DiS's Dom Gourlay and Andrzej Lukowski descended upon the first UK ATP of '09 like two gods of yore. Sleep probably being what the gods of yore would listen to had stoner metal been around in yore. But enough musings on divinity: here's our high and low points of a fine sequel to 2007's slightly bland first installment of the ATP Vs The Fans; moral of the weekend? A voting public who believe MGMT to be legitimate entertainment (thank fuck they were were unavailable) will always be gazumped by The Jesus Lizard.

Friday

Having opened for chavrock’s finest the Kings Of Leon before Christmas, playing the Pavilion stage should be something of a doddle for M83. Certainly they don’t lack confidence, tossing away fan favourites like ‘Teen Angst’ and ‘We Own The Sky’ early on, despite mainman Anthony Gonzalez hiding himself away under a hooded top for long periods. Nevertheless, their performance sets the scene for Friday evening’s fun and games, mixing swooning melodies with techno-laden swathes of reverb for good measure. By the time they finish, they’re happy and so are we. Result! (DG)

By the conclusion of Andrew WK’s ‘solo’ show, the total personnel on the stage number at least five, most notably Current 93 and an, er, individual named Bad Brilliance. He has a balloon for a head, a fact WK points out repeatedly and not particularly necessarily. The actual show is sort of like a weird cross between a kegger, a self-help seminar, and some sort of bizarre send up of live hip-hop. I had almost no actual idea what was going on, but between ‘Party Hard’, a lot of songs that sound like ‘Party Hard’, and the general WTF-ness of the onstage spectacle, it all conspired to have a sort of wrong genius. (AL)

Pink Mountaintops last toured the UK as a folk duo, and were kind of wishy washy and disengaged and a bit scared-looking, which wasn't exactly a surprise given that the current album Axis Of Evol wasn't actually a folk record. Now swollen to a six piece they sound a bit like, um, Oasis, a chugging wall of sound butting up against Steve McBean’s thick rasp. An incongrously euphoric ‘Slaves’ is a high, but you still get the impression McBean is a bit unsure of what this one time solo project is even supposed to actually be these days. (AL)

If there were one band DiS had been looking forward to finally seeing in the build-up to this festival it would have to be Devo. Even the site of them in tight bright yellow shirts and even more ill-fitting shorts halfway through like the new wave forefathers of Little Britain’s Dafydd character isn’t enough to put us off, and their set is nothing less than a bonafide surge of hits, ‘Whip It’, ‘Mongoloid’ and ‘Gates Of Steel’ in particular whipping everyone in sight – us included – into an all-singing, all-dancing, beer-spilling frenzy. (DG)

Having never quite understood the point of Fuck Buttons, something finally clicked during the early hours of Saturday morning – or was it simply down to the copious amounts of alcohol consumed over the past eight hours? Whatever the cause, Fuck Buttons noise-infused beats actually make us want to dance like we’ve just travelled back in time to a farmer’s field in 1990, and for forty-five minutes they are the best band in the world. Of course reality had dawned by midday, and upon trying to relive the moment courtesy of Street Horrrsing and a dodgy iPod, their record still sounds ropey as hell. (DG)

M83, Friday, Pavilion Stage

Saturday

”Electronic music with homoerotic undertones” is, I suppose, as good a way as any to kick off one's Saturday. That said, the Postal Service-alike number Nico Mulvey is referring to is but an enjoyably footnote in the type of revelatory-but-relaxed set ATP afternoons are all about – think my jaw is gently grazing some poor Australian's feet and eyes are suspiciously itchy by midway through the closing 'The Only Tune', an almighty deconstruction and reformatting of an old Appalachian folksong about a drowning girl reconstituted as a violin. (AL)

Lords are a larf. They know they’re a larf. Most of their songs seem to be about drinking (‘Pint Of Wine’, ‘Want To See You Drunk And Dancing Like A Russian’), and if they're ultimately kind of outclassed in the heavy stakes by their US brethren, they're also more of a hoot: a bit of joyous AC/DC swagger in the step of a heavy ATP band is more than welcome. If they were your favourite band here then that’d be kind of odd. But, you know. They're a larf. (AL)

Retribution Gospel Choir are not a larf. Having surprised many a reveller at last year’s End Of The Road festival with his guitar-slinging outburst, Low’s Alan Sparhawk appears to have found a true vehicle for all that anger. How else could one explain the ferocious energy that transforms the likes of ‘Breaker’ and ‘Take Your Time’ off the aforementioned’s Drums And Guns into something sounding like Queens Of The Stone Age after drinking a litre of petroleum liquid? When Sparhawk asks if anyone has any requests, some wag near the back makes reference to 'that' incident, seemingly disorientating the band into cutting their set short by a song. I guess that’ll teach him to try and play the diplomat… (DG)

There's a similar tension if considerably less suggestion of actual danger from The Cave Singers; it’s hard to reconcile Peter Quirk’s good ol’ boy image – beard, trucker cap, (I’m surely imagining he was wearing dungarees, right..?) – with that primeval croak, clanging out like the breaking of the first dawn, but it’s heart attack intense. Hillbillies of the apocalypse. (AL)

Despite playing to one of the smallest crowds of the weekend, Sian Ahern and her six-piece band proved to be one of its highlights. Fusing together a vast array of sounds courtesy of as many sources of instrumentation as health and safety would deem possible to fit on such a tiny stage as this, Sian Alice Group’s incendiary mix of drones, monologues and spacerock jams are a joy to behold, and suggest their forthcoming second long player may well be one of 2009’s best. (DG)

Sad to say, but Young Marble Giants are up with Spiritualized as disappointment of the festival. Can’t exactly work out why a broadly accurate run-through of an album as wonderful as Colossal Youth falls so flat; probably because they despatch it with the verve, charisma, chemistry and stagecraft of the average school chess team. Maybe even a below average school chess team. Oh yeah. That’d be it. Shame, this could have been good. Bored of this reunion now. (AL)

This is the point where I hold my hands up high and confess my knowledge of Grizzly Bear and their output was practically zilch before about 7.15pm Saturday evening. The fact that since arriving back I’ve made the point of tracking down both the Horn Of Plenty and Yellow House long players speaks loudly of the impact made by their performance. The four-way vocal harmonies of Ed Droste and co really had to be heard to be believed; perfectly-pitched with not so much as a note out of place, so engrossing that their cover of The Crystals ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)’ is possibly the most devastating four minutes of the entire weekend, and undoubtedly the moment where ignorance became bliss. (DG)

Unless cloning really comes along in leaps and bound, few of us will ever know what a mammoth being tortured would be like. Harvey Milk’s audience could probably take a solid guess, mind; the set doesn’t so much come to life as it is beaten into it, Creston Spiers wrenching ruinous shards of sound from his throat and guitar like a surgeon hoiking jagged shrapnel from a wound. Atmospheric as hell they may be, but you can't really say the early minutes of the set are actually fun. It slowly and irrevocably gathers momentum, thought, spinning into a sludge'n'roll boogie of dark joy and remorseless, implacable force. (AL)

Beirut should maybe be a bit more festival-defining than he actually proves; maybe a truth about this ATP is that looked at as a whole the heavy bands make up the core, while the others offer more of an elaborate garnish. Still, in the context of a festival where the heavyweights are so literally heavy, Zach Condon’s inter-war anti-rock goes down pretty damn well, billowing about the vast Pavilion with a stately set loaded with all manner of -Gulag Arkestar/Lon Gisland goodies, even if it's maybe not the most engaging thing that ever did happen. Still, Condon shames fellow performers by being only artist with decency to make a donk crack. (AL)

Next I sort of dither about between Errors and Sleepy Sun; the former are impressive to the point that I was actively confused as to whether they were the band I saw at Supersonic last year – their proggy dance surge feels like it could set a field of 100,000 a-boogying. Reluctant to drag myself away, but Sleepy Sun are weirdly compelling, if only because they seem to be a homage to literally everything about the Seventies (paisley shirts! beards! peace signs! Fleetwood Mac covers!). (AL)

And then... dear god what a final three. What demented set of lab conditions led to the creation of Marnie Stern I couldn’t even begin to guess at, but the raging animation’s combination of skewiff technical genius and valley girl ridiculousness is enhanced a thousandfold live. Her set is sort of like being trapped in some confusing but entirely wonderful cartoon; Rainbow Brite with a lot more shredding. Or Maxie's World. Anyone remember Maxie's World? Yeah, er, me neither. The closing trio of ‘Vibrational Match’, super hawt bassist Malia James’ bitchy anecdote about a young Stern’s encounter with John Cusack and the almighty ‘Patterns Of A Diamond Ceiling’ is enough to salve any remorse at missing the start of The Jesus Lizard. (AL)

So yeah, I miss David Yow stage-diving within the first nanosecond of ‘Puss’ or whatever happened, but y’know, he stage-dives, maybe, I dunno... couple of hundred times more? These days Yow looks not unlike Kevin Spacey’s slightly overweight cousin and seems to be forcing his ravaged body way beyond the point a man half his years could possibly take. But of course he survives. He always does. He is mayhem, he is chaos, he is very, very drunk. Indeed, for a surprise reunion of a bunch of middle aged men, it’s not really a shock to anyone how good this is, as David Yow is quite clearly going to keep being as David Yow as is physically possible until he dies of it. Still, I defy anyone not to be gobsmacked by the sheer brutality of it all as his infinitely better-preserved bandmates rip into the audience like a tiger eviscerating a herd of helpless deer. ‘Mouthbreather’... ‘Boilermaker’... ‘Monkey Trick’... FUCK YES. (AL)

Sleep I’d not necessarily been so sure about – exciting as this one off reunion is, stoner rock at 1am can be a mighty gruelling thing. Such doubts prove me a stupid person... Holy Mountain is despatched at such ungodly volume as to utterly transcend any sense that this might be a sop to genre nerds. After all the shit this band went through in the Nineties, it’s heartening to see how much this clearly means to them, but really anything so puny as human feelings is buried under a torrential spew of riffola, primitive and fierce as the fires of creation. (AL)

Grizzly Bear, Saturday, Pavilion Stage

Sunday

If you were to ask any Killing Joke fan in the room for the best couplet to start the set, most wouldn’t disagree with ‘Requiem’ and ‘Wardance’. Jaz Coleman meanwhile strikes a menacing pose, like a mystical uncle with the shared genetics of Trent Reznor and Alice Cooper. Geordie’s guitar sounds are simply euphoric, an original underrated master whose inspiration holds no boundaries, while the tribal rhythms of Paul Ferguson coupled with Youth’s elegant dubbed-up basslines are a joy to behold, none more so than on ‘Turn To Red’ or ‘Psyche’s frenzied assault which causes the Centre Stage’s dancefloor to erupt as one sweaty mass. Simply awesome, from start to finish. (DG)

For a guy with such an amazing back catalogue, Jason Pierce sure knows how to frustrate even the most virile of audiences. While ‘I Think I’m In Love’ and a rousing ‘Take Me To The Other Side’ at the death at least restore some kind of semblance, Spiritualized’s largely meandering set in between feels like a despondent void when compared to the best of what DiS has witnessed throughout this weekend. Even more disappointing is the fact Spiritualized actually sounded better during their soundcheck, so much so that even the Manchester derby in the Sports Bar was second best for a short while. Oh well… (DG)

The debate as to whether School Of Seven Bells are/aren’t shoegaze will probably go on longer than this evening, but what isn’t in doubt is that this trio conjure up an almighty crescendo of sound in the flesh. Indeed, the luscious harmonies of the Deheza twins coupled with Benjamin Curtis’ floor shaking axemanship is slightly debilitating in the way songs like ‘My Cabal’ and ‘White Elephant Coat’ - subtly ambient on record - are insanely transformed into viciously candescent slabs of noise that instantly dispel cusatory criticisms that School Of Seven Bells are nothing more than whimsical dullards. (DG)

Having possibly the most apt band name of the weekend, not least due to the fact they’re the penultimate live act before the first ATP of 2009 draws to a close, This Will Destroy You’s relentless, instrumental-based power-rock is the perfect antidote to many a sleepless night, and despite the prospect of a long drive back to the midlands in just a few hours time, manages to prolong those Zzzs for a few hours more at least. Drummer Andrew Miller is nothing short of incredible, while the bass-led fury of ‘Threads’ is simply phenomenal in its execution. (DG)

Sian Alice Group, Saturday, Reds

And with that our heroes wandered off into the sunset, bruised, battered, and probably faintly baffled at each other's taste in music. Stay tuned for next week's review where a Polishman on a comedown waxes hot and cold over this weekend's ATP Curated By The Breeders

photos by Dom Gourlay