Festival review: Stag & Dagger, Various Venues, Glasgow

IN AN era when young festivals are shed from the schedules in ever more frequent and financially-challenged fashion, it was good to see that Glasgow’s multi-venue, one-ticket hipster nexus Stag & Dagger had been cleared to make a return.

With an early-afternoon start in the newly-rebranded Captain’s (formerly the Captain’s Rest) on Great Western Road featuring some of the lesser lights of a roughly 40-act bill, the main bulk of the music was condensed into standard gigging hours of approximately 6-11pm. As such there was pretty much no chance that anyone attending will have been able to see every band they might have hoped for, but it was ever thus.

Those not feeling the urge for any exercise at all will have been satisfied, in fact, with the four centrally located stages on Sauchiehall Street, including basement hideaway Nice ‘n’ Sleazy, where Edinburgh’s fast-rising afro-indie contingent Bwani Junction and demented Glaswegian punk-metallers Holy Mountain were among the acts to hold court.

Across the road, meanwhile, the new Art School Union – another basement bar much reduced in size from the currently-in-renovation former venue – hosted groups including London’s stand-out shoegaze dream-poppers Still Corners.

Along the road at the CCA, the line-up included both sometime Fiery Furnaces frontwoman Eleanor Friedberger giving a truly memorable performance of country-blues from her recent solo album Last Summer and New York singer-songwriter Willy Mason. A walk to Stereo a few blocks to the south, meanwhile, revealed the breezy electronic pop of Justin Corrie, aka the recently Chemikal Underground-signed Miaouix Miaoux, and the similarly crystalline 1980s references of Bear in Heaven.

That the festival felt slightly reduced in size this time due to the absence of the old Art School’s main hall was undeniable, but any impression that there might have been a slight decrease in the number of international stars of the alternative (last year’s bill bore artists like Clinic, Warpaint and Kurt Vile) was mitigated by the fact so many strong Scottish acts were featured, not least the Captain’s hotly-tipped house-pop headliners Discopolis.

It was upstairs at the ABC, though, where the biggest crowds and the most well-known names appeared, with Austin, Texas’s blistering psych-rock outfit White Denim playing third fiddle to both Glasgow’s thrilling post-rock/krautrock contingent the Phantom Band and London/Edinburgh quartet Django Django. As singer Vincent Neff rightly pointed out, the latter group’s gigs in Glasgow just seem to get better and better, with a full house dancing to their oddly sublime Saturday night anthems, including their most familiar track Default.

Although the Djangos aren’t yet the stars that such a billing might promise (their appearance on Later with Jools Holland might change that quickly), their headline slot here demonstrated the acutely ahead-of-the-curve programming which once more made Stag & Dagger such a success.

Rating: ****