Titanic and Throwing Muses go cello crazy at End Of The Road, Day 3

Dressed in dead men’s suits (and dresses), The Golden Dregs take a truckload of typically British disappointment – will you just look at the state of that weather? – and turn it into something transcendent, via the medium of literate country-rock. Frontman Benjamin Woods resembles a young Lloyd Cole, doling out sage advice he’s just too stubborn to take himself.

The tempest raging outside means that Titanic, the band led by Guatemalan singing cellist Mabe Fratti, pull a bumper crowd in the Folly. But the clamour is thoroughly deserved. Their buoyant art-pop is packed with compelling twists and turns, sometimes knotty, sometimes dreamy, occasionally even danceable. And Fratti’s cello is an impressively versatile instrument: bowed for a lush, thick texture, plucked like a jazz bass or scraped like Thurston Moore’s guitar.

“I just saw Stonehenge, it’s fuckin’ awesome!” says Vermont’s Greg Freeman, reminding us that this magical corner of the UK can still bewitch and befuddle foreign visitors. “How’d they get the rocks there?” Freeman’s rousing, country-ish slacker rock is full of questions – essentially, why is everything so boring or messed up? – but he answers them elegantly with lean Telecaster thrums and joyous saxophone squalls.

Emma-Jean Thackray’s set, powering through the showers on the Garden Stage, is arguably even more uplifting. Initially known as a jazz trumpeter, here she plays guitar and sings magnificently, leading a band whose inclusive psychedelic soul brings to mind Rotary Connection. “Remedy is not easy,” she sings. But she makes it seem possible.

These days, a Throwing Muses gig is a family affair. Kristin Hersh’s partner Fred Abong is back in the fold, but has now shifted over to drums to make way for Hersh’s son Dylan on bass. “He’s been in Throwing Muses almost as long as me,” she notes. The line-up is completed by a man referred to only as Cello Pete, on a good day for fans of low bowed strings. Songs from the new album Moonlight Concessions are unmistakably Muses-y – swimmy guitars, razorblade vocals, counter-intuitive rhythmic shifts, an appealing sense of unease – but it’s a closing mid-’90s one-two punch of “Shark” and “Bright Yellow Gun” that really does the damage here.

Diiv’s drowsy shoegaze provides an anticlimactic end to proceedings in the Big Top. But then, as this festival is wont to do, End Of The Road springs one final surprise: an unassuming Syrian fella called Rizan Said takes to the stage with a bank of cheap synthesisers to provide exactly the kind of weird, transportative, psychedelic experience that Diiv didn’t quite manage. Ya hala!