Cross Linx Festival, Eindhoven 17/02/11

It comes as total coincidence that, on the same day the whole bladdy internet was getting its collective knickers in a twist over a band that redefine extreme fandom, we skipped the country to go and see a band definitely worth staying up all night for.

A tipsy January eve’s Ryan Air browsing brought to light that we could head to Eindhoven for a meagre price and catch not only The National, but Buke & Gass, Sharon Van Etten, Owen Pallett, Efterklang and more besides at Holland’s travelling Cross-Linx festival (think a multi-city Dot To Dot-style affair).

Team Awesome Hits Lolland was born.

After making all manner of terrified faces on the astoundingly short, but very turbulent, flight to Holland, we arrived in Eindhoven and dashed off the plane into the first taxi we saw. The cab driver didn’t really get what we were up to.

“So you’re staying in a hotel?”

“Nope, we’re staying up all night and flying home in the morning.”

“All night?”

“Yes, all night.”

“No sleep?”

“Nope, no sleep.”

“But it’s very cold!”

“Yep, yep, thanks for reminding us…”

In the end we lied and said we were staying with friends.

The main venue – the Muziekgebouw – is inside a shopping centre, weirdly, but it transpires that all the shows before 9.30pm are actually happening at De Effenaar, about five minutes down the road, where we picked up our wristbands.

We looked at our watches: it was about 7.15pm, and Aaron and Bryce Dessner were playing a short improvisational set at De Effenaar at 8.15pm. We split for epic Chinese food back by the main venue.

With dinner finished at 8.05pm, feeling like queens of organisation and punctuality, we trundled back towards De Effenaar. Hordes of people were walking towards us. “Ah, from the football match,” we assumed. We got to the venue. It’s empty. The lights are all going out, bar attendants are sweeping cups from the floor.

“Aren’t the band on in a minute?” we enquire.

“We are all finished here for the night,” the broom-holder says.

“But it says here,” we insist, pointing at the schedule, “that they’re on at 8.15pm.”

“Yes,” he sighs, “and it is 9.15pm.”

Like the cosmopolitan, organised jetsetters we are not, we have forgotten to change our watches to local time. What idiots.

Running back to the Muziekgebouw and feeling like total dicks, we purchased some “munts” – tokens to buy beer, cue loads of hilarious and highly sophisticated “put your munt where your mouth is” jokes – and followed our ears to find Buke And Gass powering through a set in the upstairs foyer. The timing for Cross Linx was kind of retarded. Buke & Gass, Sharon Van Etten and Owen Pallet were all on at exactly the same time. Then later, the only act competing with The National was the relatively unknown Victoire – apparently there had only been 20 people watching them the previous night. Still, painful clashes are better than a terrible line-up.

Thankfully the bands were playing for about an hour each so we caught a bit of the chaotic yet precise Buke & Gass before dashing downstairs for a couple of songs by Sharon Van Etten. Sadly Owen Pallett’s set was at capacity.

The problem was that Sharon was playing in a massive hall and despite a large collection of eyes facing the stage, the crowd still felt sparse. The lights were really low and the stage lit a deep blue. All in all it made for quite a cold set, which was disappointing as her most recent record, Epic, is warm and gorgeous. In the end we opted to catch the final few songs of Buke & Gass’ show instead. It was pretty much the polar opposite: warm, friendly and loaded with laughter, the division between the well-lit crowd and band a mere few paces.

It’s hard to pin down Buke & Gass’ sound – for the uninitiated, they’re named after their self-made instruments, the buke a baritone ukulele as played by Arone (girl), the gass a guitar strung with bass strings as played by Arone (boy). Confused yet? To say tUnE-yArDs-as-played-by-Beefheart is a pat comparison, but one that hopefully sums up how brilliantly bonkers they are. There’s a real sense of menace to their songs, Arone veering between Marnie Stern-style shrieks and gentle, Appalachian folk-indebted vocal intonation that quickly turns sinister. They’re a sight to behold too, both sat down, with Arone hooked up to a makeshift foot brace fitted with a tambourine and jingle bells, and Aron kicking the hell out of a bass drum and stomping on a litany of pedals.

Then it was back downstairs for The National in the main room – a considerably smaller space than we get to see them play in back in the UK these days. Having seen them rip up Brixton Academy last winter, this evening’s show seemed quieter, less full-throated, but certainly no worse for it. Opening with ‘Runaway’ was perhaps a telltale sign for the arc of the set, which started slow and sombre – Aaron and Bryce’s gorgeous harmonies making ‘Anyone’s Ghost’ billow gently, ‘Slow Show’ its usual drunk-at-a-wedding lollop, with ‘Conversation 16’ a fraught crescendo, images of water-submerged weeds the perfect visual accompaniment to the thick fug of emotion that drowns from the depths hidden behind Matt’s thatched beard.

A rare treat turned the tone of the set on its head – ‘Lemonworld’, which the band have previously professed to finding difficult to play due to its lack of a whopping great crescendo for it to hang on. After several months of experimenting with it, they’ve got it down – Bryan relaxes to a less frantic beat and the famously pernickety band seem comfortable in the song’s sheer easiness.

“That one’s hard to play,” says Aaron.

“Well it’s easy to play,” counters his brother Bryce, “almost too easy to play, which is the problem.”

Perhaps unlike the first band alluded to in this piece, however, no-one’s judging The National on the musical complexity of their songs. The beauty of something like ‘Mr November’ is its emotional, almost wrathful incisiveness, made stronger by Aaron and Bryce’s tersely hammered chords that hark back to their beginnings as a scruffy garage band – and that contrast magically with guest Owen Pallett’s improvised violin swirls.

Making the most of a smaller-than-usual venue and a seriously long mic cable, Matt cuts through the crowd and starts climbing the back wall, scrambling over rows of chairs and crowd members, then around the side and leaping a considerable amount of feet back down onto the stage. But what truly constitutes their final victory lap is the way they’ve taken to closing with an entirely acoustic version of ‘Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks’. Swinging along with the clarion call of Ben Lanz and Kyle Resnick’s brass section, the line “all the very best of us string ourselves up for love” takes on a peculiar purity when sung back at them by everyone in the venue.

After the swirling joy of The National and a few post-gig drinks before the venue shut its doors, we ended up in some strange Irish-themed bar. Or maybe it was just Dutch? There was a band covering Mumford & Sons and we drank a lot of beer.

The pub kicked us out at 4am, then they told us to come back, and then we left again because hanging out with five drunk OAPs and a smashed barmaid wasn’t as much fun as we’d hoped.

From then on in it got a bit surreal. We got into a taxi with a local man who took us to his house and gave us bottles of this pink stuff called Flügel that smelt a bit like Calpol. Then we went to the airport where a man was camping on a bench where one of us fell asleep and the other stayed up drinking coffee and listening to Kanye all night.

Then we flew home, which neither of us can remember.

I love Lolland.