Review: Simple Things 2017

When the nights start rolling in and the air gets a little cooler, you might think it’s time to start looking forward to Christmas. In Bristol, we start to look forward to Simple Things. This completely unique, multi-venue festival was founded by some of the best and bravest bookers in the business and ships in talent from all over the world to delight music lovers of all denominations for one seventeen-hour stretch per year.

This year’s headliners, Leftfield and Wild Beasts, were propped up by some of the most exciting music about right now, including a fair whack from our fair city: you may have been lucky enough to catch IDLES tearing up the main stage of the Colston Hall for example, or you may have stomped it out to Shanti Celeste’s rave flavours in Lakota in the early hours. Here are some of the other highlights of another exceptional year.

Japanese Breakfast, Colston Hall, Foyer
Jumping, kicking and leaning into the crowd as her band thrash behind her, Michelle Zauner is a revelation as dream-pop floor-filler Japanese Breakfast. Audiences line every inch of the Colston Hall’s stairs and hundreds of faces peer down on Zauner’s energetic stage show. Playing tunes from her most recent release, Soft Sounds from Another Planet, songs that seep woozy allure on record are kicked up a notch, and heads bob in time with Zauner’s as she casts her hands upwards, mirroring her bright, lilting voice. Special shout out to Zauner’s shoes too – when she bounces on the soles (which is all the time), they light up in all the colours of the rainbow. The perfect visual accompaniment to a prismatic set. – SJ

Japanese Breakfast. Photo by Sam Mulvey

The Kelly Twins, The Station
Sean and Dan Kelly might well be the only people to have played Simple Things every year since it launched in 2011. Consummate DJs with one of the city’s deepest vinyl collections, they kick off the bass-centric Station lineup with a typically freewheeling tour through garage reductions, bass derivatives and echoes of techno, rap and R&B. Starting out abstract but building up to some proper bangers as the set progresses, their set whets the appetite for the musical variety to come. – AB

Downtown Boys, The Sportsmans
The rain hammers down as soggy attendees run from the Colston Hall to The Sportsmans in an attempt to catch a look at Rhode Island punks, Downtown Boys. There’s a hefty queue, but when damp fans enter the pub, the instantly electrifying atmosphere makes it all worth it. Vocalist Victoria Ruiz is screaming political slogans into the mic as the band go utterly wild around her, brandishing their instruments like weapons on the Sportmans’ tiny stage. The bass thuds through the bar so hard that the ceiling starts shedding plaster, and the floor jumps up and down like a bouncy castle. The band finish their set with a raucous cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark, and everyone completely loses the plot. It’s pure, unmitigated magic. – SJ

British Paraorchestra & Army of Generals Kraftwerk: Rewerk, Colston Hall
Colston Hall’s main hall is fit to burst for British Paraorchestra (BP) and Army of Generals. They’re here to perform a new piece composed by Charlotte Harding and Lloyd Coleman inspired by Kraftwerk’s masterpiece, Trans Europe Express. Based in Bristol and marshalled by conductor Charles Hazlewood, the BP are the nation’s first professional orchestra of disabled musicians, and here they combine with Hazlewood’s period instrumentalists Army of Generals to form a massive 79-piece ensemble. While traditional instruments form the backbone, there are analogue synthesisers and custom edge electronic drum tech too, while Harding uses a Kaoss pad to process the whole sound through delays, ring modulators and the like. The musicianship is excellent throughout, and as a demonstration of the enabling power of music technology – both in terms of inclusivity and the range of sounds an orchestra can create – it’s nothing short of a marvel, but as a homage to Kraftwerk it falls a bit flat. With a bombast more suited to a Hollywood action movie than the existential travelogue suggested by the original, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that the sound and fury signify somewhat less than four Germans with synths achieved back in 1979. Perhaps capturing the Düsseldorf maestros’ subtlety with such a large ensemble is Mission: Impossible. – AB

Patten, The Station
Patten’s future industrial racket emerges from a fog of dry ice. The London-based duo whose members are known publicly as ‘D’ (male) and ‘A’ (female) are art school to the core, employing declamatory vocals, rave-era Hoover sounds and a variety of techno beats and jungle breaks hammered out live on drum pads. While the band members themselves are barely visible, there’s plenty to look at with both film and 3D laser projections employed to eye-popping effect. A’s voice is used sparingly and for the most part it’s buried so deep in the electronic mire that it’s a muffled, ghostly presence; its human urgency virtually drowned out by a world of oppressive technology. – AB

Patten. Photo by Rebecca Cleal

Spectres, The Sportsmans
It’s one in, one out at The Sportsmans, where Bristol’s own Spectres make the day’s filthiest racket. If noughties noiseniks Part Chimp re-weaponised shoegaze and stoner rock for desensitised ears, Spectres take that process to its logical, brutal conclusion with a sound whose individual elements are virtually indistinguishable thanks to the sheer levels of volume and distortion employed.  Spectres aren’t pretty, but they are powerful, disorientating and as illicitly, queasily compelling as a good, old-fashioned public execution (the condemned man, inevitably, being rock itself). – AB

Clark presents Death Peak, O2 Academy
If there was a Nobel Prize for sound design in the service of dance music, Chris Clark would be a shoe-in. In what is largely an upbeat set of big room techno – Clark at his most accessible – every sound is so perfectly chosen and sculpted that it takes club music to a rare level of craft and into the realm of the sublime. He’s flanked for much of the set by two identically-clad dancers with what can only be described as backwards haircuts – their faces obscured by veils of hair – who perform beautifully choreographed routines with props such as black obelisks and translucent shrouds. Chris Clark could churn out EDM bangers in his sleep but has chosen to remain on the fringes, commenting on the past and future of dance music by taking its technical possibilities to their limits. We should treasure him. – AB

Clark presents Death Peak. Photo by Rebecca Cleal

Jlin / Shackleton, The Station
Also pushing boundaries is Jlin (Firestation), whose footwork-inspired beats decouple that genre’s nervy, unstable rhythms from the demands of the club and stretch them to breaking point. With its complex patterns of snares and toms, Jlin’s music investigates polyrhythms of the sort rarely heard outside African music or the more outré reaches of jazz, and its atmosphere is unremittingly dark. It’s not the easiest listen, but it is both technically impressive and dazzlingly original. Another maverick producer known for oppressive vibes and prodigious drum programming, Shackleton’s recorded output shares some musical DNA with Jlin, but his set today is far more conventional than hers, aimed squarely at the dancefloor and propelled by an undercarriage of 4/4 beats. – AB

The Bug & Miss Red, The Station
Kevin Martin is one of the most idiosyncratic artists working in British music today, and his performances as The Bug aren’t for the faint-hearted. You might think his records are fierce and bass-heavy – and they generally are – but nothing could prepare you for the sheer physicality of his sound when heard through a well-tooled club system. The low end is simply crushing, while filter sweeps are employed so gratuitously that they’re equally capable of inducing euphoria and nausea. Tonight he plays two sets. The first is a vinyl journey that begins with his own anthems Poison Dart and Skeng before stopping off at various dancehall and dub destinations. The second features a hair-raisingly intense performance from Miss Red, the Israeli MC who featured on The Bug’s Angels and Devils album and more recently worked with Martin on her own mixtape Murder. Babylon leaves the room in tears, its boys having taken a hell of a beating. – AB

Omar Souleyman. Photo by Ro Murphy

Omar Souleyman, Colston Hall, Foyer
Last year’s Simple Things saw Charlotte Church lay waste to the post-headline slot in the foyer, so Omar Souleyman had a lot to live up to. The Syrian superstar was a farmer and part-time wedding singer before going international some time in his forties, since when he’s become a fixture on the festival circuit and collaborated with Bjork. Endlessly charismatic, Souleyman bonds easily with the audience, many of whom are a little worse for wear, producing the most uninhibited party atmosphere of the day. His sound – a synthesised update of traditional dabke music – is based around infectious drumbeats and swirling melody lines that recall Levantine stringed and reed instruments like the saz and mizmar.  While his musical roots are completely different, Souleyman has some of the qualities of a great dancehall MC: he’s artist and hype-man in roughly equal measures. Resistance is useless. – AB

Kahn & Neek, The Station
With fingerprints in everything from dub reggae to grime and leftfield electronica, Kahn and Neek are one of the Bristol scene’s most fertile creative partnerships. Tonight they close the Station stage with a two-hour set of deep, rumbling bass music that recalls the glory days of dubstep before it became the genre that dare not speak its name. The things that made that music great – the space, the abyssal reverbs, the cathartic extremity of the low-end emissions – are all present and correct, and it’s refreshing to hear such a talented pair of producers revelling in them. The famous Bristol bass tradition is safe in their hands. – AB

Reviews by Sammy Jones and Adam Burrows

Main image: Leftfield at Colston Hall – photo by Chris Cooper