Live at Leeds festival review

It’s a miserable day in Leeds: unreasoningly cold, grey and non-stop raining. A perfect day to stay cooped-up indoors watching bands but it makes the trips between venues not quite so much fun and it also sadly squashes the general sense of festival atmosphere that can exist and spill over into the streets on days like these.

Leeds’ own Bruising are an early highlight, spitting out a blend of sugary melodies and grungy guitar lines, ricocheting between pop sensibility and gritty noise. Menace Beach may project an across the Atlantic twang to their tone of proto-pop-garage but they too are another local band that sound both thunderous and pop-tinged, sometimes simultaneously.

Continuing with even more homegrown talent, up next are Hookworms, a group who have had an fantastic couple of years and this homecoming show really cements this. Playing to a packed audience the group tear through their material: echo-laden vocals howl throughout the sweaty room, surging guitars create a swirling psychedelic vortex and the groove-heavy bass lines roll along with taut, propulsive drums. When all these components are interlocked the results are as explosive as they are engrossing. Bully have made the trip over from Nashville, Tennessee, although times on the stage they are playing have gotten a little askew across the course of the day and they don’t start playing until they should be finishing. Thankfully the wait, and missing another band in the meantime, was worth it. They play a guitar-heavy assault of screeching grunge punk, led by Alicia Bognanno’s unique vocals, which weave from quiet murmurs to vocal cord tearing yelps. Her voice alone presents an image of a haggard life-long smoker who has had a few too many late nights in her time, yet the reality is the antithesis of such an image and rooted far more in the gusto and snarl of youth; it’s a throaty voice but it comes from the gut and when it collides with the shattering drums and convulsive guitars, it’s a forceful combination.

It’s clear that the majority of people have headed to see other stage-closing groups (such as the Cribs who packed out the city’s Town Hall) as Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore plays to a barely half-full room. Playing material largely from 2014’s The Best Day his band (which also consists of Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley and My Bloody Valentine’s Debbie Googe) go from ambient, restrained guitar experimentations to full-throttle rock-pop, as encapsulated in the wonderfully elongated ‘Speak to the Wild’. It’s an enjoyable close to the day but you can’t quite help but feel like the real party is going on elsewhere. Live at Leeds is an expansive and ambitious festival and one that offers superb value for money given the vast number of artists that perform across it. In fact its greatest asset is perhaps also its biggest fault in that there is so much on its impossible not to feel like you’re consistently missing out on something great.