Live Review – Portals Festival 2024 – Sunday
The second day of London's premier indoor alternative, experimental, math-rock, and post-rock festival. Despite being on a sleepier Sunday, the lineup is just as varied as the name has come to mean.
The Sunday started upstairs in the seated theatre at an early 1pm start with London based emo troupe itoldyouiwouldeatyou. Except for a brief intro, all music came from their as untitled new album, although tracks such as “Leon” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” have already grown to be live favourites. The final song built to almost overwhelming crescendos, ending with the refrain of “nothing ever really ends/ it just goes round again”, the echo trails accented by the reverberant theatre space lingered long enough to never feel truly ending.
Next up is the UK big riff supergroup Jaguar Throne, with members from Bossk, Cognizance, Lakes and Gold Key. With only 3 songs out – that all hit harder live – the set is mostly unreleased material, which keeps up the anthemic headbanging. The intensity of the songs is only matched by the intensity of EartH Hall’s infamous strobe lighting.
The informal aesthetic code of Portals, is dark t-shirts, dark graphic design and all black guitars, maybe punctuated by a flash of colour of a patch on a battle jacket. Fruit based math pop duo Standards came to the stage in a pastel coloured hue, supporting their new album Fruit Galaxy. Giving virtuoso guitar playing alongside more stage interaction than you get from most instrumental math rock bands, little electronic production elements like sampled amen breakbeats and arpeggiated synths adding more texture. With a single cover (a medley of some of the greatest hits of Nintendo’s music), and ending the set with a hug filled “wall of love”, Standards embody the fruit they name their songs and albums after.
Seeing a crowd of people with their phones in the air, flashes on, filming the first song of a band isn’t the usual sight in the scene that Portals works in, but Elephant Gym are the exception. Even during soundcheck, the energy in the downstairs hall was different compared to the majority of the festival, with the tension building for when the proper start was going to happen. Coming off the World EP released late last year, Elephant Gym’s unique blend of angular math funk is still imitated but hasn’t been surpassed yet. With a set spanning from Witches from recent album Dreams, to early songs like Ocean in the Night, showing their sense of identity for the whole career as a band. Before playing the titular track from album “Underwater”, bassist/singer KT Chang dedicated it to the struggles of being a musician in a band, and with a room filled to the back with musicians who have been in similar positions to you, the respect and admiration was palpable.
The initial impression of BIG|BRAVE’s live setup is their insular setup of the full amp stacks surrounding them. Whereas other bands of the big amplifier worship mentality (Sunn O))), Boris and Sleep to name a few) fill out the stage with as many speaker cabinets as possible, a small, focused unit gives a different, more personal aspect to the waves of sound. Songs from their month and a half old album A Chaos of Flowers take on a more ethereal quality than the album, with the vocals reverberating naturally around the open theatre space. Each layer of vocals was matched with another layer of guitar, both pitched notes as well as controlled feedback squeal, giving an oppressive mirror to the ethereality. Programming for a seated auditorium in rock and its surrounding genres is hard, as many bands and artists design their music around small back rooms for people to stand and cradle their beer to, but giving a theatrical space to a band like BIG|BRAVE could not have fit more perfectly
Closing out the weekend on the Hall stage, with their first ever UK performance, came instrumental post rock powerhouse If These Trees Could Talk. After a stuttering start due to technical issues they hit their stride ploughing through a lengthy thirteen song set consisting heavily from their last three records. For those in attendance this has been a long time coming and gleefully received by the eager crowd even after rappelling up and down multiple flights of stairs for two days. Finishing up with ‘Malabar Front’ from their self-titled debut, this is a perfect end to the weekend.