stagecraft bar Annie Hart, who gets into some spectacular headshaking at times and takes to the drumkit for one song but encourages us to clap along so that she can keep the rhythm as much as our lending a percussive hand; what they do have is a way of humanising the ethereal elements of their sound. Current album Still Night, Still Light is almost skeletal in its vintage drum machine plus keyboard drone plus airy harmony template, more so than the more flesh and blood-cushioned The Bird Of Music, and while they don't really deviate in the live sound - Erika Forster brings out a bass for a couple of songs, Hart has to change the battery on one of her keyboards after the first song having forgotten during the line check, there's what seems a genuine appeal to invite them back next year at the end (you can't imagine many American bands play this sort of location) and that's about it for interaction - and some songs drift by on the breeze, there are equally moments, Sad Song of particular note, when the various keyboard sounds mesh together and envelop all in enchantment. And every so often they get to crank up a disco beat or throbbing pulse rhythm for some particularly awkward shape throwing. It doesn't all work in an outdoor environment, but it works much better than you'd expect.

Knee deep at Indietracks : Sunday review

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After arriving back on site to the sight of perhaps the world's worst parked car and weather that wasn't letting up much from heatwave status - the hottest of the year it transpired, as yet again a day's worth of predicted sharp showers and possible thunderstorms completely failed to materialise, which was good as long as the gradual beetroot pigmentation process didn't prove too distracting - Sunday started with The Colliding Lemons, an all female five-piece (how many others are there? We could only think of The Organ) who make a sound like a cleaned up take on what the average punter thinks C86 is actually like. Give them a couple of years and let's see where they take it.

In trying to remind ourselves after the long weekend (and a bit) of what some of these early bands sound like we're resorting to Myspace memory jogs, but in the case of Brontosaurus Chorus it's proving to be little use. See, what on record is slightly shabby janglepop grows virtual horns onstage. There's plenty to go at, certainly. They have a trumpet player on one side of the stage and a three piece string section, one of the violinists doubling up on squeezebox, on the other. They bring a mate on to sing lead vocals on one song, which lasts less than a minute. The male bass player is wearing a dress. What when recorded is Tullycraft/early Camera Obscura summery pop develops an edge and becomes more than just passing interest. A swelling audience is richly deserved.

Reputedly after part of the equipment went missing overnight, there's a more than two hour delay to proceedings getting underway outdoors, which leads to the scheduled main and outdoor times being completely revamped at least twice and a lot of scurrying around double checking the new time sheets. As well as the unexpected bonus of removing at least two tricky stage clashes, it means a late main stage promotion for Leicester's Shop Assistants-fronted-by-Baader Meinhof-studying-Bilinda Butcher The Mai 68s, where the standup drummer behind two-piece and the waves of sound coming from Jon's guitar pedals get to thrive in front of a more than decent audience. Is this the best of the four times we've now seen them? Probably, keeping it just about together (and unlike the last time we saw them not having everything break, including the mike stand), even though Julie, despite/because of having to trade her usual sophisticated wine glass for a plastic beaker, ends up on the floor.

We don't get to see the full set, though, because there's some STN favourites to catch up with. Tempting as it is to think the whole festival is hairclips and melodicas central, Stuart and his team really do see indiepop as a communal experience beyond other people's ideas of what is and should not be here and are open to all sorts of variations on the guitar theme. Hence, who should this be striding into the church from outside in choral introduction led by a man with a ukelele but A Classic Education. We've written enough on here in the past about their post-Arcade Fire brooding grandiosity, but despite often overwhelming the PA enough of their grandiose ambitions come across to make their potential already approach fulfilment. There's the self-believing intensity of a Modest Mouse and the expansive choral intrigue of current British Sea Power in there to fit the lyrical intrigues, and although the church doesn't fill up for a disappointingly long time word seems to get around that there's something really special in this enthrallingly elating, pounding set. Trust us, it's only upwards from here.

After which sumptuous course, KateGoes comes as something of a sharp sorbet. The Brummie collective are known for playing every gig to a theme, and today it's KateGoes To The Stone Age, the five of them dressed in caveman gear and opening with three songs loosely around the theme. It's no more baffling than their actual songs, which take Kate Nash-on-dexedrine piano pop to Early Learning Centre extremes, all without a scintilla of self-awareness. Halfway through a man sporting a giveaway Misty's Big Adventure T-shirt hands out balloons to all onlookers, and within seconds it's turned into a very low budget Flaming Lips show. None of it makes any sense outside this world. That's probably the point.

Meanwhile in the tea and shade tent Darren Hayman's 'solo' set with sundry Wave Pictures is cut short after a triumphant The Sad Witch as The Smittens have started early. Colin Clary and four colleagues are just about perfect for these climes, all male/female harmony vocals, pop hooks and permanently sunny disposition. Maybe this is the sort of surface cutesiness most shy away from, but right here right now it works. In some ways The Rosie Taylor Project back in the tramshed aren't that much different in terms of the harmony-aided aura they give off of soundtracking a summer's day in a meadow at times, but stylistically there's more intricacies going on, the folk-plucked guitar, melancholic turns and romantic notions backing up the promise shown by their mini-album This City Draws Maps. The guitarist is also sporting tremendous turnups.

Now the outdoor crowds are starting to stand up and mount up, in time for a tremendous set by the ever resourceful The Wave Pictures, wry of lyric, Richman of arrangement and starting with the fairly obscure considering I Shall Be A Ditch-Digger. For a band who often seem to give over a louche air on record they're a tight outfit, but not so rigid that they can't let loose with the odd spare but technically adept solo every now and again, David Tattersall enjoying a good compact Neil Young pitch-bending solo when the occasion demands. Spiritual cousin Hayman joins in on the last two songs - they fit four in after Tattersall has speculated that they might have time for one more - and the mantle of "Britain's biggest small band", still emblazoned on Hayman/Hefner clutch bags on sale at the merch stand, could well have found its natural new home.

The noise now coming out of the refreshment tent is of a cheap keyboard nature and is being wielded by one half of Internet Forever, for this occasion known as Laura Wolf And The Bitches. Usually Wolf and the aforementioned on here Heartbeeps, for this occasion she has two backing singers. One is Joe, who we know a little bit. The other is Gareth, of whom more later. On concluding their two song set one or the other of these recommends we all adjourn to Esiotrot, a Brighton septet featuring a two man horn section who rather than use them to go supersonic stay within a staying just together sonic spectrum the Wave Pictures would admire. There's a good deal of Hefner and Pastels about them, but the overall impression is of Neutral Milk Hotel reduced to a back bedroom without Jeff Mangum's books.

Talking of sonic spectrums, The Manhattan Love Suicides have little truck with carefully crafted melodies, preferring to blast their way to fuzz, distortion and feedback nirvana in a typical sub-twenty minute set (their album has 27 tracks), Caroline's vocals only sweetening the deal insofar as it makes them sound like Psychocandy interpreted by the Darling Buds. Even their soundcheck hits you right in the chest. Meanwhile there's a right mess of tweecore going on outside, as local heroes The Deirdres are, not to put too fine a point on it, going for it in front of a willing crowd. A typhoon of excitable shouting, criss-crossing things that are almost melodies, innumerable percussion instruments, much gear swapping and the odd piece of Bearsuit-esque pop genius - they wangled their way onto the Antiques Roadshow and then wrote a song about it - it's impossible to convey in print what makes this mess of indiepop so infectiously likeable. There's signs of a proper cult growing here. It might be unwise to get in their way.

Cult status of a minor sort has long been granted to Pete Dale and Milky Wimpshake's three chord Buzzcockian punk-pop, going on the raptorous reception to every two minute song of lust and devotion. It all merges into one eventually, though, and having missed a tent set by Little My, most of whom are here as members of Silence At Sea already, we're left with Sarah Records alumni St Christopher outside doing even simpler pop melodies to even less effect. Where's the anti-glamour in this? Ah, The Bobby McGees are on in a packed out church. Jimmy has been sighted many times over the weekend - in fairness, he's fairly difficult to miss - and, well, he's wearing a full jester's outfit. Of course he is. The usual ukelele love songs, laments and high quality swearing follow as we are reduced to watching through a window.

You know what we were saying up there about Britain's new biggest small band? Well, a small part of us always hopes that eventually Gordon McIntyre will receive the credit he's long overdue. ballboy inspire a small but devoted following, due in no small part to John Peel's support, through McIntyre's unerring way of mapping out human love and frailty and treating all imposters just the same. He starts with Public Park, a low-key start instantly cranked up with I've Got Pictures Of You In Your Underwear, and from there it's plain sailing. Avant Garde Music gets people dancing, I Don't Have Time To Stand Here With You Fighting About The Size Of My Dick gets them wondering about how a song about a failed bank robbery can be so heartbreaking. It's a wonder in itself that the songs - Where Do The Nights Of Sleep Go When They Do Not Come To Me, I Lost You But I Found Country Music - are at the very least the equal of their titles, and that forthcoming album I Worked On The Ships offers up more thought provoking wonders, not least Songs For Kylie, about a songwriter offering his broken hearted songs for pop purposes knowing they'll be rejected. McIntyre, as gifted a between song raconteur, mentions at one point that he always gets asked why his band aren't big and why Coldplay are, to which he reasons that you get what you're dealt in life and he'd be happy playing events like this. As he closes with a gorgeous Leave The Earth Behind You And Take A Walk Into The Sunshine and then a less so but just as great Donald In The Bushes With A Bag Of Glue, you can't help feeling that while he's doing his oeuvre down it's all to the good that he can still play to us like this.

The main stage headliners can't start until the twenty minutes overrunning outdoor stage has finally finished, although rumour has it that at least one key member of the headliners is insisting on watching ballboy to completion anyway. And you can well believe it, as almost exactly two years after we were first stunned on first hearing their demos, we finally get to see Los Campesinos! live. Is it everything we hoped? Well, of course it is, but then it is for Gareth too, as the Wedding Present T-shirt sporting frontman, who over time has turned into the sort of frontman who can look louche, irked and boundlessly energetic simultaneously, takes a couple of occasions to heap praise on the festival's organisation and clientele, some of the bands who he saw and the very idea of it all. Admitting that their first festival headliner means having to play every song they know, the hour long set features no real surprises but exhibits a band who while tight still evidently enjoy themselves every time they step on stage. Then, after a fakeout of Pavement's Box Elder, the uncoiling post-rock buildup crystallises into the You! Me! Dancing! riff and the place virtually explodes in joy, the Cardiff contingent saluting the Twisted By Design namecheck and everyone losing their collective cool - not easy in these conditions - on every chorus.

There's a little moment during the first violin break in the following set closer Sweet Dreams Sweet Cheeks, which culminates in Gareth, Aleks, Tom and Neil all up on the barrier, where Gareth looks up at the lights with a beatific smile across his face. He knows, as do we all, that this will be one - possibly even the one - to tell everyone about when they get back to reality. The location, the bands, the clientele, the organisation, the whole essence of Indietracks has seen an increase in publicity and numbers from last year and ridden it out spectacularly. It may not be the coolest to the Vice subscribers, but who cares when there's something uniquely special about Indietracks already.

Gauge best : Indietracks Saturday review

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If Truck is the coming together of the under the radar indie kid hordes to enjoy themselves at the expense of actual music fans rather than massive conglomerations, then Indietracks is a micro-meeting of the same, a sixth of Truck's capacity but even more geared towards friendliness and community. It really does transcend all that easy point scoring about 'twee' and references to cardigans, especially with a lineup such as this and the knowledge that you'll rarely find a set of people in festival-land this year, by which we mean the organisers as much if not more than the bands and crowd, more willing to just enjoy themselves without a thought as to how it might come across. We went on the Sunday last year, enthused about it to many and this year were ready for the whole experience.

The stylistic dichotomy is summed up by the first band on in the tram shed turned main arena, Cardiff's Silence At Sea. On the one hand, they're an easygoing indie-folk outfit prone to deceptively simple and dark campfire strumalongs and Laura Janes' high, clear girly vocals. On the other hand, guitarist G is dressed as some sort of panda/Teletubby hybrid and sports a guitar with 'CAT POWER' emblazoned on in green paint (actually, maybe it's supposed to be a cat, yeah), the percussionist has at her disposal among other things a typewriter and a radio alarm clock player, and the bassist is Pagan Wanderer Lu, as previously often featured on STN. A more than merely diverting start to the weekend, and a portent of much offbeat excellence to come.

On the other side of the coin, opening (slightly late, but never mind) the freshly minted for 2008 outdoor stage on the back of a flat bed truck - that sounds familiar - Liverpool presents us with Town Bike, two men and two singing women in monogrammed bowling shirts who have a theme song, a way with banter and an endless supply of two and a half minute ubercatchy punk-pop bubblegum fuzzbombs like Helen Love without the shades and synth. Once upon a time they'd have put out a 7" which Steve Lamacq would have played for six weeks straight on the Evening Session and you'd never have heard from them again. Now, aided by the weather, they're attracting quite the interest in their songs about Dougie from McFly, swearing and the lack of good boyfriend material. Once established, that they unveil their masterstroke - a cover of B*Witched's C'Est La Vie set to the tune of Smells Like Teen Spirit. Just to our right, the project co-ordinator of Smalltown America records is in hysterics. It's their drummer's last gig, and they commemorate the moment by arseing up the start of their last song twice. This will become a theme.

From here that the strains of a mock Farfisa draw us towards the Church Stage, a fully kitted out replica of a Victorian church for the railway workers and their families. It's here we find Still Corners, who work up a dreampop sound based around a distant female vocal against swirling organ sounds that recall early Electrelane or a budget Broadcast. Bad planning means we don't see a lot of their set, but we're keen to hear more. Back outside Slow Down Tallahassee take on the heat, now reduced to a trio and with a fine debut album The Beautiful Light under their belts. Maybe it's just to their self-admitted drink-centric build-up, though, but it's not really clicking here where it should, as instruments misbehave and the set seems one-paced, overdominated by the drum machine ahead of the off-harmonies, culminating in a rendition of the album title track that hangs on for dear life before completely collapsing to a standstill and an embarrassed stage departure some way short of its usual finish. Despite it all, they still come across as flick-knife pop, a Strawberry Switchblade of the Noughties, their recorded output suggests.

Time, then, for some intelligent lyrically driven songwriterly entertainment. Australasia does this sort of thing really well - the Go-Betweens, the Flying Nun back catalogue, the Lucksmiths - and Darren Hanlon continues the great tradition with some thoughtful, melancholic explorations of the human condition and in between songs entertaining banter about fish horror in Norway and arcade game addiction. Back in the shed Shrag have not only been taken round the country by the Cribs - and there's a band whose words belie their actions, so often do they go on about K Records and Comet Gain - but seem to be being anointed as a new Huggy Bear. They're much less scrappy and politicised than that band but still energetic, splenetic and thoroughly entertaining in a very wrong way, Helen all over the stage as her bandmates produce buzzing artrock like XX Teens being hauled down to earth by Kenickie. Does 'the new Help She Can't Swim' sound like faint praise? It'll have to do, because they're going to build a similar underground following.

One of the great selling points of Indietracks is that there is an actual stage on a steam train - everyone loads on board and a singer takes on their acoustic guitar or keyboard and plays unamplified for a rapt intimate audience punctuated by whistling and sudden jerks. The Smittens' never knowingly unenthusiastic leader Colin Clary, who had previously commented favourably on our T-shirt choice while passing outside the church, takes those of us boarding with him on a particularly magical mystery tour, as being the last train set of the day the driver decides he might as well continue for as long as he wants, which turns out to be a 50 minute set of requests, personal favourites and attempts at songs he has no hope of completing on his own.

Back on terra firma girl trio (although usually a four piece) Liechtenstein, a band who for some reason we've gone until just now thinking were French but turn out to be from Gothenburg, slightly underwhelm compared to their recorded form, their meatier form of Shop Assistants jangle not quite getting over. Meanwhile Rob Jones is The Voluntary Butler Scheme, taking to an increasingly overwarm church with an array of instruments laid out before him. Word has been spreading of his talents - on donning a ukelele and a mouth brace for his kazoo in preparation for The Eiffel Tower And The BT Tower he wryly comments on how he had to present this set-up to artfully styled yet suddenly confused indie kids awaiting Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong, who he supported on tour recently - and his set impresses with its command of the loop pedal to build rhythmic backing over which he plays keyboard and sings of dislocation, making such melodic witchcraft look like the minimum of fuss.

If there was one band that hitherto unknowing hordes were to go away from Saturday wanting to know more about it looked set to be Red Pony Clock. The San Diego collective number eight here, a sprawling collective who make this joyous uplifting music because they feel we need the uplift too. Exuding positivity like a Polyphonic Spree melted down to its constituent parts and with a fine array of instruments chiefly involving mariachi brass and Association-recalling ambition. With the baking sun just starting to head over the yard arm if not exactly set yet, there's actual dancing going on and everyone seems to feel the benefit.

The accompaniment to burning our tongue on the site cafe tea, hotly touted Norwich teenagers The Kabeedies have found the midpoint between Bearsuit and the Maccabees. We've been somewhat quickly dismissive of their recorded work for whatever reason, but maybe we're just very impetuously wrong. Then, like most attendees we file back into the main stage arena for the righteously brazen Northern Soul-pop socialist Dexys stylings of scene veterans Comet Gain, but when they take to the stage we get the feeling there's something missing today. Namely, all but one member, bassist Jon Slade left to hold the fort while ringers from Shrag and Liechtenstein take up the other instruments and assorted randoms are dragged on to replace David Feck and Rachel Evans, not least a dark shaded punter, member of public red wristband as giveaway, reading the lyrics to You Can Hide Your Love Forever off a sheet of A4. The whole thing comes to a messy conclusion within twenty minutes. By the following morning, someone has added to a display of one of their 12"s with a sign reading 'FEATURING MEMBERS OF COMET GAIN'. Darren Hayman would never slack like that, having even brought his dog to the festival, so a little thing like performing in a church that is now preposterously and possibly illegally sauna-like due to overcrowding won't faze him. As such we have to dart around and catch what we can from outside, which is an ending of Painting & Kissing and Good Fruit that provokes the expected mass singalong. Punk TV, closing the outdoor stage not touched in any way by the forecast storms, are described in the programme as "the most-talked-about independent band of 2007 in Russia", surely the finest example of the law of diminishing returns. What they actually are are another attempt to fuse melodic indie rock with electronic patterns, fortunately more Her Space Holiday than Jesus Jones.

And to close day one of a scorching, scintillating day, the reason for all the middle aged men with day wristbands becomes clear, even if the request on a wall mounted sign prohibiting photos goes unheeded. Having been on C86 itself The Wedding Present have more right than most to feel their influence has touched many playing this weekend, and any thought that relocating to LA might have softened David Gedge up a little is dimmed by his having worked with Steve Albini on new album El Rey and evaporated the moment he and the current set of bandmates kick in with Flying Saucer and the first three or four rows turn into that most untwee of occupations, the forming of a moshpit. Over the course of 75 minutes comes ample proof that Gedge, caked in sweat virtually from the off, has been doing this long enough to know what the public want - a handful of songs from the new album, a few old ones largely forgotten by the populace (Love Slave, I'm Not Always So Stupid), the occasional surprise - Cinerama's Wow revived in fine style - and what passes in Weddoes world as hits - there's a riotous run through You Should Always Keep In Touch With Your Friends, Brassneck virtually brings the place down and breaks Gedge's guitar, and a closing couplet of Dalliance and Dare really finished everyone off. And to think that was only half the story.