The Big Chill, Sailor Jerry Stage, 7th August 2010

At a festival that boasts a line-up of over a hundred top name bands one would not expect the highlight to come from an unsigned group playing on a miniature stage in a leafy glade. But this is no reflection on the quality of the other acts at this year’s Big Chill. Rather its evidence of just how good Race Horses, a four-piece band from Cardiff, are.

Playing in the afternoon sunshine Race Horse’s thrash out raw experimental pop with strong melodies that is weird, wonderful and upbeat. Combining accomplished musicianship, genuine lyrical talent and a energetic sense of fun the band soon has everyone in the small crowd dancing.

In Pony, their sound is part Roxy Music part Talking Heads with a punchy hammond organ under-pinning darker lyrics (“I want to be the one you lie to”). Cake is a catchy guitar-based love song with a twist and Marge Wedi Blino (Marge Is Tired), sung in Welsh, starts as an upbeat pop song before lurching into an elegiac hymn. The uplifting vocals of Meilyr Jones, the band’s fresh-faced lead singer, soar against the soft beat of a drum. The hymn repeats itself as dark chords build to a wall of feedback and broken guitars. Unsure what to make of it, I ask Jones after the set if it is a love song. “No, its more of a horror song” he replies with a grin “It’s about a young girl obsessed with thoughts of death.” And it is surprises like this that make the band so refreshing.

Writing the songs together the band members share a low-boredom threshold when it comes to easily with formulas in song-writing, instrumentation and production. “We consciously try to avoid thinking about our new songs in terms of who plays guitar or drums or whatever” explains keyboard player, Dylan Hughes.

“We sort of liken ourselves to some late 70s early 80s pop bands that were popular but really weird – messing with people’s perception of what pop music is” Hughes tells me. Race Horses manage to do this by synthesizing a huge range of styles from glam-rock to post-punk, psychedelia to electronica. Each of the songs on their first album, Goodbye Falkenburg, released earlier in the year, has contrasting instrumentation and style. “Its actually a concept album” explains Jones. “The songs reflect different aspects of a story told by a sailor on his death bed.” Now that’s not something you hear everyday.

Stumbling on new bands is just one of the many pleasures of the Big Chill which, although much larger this year, has retained the charms which have drawn people back for fifteen years. Not only was this year’s festival-site bigger but by securing chart-topping headline acts such as Lilly Allen, M.I.A and Plan B the Big Chill’s new majority owners, Festival Republic, ensured that whilst the size of the crowd went up their average age went down significantly. Whilst some Big Chillers might miss the more intimate feel of earlier festivals, there are still plenty of magic moments to be had, whether dancing in the Monkey Shoulder tree house, watching the sun set over the stunning Eastnor valley, or hearing exciting new bands like Race Horses for the first time.