Route du Rock

There are several things about Route du Rock that, without much effort, conjure up the image of some hypothetical parallel festival held in an Italian town. For one, as the concerts get underway, the town centre - which is essentially just the inside of the fortifications facing the sea, separated from it by little more than a strip of sand, especially at high tide - is overrun by tourists, particularly since the festival takes place on the Ferragosto weekend. After the odyssey required to reach the town and then leave it again - at the tourist office, the directions to Dinard airport, just ten kilometres away, point travellers toward spots for hitchhiking - you get the feeling it would have been quicker to drive there, even from Italy; and you'd have saved money too.

It doesn't help that the organisers split the concerts between the town itself and the main stage, set inside the admittedly beautiful grounds of a medieval fortress, the Fort du Saint-Père, about ten kilometres from Saint-Malo. Every day, festival-goers - and the event boasts a capacity of tens of thousands - have to make the trip back and forth at least once to catch everything. It's easy to picture the crowds piling up at the entrance to the (scarce) shuttle buses, which apparently have actually increased in number compared to last year. Then there are the comforts afforded to the lucky few with press accreditation, who can happily lounge in armchairs up on the ramparts while ordinary punters have to fight over a grand total of two (!) tables to eat or rest at. All in all, a very "Latin" festival, and not remotely Anglo-Saxon or Nordic in spirit: the triumph of aesthetics over practicality - though the former without the latter tends to fall apart, especially amid mud and twenty thousand people. And in all this, if nothing else contributing to the general air of disarray, Saturday's torrential rain is no excuse.

That said, thirty-five euros for a day pass and eighty for three days are genuinely bargain prices for the names the organisers have managed to attract this year, with the added merit of having grouped them into "themed" days. The choice has (inevitably?) fallen on Sunday, a true showcase of that American melting pot filed under the label "indie-folk", even if by now it has, for almost all these acts, very little to do with folk or the popular tradition. In succession: Josh T. Pearson, Other Lives, Okkervil River and Fleet Foxes.

The first two acts play at the theatre-auditorium of Saint-Malo's convention centre, just outside the city walls. There's just enough time to escape, almost entirely, the baroque darkness of Chelsea Wolfe's howling warbles and her "nightmare" dressing-up of the usual graveyard clichés.

After the disappointment of the Milan show, Pearson at Saint-Malo is something otherworldly. Perhaps it's the way the curtain parts on the first notes plucked by the Texan, the single light embracing him from above and filtering with an almost immaterial effect through the towering singer-songwriter's mane, but he seems to materialise straight out of some celestial sphere. The liturgical solemnity of the theatre stage clearly suits Pearson, as some lucky souls will have witnessed in Ferrara. He throws himself into it completely, moving with a pronounced sense of choreography - striking when he drops to his knees, seemingly in full guitar-driven ecstasy - even reining in his usual (and slightly off-key) run of jokes to just the occasional likeable quip. When the show (and the audience's trance) ends, there's a distinct feeling that this run of concerts, coming right after "Last Of The Country Gentlemen", will be remembered for a long time.

The decision to have Other Lives play right after Pearson is, in truth, hard to fathom, unless it's meant to help thin out the crowd moving from Saint-Malo to the Fort du Saint-Père. The audience is halved: unfortunately, media hype still carries weight. The Stillwater band would certainly deserve more, not just for their flawless production - a hallmark since their days as Kunek, their original name - but also for their live show, where, with an admirable work ethic - each member plays at least a couple of different instruments - and without artificial shortcuts, save for a laptop backing them up, they manage to reproduce the sound of "Tamer Animals" with remarkable precision. The album is played almost in full, from the metaphysical breath of "For 12" to the more stripped-down "As I Lay My Head Down" and the orchestral Coldplay-isms of "Dark Horse". This choice not to revisit tracks from their previous self-titled record - let alone the Kunek material - gives the Other Lives set an extraordinary cohesion, its layered sound building like a superb geological formation. Jesse Tabish's only concession to fans, who might be expecting some killer cut from "Other Lives", is of course "Black Tables", dashed off solo at the piano as he returns to the stage just before closing.

Back to the fort for the double bill already tried out at End Of The Road a couple of years ago: Okkervil River – Fleet Foxes. This time round, the former largely confirm the (low) expectations of anyone who wasn't particularly won over by the - let's be honest - cheesy turn taken on "I Am Very Far". From the ungainly outbursts of "Wake And Be Fine" and the mildly testosterone-fuelled "The Valley" to the holiday-resort rhythms of "Your Past Life Is A Blast", it's hard to recognise in Will Sheff the same singer-songwriter behind "The Velocity Of Saul", "Red", and so on. At the press conference - which feels very much like an "after-festival" affair, complete with a translator-moderator - Sheff deftly sidesteps, like a seasoned veteran of TV appearances, the question posed by this OndaRock correspondent about the end of his collaboration with Jonathan Meiburg, but the effects are plain for anyone with a working set of ears. This, however, will not turn out to be the last word on what Okkervil River are today.

You have to wait for the dazzling harmonic exploits of the "fleeing foxes" to get a fitting close to this day of the festival. The musical orgy of "Helplessness Blues" offers plenty of instrumentation to unleash a live set that pours over the adoring crowd like a cornucopia, helped along by the addition of a multi-instrumentalist. Naturally, the sheer musical growth shown on this latest record - next to which the self-titled debut seems like a simple collection of songs - is evident live too, starting with Robin Pecknold's more controlled delivery. "Ragged Wood" is a standout success, with a tempo change that sends shivers down the spine.

Fleet Foxes navigate the kaleidoscopic twists of "Helplessness Blues", wallowing in it as if in some sublime amniotic fluid, leaping from the opening gathering-call of "Grown Ocean", a gentle charge straight to the heart, to the exotic psychedelia of "Sim Sala Bim". Everything feels natural, spontaneous, like some bodily humour gushing from an organ only they possess.

This is pretty much what the Route du Rock is, take it or leave it. It must be said that most of the downsides can't really be blamed on the organisers, as you can well imagine: Saint-Malo is hard to get to, with or without the festival. It's mainly appealing to people living in France – and not even everyone there – and in England, close to the only two airports connected to nearby – only geographically! – Dinard. The area itself, though, is stunning, and the Route du Rock can be the (cheap) icing on the cake of a fantastic holiday.

Photo contributions by Francesca Baiocchi

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