Festival season finally kicked-off for us here at Artrocker with a stage at the Camden Crawl. There’s only so many hours in a day at the Camden Crawl to submit your ears to the onslaught of musical noise and exploration, so travelling at speed to maximize hearing potential is key. My advice is to run or just get a bike, that’d help too.
The perfect start to this year’s Crawl was catching Toy on the Artrocker stage at the Purple Turtle, whose psychedelic fuzz-pop served to heal any remnants of the pre-event hangover.
Toy. Photo by Kane Howie
Next up was Fiction’s minimalist tropical post-punk, which was so engaging that I lost track of time and missed the Blacklisters set at the Earl Of Camden…
Fiction. Photo by Kane Howie
But the pre-apocalyptic doom-sludge of Black Moth was there to remind us all of why the Artroker stage had the best NEW talent of the whole festival. When ‘Chicken Shit’ went down the place exploded under the behomothic brew of hammering drums, thrash guitar and the charisma of lead-vocalist Harriet Hyde.
It was a ball-crushing end to a manic weekend of modern psychedelica, post-punk, through to electro-pop and proto-punk influenced Rock ‘N’ Roll. Now I know why it’s called the Camden Crawl… although crawling around the Artrocker stage was all you needed.
