They may be Essex boys, but Jack and George Barnett of These New Puritans make music that’s just as at home in the Portuguese city of Guimarães. Located a hairsbreadth inland from Porto, Guimarães may not share the main character energy of its neighbour, nor the country’s capital, but it’s in fact considered to be the birthplace of Portugal. The small city moves at its own pace. Its narrow streets with their ancient, bulging buildings and countless alminhas (street-side Catholic shrines) are easily clogged by modernity: on my first afternoon in the city, a van causes minor chaos trying to deliver a king-sized mattress to a local resident.
I am in Guimarães for Mucho Flow, the city’s annual music festival that takes place as October yields to November, and where These New Puritans will play on the final night. Guimarães suits autumn, its medieval gothic gloom shrouded by dark hills and, on this particular weekend, a near-eternal rain. It’s also a city that suits These New Puritans, a band who weigh up man and machine, medieval and modern, pastoral and industrial, and decide to keep it all. Guimarães is similarly contradictory, its historic centre girdled by twentieth-century apartment blocks, brutalist shopping galleries, and industrial buildings. In a small metal box plonked outside the city’s tenth-century castle, people in headsets move about as if they’ve just discovered their arms for the first time: an immersive virtual reality experience that recreates historical battles and the castle’s interiors.
Why fork out for tacky VR, though, when you can walk the old twisting streets listening to These New Puritans? “I am buried, I am deep underground,” pipes up a Southend Boys Choir soloist at the start of recent album Crooked Wing, one that’s populated with bells and organs, cranking metal and soaring feeling, marching drumbeats and glimpses of kingdoms.
“We’ll think until our minds align / that’s when we’re slicing through time”, (a line from 2010 song ‘Three Thousand’), meanwhile, could serve as a slogan for Mucho Flow, a festival that prides itself on cutting edge sounds. There are no clashes, so the crowd moves like a pack from venue to venue: a former textile factory, an 18th-century palace, a dapper 30s cinema, a kitsch 70s cinema, a nightclub in a car park on the edge of town. Mucho Flow doesn’t reveal itself to you willingly. It’s not obvious there’s a festival going on. You have to look for mysterious huddles of people, most of whom are locals, unlike the largely international lineup — many of this year’s acts haven’t played in Portugal before.
But the weekend begins with Lisbon drummer and composer Pedro Melo Alves, poised like a handsome but mad professor before his kit, his back to the crowd. That normally tired gimmick allows the audience to admire the physicality of his drumming: he moves about the cymbals and snares and pads so lightly you’d think he wasn’t touching them at all, were it not for the almighty clatter and glitch that fills the room.
Later on in the weekend, Portuguese trans hardcore band bbb hairdryer (followed by Body Meat and YHWH Nailgun, a section of the lineup I like to call “grisly salon price list”) also perform with their backs to the crowd, but their caterwauling anger pummels the venue into fun submission. Then there’s shadowy Portuguese collective Raso, vocal performer Carlos A. Correira leaping and stalking about the stage like a menacing Beastie Boy, his mournful wails a perfect foil to the pounding of drummer Ricardo Martins.
Together with other acts — the quiet apocalypse of feeo, the sonic collision of Colombian Drone Mafia and Gibrana Cervantes, the camp Arthurian delight of Plus44kaligula — Mucho Flow places stepping stones to These New Puritans’ performance on Saturday night. On paper the band are a match made in heaven for the festival and the city, potential that’s curtailed by the time constraints of a festival set.
After an excerpt from ‘Waiting’, that Southend chorister summoning the high-ceilinged venue to quiet, the Barnett brothers appear on stage. George is obscured behind a tubular bell set custom-made by sound sculptor Henry Dagg for this Crooked Wing tour. Its put to particularly good use on the track ‘Bells’, based on a field recording from a Greek Orthodox church. Live, it falls nicely into the Depechey tinkle of ‘Infinity Vibraphones’ from 2019’s Inside The Rose, jagged cracks of light splitting the stage, which is suddenly part 1980s goth club. Jack is all grand gestures and languid limbs, like a time-traveller from an ancient era who has decided to cast himself as some sort of pop frontman in this one.
You can imagine hearing ‘Three Thousand’ and ‘We Want War’ floating down the medieval lanes of Guimarães, as spotlights rove about the room and militaristic drums rain down, the band juddering like an out-of-control steam train. The Barnetts and just two other musicians occupy the small stage, yet they deliver something majestic and elaborate and entirely fitting. ‘A Season In Hell’ sounds like a building site outside a bedroom window, pneumatic drill swapped for demented organ, while ‘Wild Fields’ — featuring words from William Byrd’s 1585 lament for Thomas Tallis — is more abrasive live, two sets of percussion sounding like anything but a lament. Jack Barnett’s voice threatens to split like a winter-battered lip on ‘I’m Already Here’, before the show closes with ‘Organ Eternal’ from 2013’s Field Of Reeds, pale green lasers and a long outro bathing the congregation in warmth. He sings of “the evening rain”, and the audience exits into another Atlantic downpour.
Some will head on to the club (for all its time-worn lore, Guimarães has a strong reputation as a destination for dancing), and each night of Mucho Flow local DJs such as Maki, NÓIA, and DJ Lynce provide hammering giddy fun for the last ones standing, others home. Soon the shadowy streets and churches will swallow up all this visionary noise, the city folded back into its ancient self, the music buried deep underground.
