Everything Everything

Now in its third year, and most definitely at home, By The Sea festival returned to Margate in glorious style. Having surely established itself as Kent's premier music festival, By The Sea once again upped its game with an inspired roll call of artists. Across the last weekend in September, and in some iconic venues that included Dreamland heritage theme park and the Margate Winter Gardens, East Kent was treated to a spectacular musical menu.

If the thrill of riding the U.K.'s oldest wooden roller coaster, The Scenic Railway, taking a stroll along the golden sands or even seeing Steve Davis DJ in Olby's Soul Café were not enough to tempt you down to the coast on Friday night then surely huge dancing bears and the Hall By The Sea's headline acts were. As the dodgem DJs began to spin their last few tunes, the theme park took on a new guise under the bright lights and neon kitsch. As the yearning for Candy Floss subsided and the need for an Acapulco Taco took over Dreamland came to life.

Dutch Uncles were in great spirits in The Hall By The Sea kicking off their set with 'Oh Yeah' off of their most recent and most successful album to date, 'Big Balloon'. Singer Duncan Wallis was in fine form, excited to 'finally be there' and even inviting the crowd to come and 'ram us later' on the dodgems. With some very funky slap bass, a playful exuberance and a tight, polished set, Dutch Uncles proved a delight. After delivering crowd favourites, 'Face In' and 'Fester', Duncan declared, 'That's enough dancing around like p***ks, we're 30 for God's sake! If we wanted to be sick we'd have gone on the waltzers!' 'Steetlight' and a pulsating, percussively excellent 'Big Balloon' followed before the first of the evening's crowd participation, the harder hitting 'Dressage', closed out their set.

Continue reading: By The Sea Festival 2017 - Festival Review

Everything Everything's arrival in 2009 came via 'My Kz Yr Bf', a song which gave critics much leeway in comparatives. Based on its poly-rhythmic, twitchy math pop body and almost perfect euphoria soaked chorus, it was easy to sum up their hybrid appeal, or so it seemed: Sparks doing Slint whilst digging Late of The Pier? Maybe. Foals, without all the prissy, complicated abstractions? Sure. A universe apart from almost anything in their time zone? Definitely.

Clearly this freshly minted feeling of intellectual hair down was going to attract some comments about the clip of the foursome, but then again any outfit that gives their work titles like 'Photoshop Handsome' and 'Suffragette Suffragette' is apparently willing to stick their neck out for shapes being busted in Iambic Pentameter. A second album, 2013's 'Arc', underlined the ability of singer-songwriter Johnathan Higgs as an individual capable of fusing the realness of both art and emotion together seamlessly, a voice of conscience which placed the band into a category in which other Great British Avant Goodists such as XTC, Roxy Music and Radiohead had carved a similarly idiosyncratic niche.

The build up to 'Get To Heaven''s recording proved to be something of a tortuous process for Higgs, who had spent it absorbing some of the atrocities of our modern 24 hour news existence as connected directly into our lives via TV and computer. Building this kind of mental library can have a de-humanising effect on anyone, but the mental strafing turns itself into verbal ammunition on opener 'Blast Doors', on which the singer reframes the word play of Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' in extremis. In one of its rare sedentary moments, Higgs gargles, "I can smell your fingerprints all over my computer": It's one of the album's signature moments, intimacy and paranoia on a knife edge, the twitching curtains of the psyche turning the outside world in.

Continue reading: Everything Everything - Get To Heaven Album Review