Bannau Brycheiniog, Wales
The traditional fire might be banned this year, but festivalgoers are treated by energetic performances by Four Tet, Tamikrest and Westside Cowboy

Driving towards the bucolic Welsh valley that’s home to the Green Man festival feels a little apocalyptic this year. Charred peat and grassland smoulder on the hillsides, the remnants of one of the 20 wildfires that blazed through south and west Wales the previous week. The dangerously dry conditions pose a problem for the festival organisers: the traditional closing ceremony, during which a towering effigy of the titular Green Man adorned with punters’ handwritten wishes is set alight, has been cancelled. A sensible decision, but one that left longtime festival-goers with a serious question: where would all those wishes go?

Then, the heavens open. Manchester quartet Westside Cowboy pack out the main stage arena on Friday afternoon, thousands of soggy cagoules bobbing along to the band’s charmingly ramshackle blend of British indie and amiable Americana. “We were over there last year,” grins vocalist and guitarist Jimmy Bradbury, gesturing towards the significantly smaller Rising stage. They’re clearly over the moon – and it’s infectious. To close the set, the band down instruments – save a guitar and a handheld drum – and gather round one mic for a rallying performance of In the Morning. The recorded version sounds like a lullaby, but here they transform it into a euphoric boot-stomping finale.

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(4AD)
The standout act in the sprechgesang wave, the four-piece’s newly expansive sound carries singer Florence Shaw’s distinctive tales of mundane lives spiralling out of control

Dry Cleaning’s third album features a lot of strikingly odd lyrics. Take your pick from “alien offshoot mushroom, going the gym to get slim”; “my dream house is a negative space of rock”; or, indeed, “when I was a child I wanted to be a horse, eating onions, carrots, celery”. But it’s an ostensibly more straightforward line, from Cruise Ship Designer, that seems destined to attract the most attention. “I make sure there are hidden messages in my work,” says vocalist Florence Shaw as the track draws to a conclusion, the muscular guitar riff that’s driven it along devolving into a janky, trebly scrabble.

Initially, the lyric appears to characterise what Dry Cleaning do, and Shaw in particular. From the moment they first appeared with the 2018 EP Sweet Princess, the south London quartet have attracted adjectives such as “surreal”, “enigmatic” and “inscrutable”. Most of the British bands who emerged around the same time bearing a roughly equivalent blend of post-punk guitars and spoken-word vocals sounded angry or sarcastic or straightforwardly comedic. Dry Cleaning, on the other hand, seemed mysterious. Shaw’s lyrics were collages of overheard remarks, recycled YouTube comments, lines from adverts and non sequiturs, delivered in a voice that was too icy to sound whimsical. It’s variously been characterised as “anhedonic” and “achromatic”, but might more straightforwardly be described as sounding politely bored. She occasionally shifts from speaking into singing in an untutored voice that brings to mind Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants’ line about their understated vocalist Alison Statton sounding “as if she was at the bus stop or something”. It was all intriguingly confusing: here were songs that could indeed contain hidden messages, that seemed like puzzles to be unpicked.