Wild Paths Pre-Party - The Empty Threats
Wild Paths gets underway properly on Thursday, with a programme that features over 150 acts performing in fifteen venues across the city.
Although this year's Wild Paths does not kick off properly until Thursday afternoon (when Norwich's Arthur Black performs the festival's opening set in the Minstrel Room of The Maid's Head Hotel), the first of two special 'Pre-Party' nights at Voodoo Daddy's gave Norwich music fans a foretaste of what is to come, with sets from two local bands, FEASTS and Magnolia, and a headlining performance from Australia's The Empty Threats.
Voodoo's has had a recent revamp downstairs, and the result is a new sound system that now enables the space to be used for both live music and club nights. The result is an improved sound for live acts, although the DJ console, placed behind a wire cage, may have reduced the performance space of the stage. The stage now looks a bit like that bit in The Blues Brothers where Jake and Elwood have to perform protected against a rain of empty beer bottles. Voodoos' audiences, however, are much better behaved than that.
Opening act are Norwich duo FEASTS, the punky math-rock outfit made up of Ben Giles on drums and vocals, and Conor Etteridge on guitar. It is the sixth time that I have seen them perform, and every time they manage to take it up another notch – Giles' drumming is loud, intense, and fascinating to watch, his vocals have a feral urgency that is wild, almost demonic. Etteridge's guitar is concentrated and focussed. Together, their music has been described as being like 'an explosion in a fireworks factory'.
Norwich seven-piece Magnolia are playing tonight without trombonist Matthew Cassie, but the experimental post-rockers still manage to create a brilliantly cacophonic collage of sound from their mix of guitars, saxophone and vocals, and all augmented with the additional intensity of two drummers. Their sound seems to draw from so many different sources, but I am always reminded of the time I first saw Black Midi at Latitude, back in 2018. It is the third time that I have seen them perform live, and trust me, unlike the colour on the paint charts, there is nothing bland about Magnolia.
Headliners, The Empty Threats, hail from Kaurna, on the Adelaide Plains of South Australia. It is their first time in Norwich, but their second European tour since they first formed in 2017. Another six-piece band needing to squeeze themselves onto the Voodoo Daddy's stage tonight, and perhaps partly explaining lead singer Stuart Patterson's repeated forays into the crowd during their set. His vocal style reminds me in equal parts of Iggy Pop and Julian Cope. Much of the ten-song set is taken from the recently released second full-length album, 'Happy Birthday', and it includes both the recent singles, 'Bus Stop' and 'The One'. The band are described as a 'wild spectacle of Australian post-punk', and of casting themselves as 'atypical misfits'. They certainly possess a party-like enthusiasm in their songs and their style (which includes Patterson's black camisole emblazoned with the word 'Feral'). However, songs like the punchy punk anthem 'Boys In The Gutter' (which is actually about abortion rights) demonstrate that The Empty Threats are definitely not guilty of style over substance.
Wild Paths gets underway properly on Thursday, with a programme that features over 150 acts performing in fifteen venues across the city. Full details at www.wildpaths.co.uk . Weekend wristbands and day passes available in advance from https://wildpaths.gigantic.com/wild-paths-festival-tickets
