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Simple Things festival review – trance, slow jams and toilet-rattling rock

Various venues, BristolIt’s overambitious, but this festival remains a welcome alternative to generic lineups and corporate sponsorships – and there are stellar sets from L’Rain, Evian Christ and more

Amid festivals with homogenous crowd-pleasing lineups and corporate sponsorships, Bristol’s Simple Things is a welcome returnee in its first year back after the pandemic: an ambitious 15-hour programme of forward-thinking music across seven venues, including a bowling alley. Like many of the performances that follow in the DIY space, L’Rain’s is strangely intimate, even in the face of the huge, enveloping rhythm section, owing to her delicate harmonies, faint bedroom-pop sensibilities and, no doubt, the band’s commitment to playing in socks. Silhouetted by a dazzling light show and clouds of smoke machine fog, Evian Christ tears through a slowly crescendoing trance set so blistering yet so celestial that one audience member tells their partner: “It sounds like we’re at a wedding!” That experience – joyous and unbounded underground music that evades category – captures what makes Simple Things special.

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