What use is sun when we haven't got love? A few minutes into their set and already Gorky Zygotic Mynci are worrying their fuzzy heads with the big questions. Later, singer Euros Childs declares "That song was about a stalker. This song's about taking a dog for a walk." In decades to come, indie hipsters will rediscover these Welsh folk mavericks and laud the six piece as lost visionaries, in the same way that Stereolab fans droll over Os Mutantes and The Free Design. They might have made sense of them by then, as well.
Lord knows Gorky's don't do themselves any favours. They amble through their set with the urgency of a band rehearsal in a local village hall, rarely attempting to keep the audience engaged between songs. Childs gives the impression he'd rather be singing from inside a hermetically sealed bubble, and a broken guitar string takes an age to fix. Given a catalyst, a speck of grit, a sudden lightning bolt, they'd command the rapt devotion their songs sometimes deserve rather than tootle mildly along second on the bill.
When they do hit form, they're superb. They start slow and mesmeric, lilting harmonious folk infused with early misty mornings spent staring at the Irish Sea, and build up to a rousing Celtic soul stomp a few songs later. But what should have been a glorious genre mash for "Sweet Johnny" is marred by cacophony for its own sake. Surely thirty plus years after Saint Lou invented feedback, bands must have realised that it's a whole load more fun to kick up a squealing din than to actual listen to it? Apparently not.
Yo La Tengo suffer from the same overfondness for self-indulgent noise, which is ironic considering their best work involves stripping back to basic components and exploring the space between a voice, a beat and a keyboard. The image you take away isn't of a trio of quiet innovators clever deconstructing songcraft, but of Ira Kaplan on his knees, fist clenched around his guitar, in throes of rapture over a howling mess that any idiot could knock out given the right amplification. "It was like watching Leo Sayer having a w*nk" is one onlooker's summation afterwards, which isn't pleasant whichever way you cut it.
The real magic happens when Yo La focus on the details: Georgia Hubley's gloriously minimalist beats, Kaplan's light touches of keyboard, just sketching in ideas, opening up whole landscapes with the slightest note. Surprisingly, they shine they're at their most awkward, Kaplan finding insecurity in a crowded room in "Season Of The Shark", the Velvets if they'd ever felt tentative about anything in their entire career. They vamp through a hand jiving dance routine towards the end and it's so knowingly unsophisticated it's glorious, the group's amiable naivety untarnished by bluster.
But then Leo Sayer gets a glint in his eye. Ho hum. Yo La Tengo have two sprawling instrumentals they can turn to should the mood take them. One, "I Heard You Looking", is a euphoric masterpiece that ebbs and peaks with true grandeur and made Yo La's Glastonbury set of last year. The other, "Blue Line Swinger", is an unfocussed echo of its cousin, the same melody shorn of purpose. Tonight, alas, we get the latter.
By the end, you want to smash Kaplan's guitar into firewood and kick him back to his keyboard. How can you be true originals and utterly tiresome all in the same night? Both bands really need to start living up to their full potential.
