{"id":23,"date":"2019-11-22T14:12:59","date_gmt":"2019-11-22T14:12:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bolachas.org\/testes\/?p=23"},"modified":"2020-10-14T21:26:53","modified_gmt":"2020-10-14T20:26:53","slug":"the-takeroot-2019-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bolachas.org\/?p=23","title":{"rendered":"The TakeRoot 2019 review"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Garrett T. Capps. Photo by Knelis \/ TakeRoot<\/a>\u00a0<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s midnight in Groningen. It\u2019s the end of an abnormally warm November saturday and it should also have been the end of an eight hour marathon of roots and americana across six rooms in the De Oosterpoort complex. But Garrett T. Capps<\/b> and his NASA Country have different ideas. Suddenly, a \u201ccurfew\u201d seems like a malleable concept as fellow Texans Robert Ellis and James Steinle join the band on stage for a sprawling and ecstatic \u201cBorn in San Antone\u201d and a version of the classic \u201cShe\u2019s About a Mover\u201d, penned by San Antonio\u2019s very own Doug Sahm. Capps seems comfortable as the frontman to a 21st century version of the mighty Texas Tornados, powered by a strong rhythm section and an unusual synth that takes his brand of Americana to another dimension. I\u2019ve been calling it krautcountry<\/i> after seeing them in Paradiso\u2019s small room in the same evening as Faust and Camera, and you should too.<\/p>\n

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The legs of young and old seem to have forgotten they spent the last eight hours standing and rushing to the next stage with little or no time to rest and nobody can stand still. Believe me when I say\u00a0\u201cyoung and old\u201d \u2013 the audience here is clearly older than your average \u201cindie\u201d festival, embarrassing not only boomers across the continent who think they\u2019re too old to leave the house after dinner time, but also Gen X-ers and millennials who gave up on live music and the having of fun<\/i> as soon as they got kids to feed. Anyway. Find me someone who was in the room and didn\u2019t leave the festival with a smile on their face and I\u2019ll try to cheer them up in 2020. Maybe they missed on the amazing frietjes topped with stoofvlees we had earlier that evening?<\/p>\n

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Orville Peck. Photo by Knelis \/ TakeRoot<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just before that closing show, AA Bondy<\/b> played the most exquisite show of the evening in the small, scorching hot basement of De Oosterpoort. There were zero guitars on stage. It was just a man, his sunglasses, his synth, colorful stage lights, video projections and some of the best songs of 2019. I had watched his show in Amsterdam the night before, so I knew Bondy\u2019s beautiful updated version of his own\u00a0\u201cOh the Vampyre\u201d, close to the end of the set, would be one of the highlights of his set, so I had to be there for that. A few hours earlier, outside that very same stage, people were queuing for what seemed like half an hour in order to not miss a second of Orville Peck<\/b>\u2019s show. In 45 minutes that sounded like 25, the masked Pink Cowboy (my personal favorite Halloween costume of 2019, from what I\u2019ve seen on Instagram) and his cowboy-hat wearing five piece band went through most of Peck\u2019s debut and only album so far, Pony<\/i>, with a single break for a cover of the Parsons\/Harris duet Ooh Las Vegas alongside FRIGS\u2019 Bria Salmena, who\u2019s part of Peck\u2019s touring band.<\/p>\n

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Erin Rae. Photo by Knelis \/ TakeRoot<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Earlier at the Binnenzaal, both Erin Rae<\/b> and Caroline Spence<\/b> debuted some new songs. The high points of Rae\u2019s set, though, were the beautiful \u201cMinolta\u201d from 2015\u2032s Soon Enough<\/i>\u00a0and the brilliant\u00a0\u201cWild Blue Wind\u201d off last year\u2019s breakthrough Putting On Airs.<\/i>\u00a0Likewise, Spence\u2019s infectious \u201cWho\u2019s Gonna Make My Mistakes\u201d off the brand new Mint Condition<\/i> was the first big highlight of a festival that, for one more year, was able to put up the \u201csold out\u201d sign \u2013 and I learned it the hard way as I tried to get in the already packed room. This is no ordinary festival, and the artists know it, too. It was common for them to give a shout out to some of their friends who were also playing, and most seemed excited with the idea of playing a festival where artists would rather be amongst the public seeing other shows than to get wasted backstage. Rae was having the time of her life seeing Drive-By Truckers<\/b>, and, just like any other festival goer, had to manage her time to be able to catch a bit of AA Bondy\u2019s show. After all, we\u2019re all the same, we just happen to not be as gifted with words as they are.<\/p>\n

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The Delines\u2019 Amy Boone. Photo by Knelis \/ TakeRoot<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the bigger room of the complex, the only disappointing moment of the festival, as\u00a0Josh Ritter<\/b> took the stage without a backing band. Sure, it was great to hear acoustic versions of classics like\u00a0\u201cWolves\u201d or\u00a0\u201cHenrietta, Indiana\u201d, but make sure you bring a full band next time, pal. Meanwhile, in an absurdly packed and sweaty basement, Tyler Ramsey<\/b>\u00a0and his band were playing a few selections from his past albums, but focusing on his latest For the Morning<\/i>; in an also packed, half-seated Kleine Zaal,\u00a0The Delines,<\/i><\/b> were presenting\u00a0The Imperial <\/i>alongside a\u00a0few new songs whose names sound like they\u2019re out of a concept album about going up on a hotel elevator (\u201cEight Floors Up\u201d,\u00a0\u201cA Room in the Tenth Floor\u201d). They\u2019re self-described as a \u201cretro country band\u201d, and that\u2019s exactly what you get from their live show. \u201cRetro\u201d as in\u00a0\u201cyou\u2019re transported to a smokeless smoky room in some other time\u201d, not as some sort of nostalgic pastiche of influences that makes you cringe. If you\u2019re familiar with Vlautin\u2019s songwriting with Richmond Fontaine you\u2019ll notice the same lyrical themes of beaten-up common folk trying to make it in a world that wasn\u2019t exactly made for them. Boone\u2019s voice projects those stories into a half-empty room of a provincial bar somewhere in the western United States, and you\u2019re sitting there wishing there was a friendly person on the other side of the bar pouring you another whiskey. (Shout out to the kind and very knowledgeable barkeeper at Caf\u00e9 de Koffer<\/a>, where yours truly went to get a nightcap after the mandatory midnight d\u00f6ner, and ended up sitting at the bar sharing some beautiful Cantillon until 4am.)<\/p>\n

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Robert Ellis. Photo by Knelis \/ TakeRoot<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But no matter how good a festival is, if this guy is playing, the highlight is bound to be the same every single time, even though plenty of his best songs were left out of the set.\u00a0Robert Ellis<\/b>. One of our favorite songwriters of the past decade keeps reinventing himself. This time around he presents himself as the Texas Piano Man, the title of his stellar latest record. He guides us through the piano-driven album (\u201cFucking Crazy\u201d,\u00a0\u201cWhen You\u2019re Away\u201d,\u00a0\u201cPassive Aggressive\u201d, the sad-as-fuck \u201cFather\u201d, or the closer\u00a0\u201cNobody Smokes Anymore\u201d) with a few stops to pick up a guitar, playing two absolute classics: \u201cHappy Birthday\u201d (yes, that one) and\u00a0\u201cWhat a Wonderful World\u201d (also, yes, that one) and his own\u00a0\u201cElephant\u201d. But the most surprising number from the covers department had to be either the George Strait classic\u00a0\u201cAmarillo by Morning\u201d (originally written by\u00a0Terry Stafford and Paul Fraser), or Ellis\u2019 assumption that people in the audience wouldn\u2019t know who Strait is. It\u2019s the Netherlands, dude. The best place in Europe for open minded music enthusiasts who don\u2019t think country music is for people who marry their cousins. And, year after year, TakeRoot is still the closest to a Disneyland for people who wish they owned a nudie suit we can get on this side of the ocean.<\/p>\n

TakeRoot<\/a>\u00a0will be back\u00a0next Saturday, 7 November 2020 at\u00a0SPOT\/De Oosterpoort, Groningen, The Netherlands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Garrett T. Capps. Photo by Knelis \/ TakeRoot\u00a0 It\u2019s midnight in Groningen. It\u2019s the end of an abnormally warm November saturday and it should also have been the end of an eight hour marathon of roots and americana across six rooms in the De Oosterpoort complex. But Garrett T. Capps and his NASA Country have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[134],"tags":[143,144,145,139,142,146,137,138,133,136,135,140,141],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live","tag-aa-bondy","tag-caroline-spence","tag-erin-rae","tag-garrett-t-capps","tag-josh-ritter","tag-orville-peck","tag-review","tag-robert-ellis","tag-takeroot","tag-takeroot-19","tag-takeroot-2019","tag-the-delines","tag-tyler-ramsey"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bolachas.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bolachas.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bolachas.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bolachas.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bolachas.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bolachas.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2062,"href":"https:\/\/bolachas.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/2062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bolachas.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bolachas.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bolachas.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}