If all's well that ends well then the End of the Road Festival scored big on the old wellometer. Originally slated to clash directly with last-night main stage headliners Lambchop, circumstances or ye coming to of ye senses saw Jens Lekman pushed back to 11 o'clock in the Big Top thus effectively closing the festival unopposed. (He'd flipped places with Josh T Pearson whose nihilistic intensity would've been an appalling end to proceedings.) Happily, it was horns, handclaps & helpless grins ahoy as the dapper Swede and his six-piece girl band dished up a feelgood set of Tamla-tinged indieboy swoon.
Taking the ever-swelling captive audience largely by surprise with lashings of late-night big pop action, cuts from the gorgeous brand new album were naturally to the fore. Postcard to Nina's sit-com bittersweetness, the joyously contradictory Opposite of hallelujah and Your arms around me's big-beat dreaminess, all advertised the merits of Night falls over Kortedala. Quite simply, it's yet another Swedish essential. Older 'hits' like Black cab and A sweet summer's night on Hammer Hill kept the party rolling til the midnight hour. Just like this, in fact...

Elsewhere that weekend...

...another Swedish act still under far too many radars, Loney,dear's transcendant melodies eventually stirred to sun-dazed Saturday afternoon, er, crowd (a concept this relatively intimate gathering is happily still a stranger to) off their rugs for a standing ovation. Rather unjustly, the same space was then inundated for the rather less sophisticated and now somewhat over-exposed singalongs of I'm From Barcelona, still managing to bring out the inner twat in us all...

And talking of which, David Thomas Broughton is definitely a man with a finely tuned sense of the ridiculous. His set in the Bimble Inn teepee saw more of his hit-n-miss sonic improvisations, setting up some beautiful vocal loops then gleefully sabotaging them with pretty much anything he get an interesting sound out of. Brilliant, barking, occasionally testing, a mournfully unrecognizable rendition of Hungry heart was maybe his most impressive trick of the evening, making the music of Bruce Springsteen momentarily interesting...

The smartly turned indie clatter of Reading quintet Pete & the Pirates kick-started Sunday's action in excellent style. The debut album's out of the traps early in '08 and on this evidence will deserve your record tokens. "We've been criticised for not being 'piratey', which is ridiculous," Pete & the Pirates drummer Jonny tells the latest edition of Artrocker magazine. Absolutely right, leave all that shiver me timbers nonsense to The Decemberists, says reallyrather. The Pirates' second single Knots drops Oct 8 and is a tip-top two-and-a-half minutes...

Last up in the same space the night before British Sea Power rocked about as hard as anyone's ever likely to at this gathering, essentially an alt-folk-pop affair. With hitherto only the vaguest awareness of this maverick outfit's sound, reallyrather's inital benefit-of-the-doubt ten minutes stretched right to the last bonkers note of their epic closer, such was their compelling force this night. And besides, it was getting bloody nippy outside. Finally, local (to here) heroes My Sad Captains' turned in as peachey a performance as this blog has yet witnessed, their trek to the wilds of Dorset doing them no harm whatsoever. Despite already having a sackful of top tunes to call on Ed & co. still keep 'em coming; Great expectations indeed...