Sundaying

There's been a bit of of an autumn chill in the air this Sunday, and judging by the (notoriously untrustworthy) Budapest weather forecast, this is how we'll roll until late September, so we'd better get used to it. There's nothing like an Eszterházy cake to warm your heart on such days and the very best is to be found at Ruszwurm in the castle. The cakes of the famous New York cafe are more prohibitve pricewise- and, to be frank, not as tasty, but every now and then you can drop by for a fine espresso and some gilded everything. 

Best Concerts of Sziget 2014 #2: Miles Kane

Miles Kane gets to be The Other Guy a lot. Being the other guy to Alex Turner is of course spectacularly better than being the other guy to say Macklemore, but it's still grandly unfair. And frankly the best he could expect in Budapest was to be no guy at all- many people crowding the A38 tent had no inkling of either the Rascals or the Last Shadow Puppets and were there only for the party. Which is exactly what they got-it's a great compliment to Miles Kane's craft as a songwriter and showman that he could have such a consistently strong show on the tail of only two albums. Well, calling it just strong is pretty much understatement: it started off great, veered into the amazing around half time and ended up being so good it makes you giddy. Just one of those concert moments that totally suck you in and you keep repeating to yourself, oh Lord, I wish this would never end.I still think it's unfair to always gloss on Alex Turner when mentioning Miles Kane, but I just could not shake off the thought that there is no way on earth Alex could ever pull off a solo show without looking and sounding awkward as hell. Which is exactly the opposite of Miles Kane- there's seemingly no effort is his being just cooler than mere mortals and there's so much raw energy in his reassured cockiness that it gets contagious and you walk around with a stupid grin on your face for several hours after the show. What on earth happened to you, your friends inquire. Miles Fucking Kane.

Best Concerts of Sziget #3: Triggerfinger

Our total awe at the might of Triggerfinger having already been plentifully expressed, we take the liberty of having them share the third place on the podium for best concerts with Yasmine Hamdan.  You might enquire why they aren’t first, given all that awesomeness bundled into one majestic unit of Belgianness, and the answer is, well, they can’t be first all the time.  (Or CAN they?!) Their effort from last year’s scorching A38 sauna tent was epic, so it’s hard to top that, and this year they were merely  superb- I dare any Sziget repeat offender to do that. Cause yeah, actually, it was never accomplished before. So there you have it, Triggerfinger are the best even when they are third.

Best Concerts of Sziget #3: Yasmine Hamdan

Jim Jarmusch is a man of many talents, like discovering the music you always wanted to listen to, but never knew where to look for it. On this particular occasion you’d have to go to Beirut via Paris (or Paris via Beirut, depends on how you look at it), just like Jarmusch’s eternally journeying vampires move around the world. There is something wonderfully befitting his timeless heroes in Yasmine Hamdan’s music: it seems, at the same time, extremely ancient and very modern, extremely calm and very unsettling. The ingredients are basic: her voice, some guitars, a sprinkling of traditional instruments here and there, but the result is as arresting as the source is simple, it doesn’t feel as much as music being made, but music that simply is, an existential element contained within itself.

Best Concerts of Sziget #4: La Roux

La Roux had the seemingly daunting task of going head to head with Calvin Harris spitting fire on the main stage. Sure enough, halfway through her performance there were  apocalyptic sounds coming from behind the A38 tent- not Harris himself mercifully, but the deafening rumble of the fireworks being shot into the great wide open. A few weak minded Sziget dwellers did dutifully run to the edge of the tent, but it probably serves as a compliment to La Roux that very few people actually went out, most of them returning promptly after briskly inspecting the celestial spectacle.

This was La Roux’s second Sziget show, and as the first was somewhat of a disappointment, I was a bit apprehensive about it, but it took only 10 seconds into the first song to realize that this was to be another class of show altogether. The very first thing that strikes you is how much more confident she is- the laboured process which led to her second album seems to have paid off as she belted out dancefloor favourite after dancefloor favourite to a crowd that never stopped moving.  It was the perfect concert for the closing evening- a self assured performance from an artist slowly but surely growing into an alternative cult figure.