Amid festivals with homogenous crowd-pleasing lineups and corporate sponsorships, Bristol’s Simple Things is a welcome returnee in its first year back after the pandemic: an ambitious 15-hour programme of forward-thinking music across seven venues, including a bowling alley. It’s perhaps too ambitious – there are plenty of clashes, queues and frustratingly short sets – but it’s still hearteningly different from other festival bills.
Lauded multi-instrumentalist L’Rain warms up the day at Strange Brew as she glides through her quietly experimental album I Killed Your Dog, complete with a full band and samples of barking dogs and ringing phones. Like many of the performances that follow in the DIY space, L’Rain’s is strangely intimate, even in the face of the huge, enveloping rhythm section, owing to her delicate harmonies, faint bedroom-pop sensibilities and, no doubt, the band’s commitment to playing in socks.
Somewhere in the centre of the festival sits the Sportsman, a rough-and-ready sports bar and music venue framed by arcade machines and stacked pub chairs. Despite the more low-profile and local lineup, it’s far from a fringe event and the room is consistently packed with head-banging listeners. At one point, Butch Kassidy’s brilliant, swarming post-rock makes the floor shake and the toilet doors rattle, before the Psychotic Monks send the audience into a frenzy with their bruising electronic brand of post-punk.
With multiple large performance spaces set across five floors, Bristol Beacon is a more obvious venue choice, but a poor one for character; its swish but plain decor feels more suited to a conference than a festival. George Riley’s signature whispering vocals, which she weaves through seductive slow jams and R&B-informed dance instrumentals, get lost in the cavernous, glass-walled space. Upstairs, Wu-Lu’s punchy hardcore hip-hop sounds great but feels better suited to somewhere more intimate and scuzzy. The sleazy acid house of closing act Paranoid London feels particularly incongruous on the tiny stage in the venue’s entrance hall. But with hands-in-the-air dancers filling the space wall to wall, you can almost imagine it as a small, sweaty club rather than a foyer if you put your mind to it.
Most effective in that venue, though, are the A/V performances. Silhouetted by a dazzling light show and clouds of smoke machine fog, Evian Christ tears through a slowly crescendoing trance set so blistering yet so celestial that one audience member tells their partner: “It sounds like we’re at a wedding!” That experience – joyous and unbounded underground music that evades category – captures what makes Simple Things special.
