Now in its second year, the festival is a triumphant celebration of local artists across 8-stages.
Above: The New Eves | All Photos by Hazel Blacher | Words: Elvis Thrilwell
Established last year around the Music Venues Alliance Brighton (MVAB) – a group set up to solidify and protect the city's treasured live music culture – the newly established Homegrown Festival returned this year for a triumphant second sold-out edition. Boasting 8 stages and over 60 exclusively local acts - the festival offers as comprehensive argument, if any were needed, that this small seaside city can confidently boast one of the most nurturing, communal, and exciting alternative scenes in the country. Aside from a special secret acoustic performance from local hero Marika Hackman, and headline slots from ARXX and Hot Wax, the line-up featured more than its fair share of future ones-to-watch. So we at Hard of Hearing, with due diligence, hightailed to the south coast in order to see see what the fuck is up!
Like an amped up alarm bell ringing that the festivities have well and truly begun, Oral Habit open things up for us at pokey attic venue The Pipeline. A space that feels more like you're watching a gig at someone's house than anything else, the psych-rock three-piece threaten to wrench off the rooftop that looms all too close above our heads. With a thematically aligned jar of Sauerkraut lodged in front of the bass drum inspired by their recent single of the same name, we witness a fuzz-walloped twang-coded parade of gnarly 12-string riffage, a bassist striking notes like they were threading a needle and a cover of CAN's 'I'm So Green' in this acid-soaked smorgasbord of psychedelic variation.
A short walk along the seaside to LGBT nightclub venue Revenge brings us to the altogether more soothing (mostly) strains of AtticOmatic. Like splodging Tiger Balm on your stress-addled temples and surrendering yourself to it's overwhelmingly cool release, the quintet's nifty balance of silky neo-jazz shuffles and cutting indie-rock, centred around the duets of twin lead vocalists Kamran Kaur and Lorcan Forder - is endlessly enriching and hypnotic. Their set rises and falls much like the sunshine waves on the coastline nearby – rolling, sweeping, breaking and crashing in exquisite formation.
Sticking with Revenge, the fresh-faced SLAG offer us up one of the day's most beautiful surprises. Locked and loaded with big shreds and an even bigger pair of glittery silver high heels, SLAG's combination of glammed-up flamboyance, slick-ass grunge sensibilities, and shameless math-rock gratifications is an instantly endearing joy. Latest single 'Heaven' is an obvious highlight – complete with a technical difficulty break mid-song which, when fixed, sends the song surging back with an even greater transcendence of bursting energy and rowdy applause.
Above: SLAG
Racing across Brighton down to Green Door Store, the grinding tempests of ĠENN are seriously sublime. Their hard-hitting Sabbath-esque hard-rock-devilry licks sweat onto the bare white-bricked walls; each pose, spin, pirouette and cymbal crash is crisp, immaculate and divine. By contrast, at leafy Folklore Rooms next, The Roebucks' brand of rock is more Mississippi delta than the dungeons of hell. Firmly digging their spurs into a grimy, swampy and charmed concoction of gritty Americana and 60s Rhythm & Blues, tracks like 'Great British Pig' and 'Mona' delight with their dust-swept harmonies, while a closing cover of John Lee Hooker's 'Dimples' well and truly pins their colours to the mast.
There is only band we see today with no releases yet to their name. It's been little over 6 months since Goodbye played their first show, but their set at The Folklore Rooms stands as proud, tall and refined as anything we witness today. Like a hundred candles flickering in a sacred pitch black gloom, with the smoke skeins spiralling pretty patterns onto the walls, their music is ghostly and enigmatic, channeling the goth, indie, and jangling dream-pop classics of the 80s and 90s in a way which is both humbly familiar yet refreshingly distinct.
Next up and no strangers to us here at Hard of Hearing were long-standing favourites The New Eves. Buoyed by the release of recent single 'Highway Man' and news of their signing to Transgressive Records, they round off the evening with a trenchant late night set at The Prince Albert. Belted harmonies, bruising rhythms and Swedish cow songs reverberate out of the pub walls and spill into the growing Brighton night. With a newly acquired 'Big Hag Energy' badge to mark the occasion, we already desperately cannot wait for the band to release more.
Above: The Roebucks
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