21/1/2017
St Jerome’s Laneway Festival is known for its diverse line-up and the 2017 edition was no exception. Besides the traditional fare of indie rock, there was a healthy dose of hip-hop and electronica acts. The focus of our attention this time round is on Bob Moses and Floating Points, both scheduled for prime slots at the smaller Cloud Stage.
Taking the stage at 8pm to raucous cheers from the crowd, Bob Moses clearly had a small but passionate following in Singapore. This time, they had a live drummer joining them on stage. With a set time of only 45 minutes, Bob Moses opted for quality over quantity as they worked through extended versions of each song rather than squeezing as many tracks as they can. They opened their set with “Like It Or Not” off their 2016 album “Days Gone By” and got the crowd dancing non-stop for the rest of their show as they transitioned smoothly track after track without audible pauses. Jimmy was also visibly excited as he repeatedly came to the center of the stage to hype up the audience, emptying a bottle of mineral water into the crowd at one point. Time passed faster than it should and Bob Moses quickly reached the end of their set, closing with “Tearing Me Up” after “Grace”. It’s fair to say they tore us (and probably the crowd) up with their debut performance in Singapore.
At the same Cloud Stage, Floating Points closed the festival with a 1-hr set. Playing his usual disco, funk and soul, Sam Shepherd’s set was a fitting way to end the festival. The earlier thunderstorms in the afternoon which had given way to a drizzle threatened to return during the set but it no longer mattered to the 150-or-so festival-goers who had stayed behind. Besides playing staples from his astounding collection of old tracks such as Timeless Legend’s “I Was Born To Love You”, Floating Points also infused modern flavours into his set with Four Tet’s edit of Syreeta’s “Keep Him Like He Is” and Los Hermanos “Birth of 3000”. With the good vibes reverberating through the air at the Cloud Stage, Floating Points closed with Dee Edwards’s “I Can Deal With That”. This rounds up our Laneway coverage and we have no choice but to deal with to the fact that the next Laneway is a year away…
(Due to the poor sound quality of our recordings, we only have a short snippet of Floating Points that is barely audible)
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