TV Girl, Saturday, August 12, Freedome Stage

There are two basic types of ‘concert epiphanies’ on Sziget: the one where you realise that you really enjoy listening to a band’s recordings, but they don’t really work live. And the one where you just stop by to listen to an artist you find underwhelming, or don’t know at all, and they turn out to be brilliant live. TV Girl most decidedly fall into the first category when it comes to the musical performance itself. Generally speaking, they’re the kind of band your tattooed barista friend who only drinks very niche craft beers will know, love and play them as background music in their very hip boho-industrial café. When asked about the band, they’ll wave their hand politely but dismissively, oh, you wouldn’t know them, an indie pop act from San Diego. Truth be said, most people in the tent didn’t know them either, and the few, seemingly dedicated fans in the front rows were not enough to warm up the atmosphere. Not that lead singer Brad Peetering showed any desire to enjoy life, or even engage with it at any level. He did pepper the otherwise dull performance with speeches about how he doesn’t mind people’s drug consumption and the superiority of Mastercard over Visa (Mastercard were the sponsors of Freedome. Insert interesting discussion about corporate behemoths sponsoring freedom.) He did also mention that if he were capable of any human feeling (didn’t look like it), he would feel love, presumably for the Freedome crowd. We were less than convinced, but overall, the show proved to be an interesting oddity, yet I still feel that TV Girl’s music works much better as the soundtrack of that hip café than on stage.

Mimi Webb, Saturday, August 12, Main Stage

Yet another type of Sziget concert is the one you don’t get to see, which, as far as I am concerned, applies to Mimi Webb. We did send correspondents to cover the concert, which sounds far more professional than it was: the blog’s industrious co-photographer and our mate Marian went, essentially, for beers, and made a detour to the Main Stage. They were also quite open in having their interest fueled mostly by Ms Webb’s looks, and less so by her music, of which they were mostly ignorant. My problem with Ms Webb’s music is that I actually tried to listen to it, and failed: as in I heard it, alright, but it was so incredibly average that my brain erased it from my memory as soon as the sound waves receded. It’s pretty much as if an AI was tasked to come up with the most generic British female pop singer ever, and thusly created Mimi. I tried to probe the correspondents on their feelings post concert, yet it turned out that the same had happened to them, and they had simply erased all useful information, and concluded, not unlike the heroes of Burn After Reading, that the one thing they learned was not to do it again.

Bamba Wassoulou Groove, Saturday, August 12, Global Village

Bamba Wassoulou Groove was also visited by the correspondents exclusively, but, as opposed to Mimi Webb, they came back with rave reviews, going as far as to name it one of the best concerts of Sziget, full stop. That kind of concert where a band you are not familiar with, representing a genre you don’t necessarily listen to all them time, pops up with something unique and memorable. Come to think of it, of course, the blues is music that travelled across the ocean, across from Africa, with the people who were forced to sing it-the sadness of despair, of being bound in shackles, of being unrooted, of being lost. But it is also the music of hope, of finding home away from home, of growing roots in hostile land. It’s music anyone displaced from their homeland will relate to. It comes from the soul, from that safe place where mums cook us dinner- the specific dish they cook may be different, but the feeling behind it remains the same. It’s home. Maybe it comes from Budapest. From Paris. From Istanbul. From Bamako. Maybe you understand the words, and maybe you don’t. But if you don’t, they will still call to you, You were once lost. And now, for a few fleeing minutes, on an island, in a strange city with friendly people, you are found.

Moderat, Saturday, August 12, Freedome Stage

You could call Moderat the opposite of emotional music. On the surface of it, their sound is polished to perfection, sparse, cold in a calculated way. Germanic, to operate with stale stereotypes. These are people who name their records II, III, More Data and Even More Data– you guessed right, there was a first record before II, it wasn’t even I, it was just Moderat, and it contained breezy stuff like songs called A New Error, Rusty Nails, Nasty Silence. In concert, they are live versions of the same mathematical precision. Elaborate visuals float behind the stage, in perfect synchronicity with the beats of the music. There seems to be a masterplan of how songs follow each other, of what happens , and when. A machine, machine music, generating data. And yet slowly, especially during tracks which feature vocals from Sascha Ring, something altogether unexpected emerges. An outburst of feelings, mostly melancholy, aching, a longing for something lost, but also the occasional spark of joy, like star’s last burst before it implodes. It’s almost as if you took a skeleton of steel and platinum, and gave it flesh, made it human. This may be an admittedly very long, and digressive way to say it, but this may have been this year’s best Sziget concert for me, a perfect balancing act between the precision of science and the chaos of emotions.

Tom Grennan, Sunday, August 13, Main Stage

And now we arrive to the unavoidable ‘a bit of a letdown’ concert. There is always one, there must be, but I will honestly admit I did not expect it to be Tom Grennan. I should have expected it, perhaps: after having really loved his first album (and the subsequent Sziget concert, which I’d rated even higher than none else than the Arctic Monkeys), I’d been a bit underwhelmed by his more recent records. There’s nothing inherently wrong with them, they just seem a little confused as to what they want to be, musically speaking. The Sziget concert was their mirror image. It is quite natural that a fairly young artist would explore different genres in search of an identity, but yoyoing from a little bit of electro here, to a little bit of soul there and a Little Bit of Love at the end of the set felt quite clueless. There were good levels of energy and an overall happy vibe for the afternoon slot, which by the fourth day became positively hot. But there was no oomph. Nothing to make the show memorable. Nothing to keep you in the sun, truly connected to the music on stage, when you could walk to a shaded bench and randomly slag off Manchester United with a stranger who happened to seek shelter from the heat under the same tree. That, and the intro medley of songs from Grennan’s first album, were the only genuinely entertaining bits of the show.

Arlo Parks, Sunday, August 13, Main Stage

Arlo Parks could have had her Grennan ’18 moment had she played the more intimate atmosphere of the Freedome tent. The Main Stage, especially in the pre-headliner slot, can be a mixed blessing for an artist who doesn’t have a well established fan base outside the UK. She even mentioned how this was one of the largest stages she’d ever played on- and it looked like it, she has a mesmerising stage presence, but it seemed like she had to run a lot to cover the expanse of the stage in the same way she would have done at a smaller venue. Right at the start of the show, she even took a bit of a tumble, which she then proceeded to laugh off in good humour. I felt immediately positively inclined towards an artist who is obviously ridiculously talented, but also a little clumsy and gauche every now and then, she felt like one of us. This translates into her music as well- it’s just eminently relatable, even if you don’t share her age or her situation, she’ll just drop an astute observation that will immediately strike a chord. It might not have been a memorable show in its entirety, but it definitely had its moments- Eugene, her most popular song to date, energised the crowd into an enthusiastic singalong. Someone to my left had an epiphany: she had heard this song being played in H&M, and liked it, but had no idea it was Arlo Parks. She would now proceed to listen to more Arlo Parks. The ways into a music lover’s heart are convoluted and manifold.

Nothing But Thieves, Sunday, August 13, Freedome Stage

The biggest shock of the Nothing but Thieves concert was that I discovered that I had been wrong about something (this usually unsettles me). I had been labouring under the misconception that their 2017 Sziget gig was cancelled because lead singer Conor Mason accidentally stabbed himself in the eye with a fork. As it turns out, a splinter of a knife flew into his eye- I really don’t know which scenario is scarier, but let’s say the second absolves Conor of being unable to use cutlery. However, I now inspect knives in my kitchen with an elevated level of suspicion. I’ve been rambling so long about something quite inconsequential because I never know what to say about a Nothing but Thieves concert. I somehow often end up at one, I feel that the vibe is good and that there is a strong crowd of die hard fans- this had been symptomatic during the day, when szitizens with Nothing but Thieves band shirts easily outnumbered those with Mumford and Sons shirts, albeit the latter were the Main Stage headliners. It would be a stretch to have them headline the Main Stage- but a switch with Arlo Parks would have benefited both acts. But there is this problem where the music just doesn’t strike a chord with me on any level. I just played their hit Amsterdam several times and now that the music has stopped, I can’t remember a beat. Same applies to the concert, to a heightened level, as the Freedome sound system had one of its bad days, with strong noise levels and distortion, especially at the back of the tent. But a lot of fans evidently had a great time, and who am I to judge them for it.

PS: Apparently, in 2018, I was very much aware of the correct version of the Conor Mason eye harming debacle.