Day three of Le Guess Who? involved a bit of box-ticking and a trip down memory lane. Wire, sporting a nice line in mint green guitars, were the first act to be checked out in the Tivoli-Vredenburg. Displaying great energy their set was pretty much as expected in terms of recognisable songs, given that I’m a devotee of their classic output from the Seventies and hazier on the later stuff. Add to that the fact that they’re still very much an active entity (new songs ‘Blogging’ and ‘Swallow’ were keenly received, as was the first live outing for a track that may be titled ‘In Manchester’) and you'd be foolish to expect only the 'hits'. 'Map Ref 41 Degrees N 93 Degrees W' was though a welcome inclusion. Technical issues appeared to dog the second guitar but those didn’t get in the way of the performance, which even inspired a small pit at one point. Anyone heading to see the band at their DRILL :Brighton event will be well entertained.

Local boy Binkbeats, who we had the pleasure to see honing his set in the ex-Tivoli-Oudegracht the day before, was given the honour of playing in the Grote Zaal tonight and the Kytopia member pulled it off pretty well. Whilst his tunes brought to mind Aphex Twin, Orbital and Jimi Tenor at various points and he’d a fantastic though too short spell utilising hand bells there were other periods when he was a tad dwarfed by the setting. A more intimate room is probably the best place within which to see him, for the time being at least seeing as his ambitions point to his sound managing to fill large spaces in the not too distant future.

A quick look in at Mac Demarco is best glossed over as his cod reggae and dungarees were highly suspect, popular though he obviously was seeing as it was standing room only even on the balconies of the Pandora room. What was called for now was a walk down through the city centre to the de Helling venue to step back in time with The Vaselines.

Entering as the band were getting into ‘Monsterpussy’ it was immediately clear that those there to watch were fans rather than just stopping by as part of the overall festival experience. Frances was in a very vocal mood, describing the audience as being compiled of three types – rowdy, quiet and those at the bar who were “just masturbating”, whilst later announcing she’s not gender biased (Eugene apparently is though) and generally keeping up a better level of chat with the crowd than witnessed anywhere else over the weekend. ‘Jesus Don’t Want Me For A Sunbeam’, Sex Sux’, ‘One Lost Year’ and ‘Son Of A Gun’ whipped a small section of the audience into a worshipful frenzy whilst the rest of us were rather more restrained but nevertheless appreciative of one of the stand-out performances of the four days. Long live The Vaselines.

The fourth and final day of the festival began with a return to Ekko to catch Brooklynites PC Worship. Delivering a tight and uncompromising set (of their tight and uncompromising sound) theirs was a performance in which you could virtually see a physical representation of the coiled energy they so obviously contain and feed off & then so spectacularly let loose when the pressure reaches its peak. Staying around Ekko we caught one of the weekend’s enticing collaborations (of which Le Guess Who? had a number this time around) as PC Worship and Parquet Courts teamed up to perform as the jazz-infused PCPC. Alternately wailing and brooding the saxophone was a welcome inclusion in the marriage of the two band’s punk energies and those that had stuck around for this little step into the unknown were well rewarded for their curiosity.

 Punk of a different flavour was next on the bill as a visit to the far flung dB’s venue to catch Thee Oops and The Monsters was in order. Take it from me – you need to take the rail option when hitting this place, particularly at this time of year. Thee Oops hail from Sardinia and delivered a fast, rough & ready set that epitomised the healthy state of garage punk worldwide right at this moment in time. Theirs is a loud voice that deserves as wide an audience beyond the confines of the scene as possible.

Lightning Beatman and The Monsters rounded things off for us this year in a multi-lingual performance that nicely brought things full-circle. Plus they were sporting those same mint green guitars (okay, one was a bass) as Wire so clearly a seal of approval. With their two drummers pounding away on their combined one and a half kits, Lightning Beatman growling and howling away (all the time resembling the confused.com character with his minimal combover flailing about) and all four members sweating cobs in their maitre’d-like outfits this was a vintage performance of raw, primal, foot-stomping urgency and the dedicated crowd loved it. Cramming in 18 or so songs, including a rendition of ‘Blow Um Mau Mau’ you could feel in your gut, the boys from Bern laid it down as few others can and, once they’d disappeared from the stage, there was no chance of keeping the high going so catching a train back to town and heading home was the obvious option. A great end to another great event in Utrecht.   

Many thanks to Inga & Max for being fantastic hosts and to Jessica and the LGW? team for their help and assistance throughout the weekend. Cheers too to Stef - good to finally put a face to the name.

Le Guess Who? 2014 initially finds us in the newly built-upon (& so massively expanded) Tivoli-Vredenburg venue, slap bang in the centre of the city and now housing nine performance spaces over 13 floors - surely the envy of any similar sized city (or indeed many larger ones) with pretensions of being a shining light of the live music scene.

German industrial heavyweights EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN are performing their new work Lament in the venue's Grote Zaal so that seems the ideal way to start off this year's event. Originally commissioned by the Belgian city of Diksmuide as part of its WWI commemoration events the live environment is undoubtedly the best way in which to experience such an involving and intense document of man's capacity for inhumanity and the portrayal of war as a beast that feeds on social ills and religious zeal. As a result plans to see other acts elsewhere in the venue are quickly shelved, such is the hold exerted by messrs Bargeld, Arbeit, Unruh, Moser and Hacke.

Taking to the stage amidst great adulation from the capacity crowd the quintet are initially suitably grim faced and soon hard at work pounding away on the many instruments they've constructed specifically for the performance of Lament. Boiler-like sculptures of metal are pushed over, dragged, whipped with chains, added to and subtracted from to create a noise that, as it builds to its climax, manages to achieve the aimed for disturbing effect of the sounds of bombardment and other horrendous aural images from the first European mechanised war.

The sight of a purple dildo being used to gain a particular sound from the guitar and Blixa Bargeld's good humoured, though enlightening, extrapolations on the origins of songs in the work (not to mention his farm yard animal impersonations during the rendition of 'Der Beginn Des Weltkrieges 1914 (Dargestellt Unter Zuhilfenahme Eines Tierstimmenimitators)') and latterly N. U. Unruh's Casey Jonesesque plastic hat and the sight of 3 grown men squirting high pressure air through a number of plastic drainpipes to great musical effect all instil elements of lightheartedness into the performance without in anyway diminishing the weight of the subject matter.

There's no greater example of how seriously the band have approached the work than to see them pounding out 'Der 1. Weltkrieg' on the first use of those previously mentioned drainpipes. Lasting, as it does, over 13 minutes it's a furious workout for the upper body whilst also being a fascinating take on musically representing the main 1914 - 1918 period of the war. 'Let's Do It A Dada' from the 2007 album Alles Weider Offen gets a look-in during the first encore and the group prove once again that they're as up to date (if not ahead of the pack) as ever by having recordings of the show available to buy at the merch stall within minutes of the stage being vacated. A band at the peak of their powers and a performance worthy of the cost of the weekend's ticket alone.

Friday night sees us head to start on the outer fringe of the festival's circuit at the Moira venue, where Ryley Walker's doing his thing. Whether he's under the weather or otherwise phased by something the tracks from debut album All Kinds Of You just don't feel as effective live as on record. A broken string and the need to replace it, rather than swap for another guitar, after only a couple of numbers doesn't help matters and the misunderstood joke he makes to the sound engineer about putting on some trip hop leave a mildly embarrassing air in the room as we head off to Ekko for Dracula Legs.

Aware of the band only through their Too Pure single 'Heartburn Destination / Cold Licks' from earlier this year they were for the most part an unknown quantity. They rocked out pretty hard though & the venue's coal black interior was a good setting for their energetic mix of Seventies rock and Lungfishesque vocal digressions. The crowd was as dense upon leaving as it was when we arrived so clearly they were doing something right in terms of keeping folk from wandering off in search of a new thrill.

From Ekko it was a ten minute walk back to the (still amazing) Tivoli-Vredenburg for another bit of box ticking in terms of seeing an older and venerable performer, in the shape of Dr. John & The Nite Trippers. The slate was blank in terms of expectations so to say we were disappointed by the part of the show we witnessed would not be strictly true. Given the great man's need of two sticks to enable him to walk out to the piano and a total lack of chat with the crowd he's clearly not in the best shape of his life, but the pedestrian pace of the songs we took in (including a very mediocre 'St. James Infirmary') failed to raise our pulse rates. Things maybe improved after we left and the bulk of the crowd seemed to be getting what they wanted but Iceage were on in the Pandora hall so excitement was now sought there.

And thankfully it was found. Whilst having doubts myself about new album Plowing Into The Fields Of Love the intensity of previous works Iceage and You're Nothing was fully on display as Elias Rønnenfelt flung himself about the stage above the seething crowd. Sardines have more space in a tin than the sea of bodies we were viewing from the balcony appeared to have yet, like all of the rooms in the venue we were to experience over the course of the weekend, discomfort seemed to have been successfully designed out of the structure and ease of movement for those leaving at any point during a performance appeared to be a more straightforward process than the packed mass of bodies would have had you believe. Having regained some of the adrenalin rush of the night before we called it a night at this point.