It’s the last night of Pitchfork. Do you know where your band is?
By Sheba White
Published: July 22nd, 2008 | 9:00am
Sunday’s Pitchfork Music Festival got off to a rocky start as the Balance Stage schedule was once again pushed back. Rumor had it that PMF organizers were asked by the church located just outside of the stage’s southwest corner to delay the schedule until services were let out, and organizers granted the request. The decision made all of the early- to mid-afternoon Balance Stage set times unknown to most festival goers, who spent exhausting time walking back and forth between the two main stages just to check if bands were performing.
Mahjongg took the Balance Stage 40 minutes later than its 12:30 p.m. set time to cheers from the early-afternoon crowd. The Chicago band woke the birds with what can be best described as electro-funk, radar-love beats and shook pink tambourines in a non-annoying way. But due to the delay, there was no time to get comfortable with Mahjongg’s funky grooves before it was time to scurry over to Times New Viking's set.
Fresh off its Siren Festival slot, the Columbus, Ohio, natives brought their feedback- and distortion-heavy pop songs to the Connector Stage while looking perkier than expected, bouncing along to the music and giving the crowd a reason to stand out in what was promising to be a scorcher of a day. It helped that the Vikings chose shorter numbers — songs about drugs, money, and death, like its MySpace favorite “teenageLUST” — and spent time joking with the early-afternoon crowd.
Some overlap meant that Brooklyn’s tropical electro-choral duo, High Places, was on the Balance Stage at the same time as the Dirty Projectors on the Aluminum Stage. Both sets illuminated the hazy, early-afternoon atmosphere of the day, but the Dirty Projectors came ahead in the stage-presence game, if not for its Abba-like harmonizing than for the band’s infectiously innocent demeanors that reflected the Sunday-morning mood.
As sweet as the ladies of Dirty Projectors are to watch, musically High Places’ Mary Pearson reminded folks of the intricate work of the Ruby Suns’ Aimee Robinson from the previous day’s schedule. Both are multi-instrumentalists with obvious talent, and both are in duo bands with percussion-heavy beats. Yet live, Pearson and Robinson also have the unfortunate similarities of spending far too much time looking down at their instruments than looking at the audience, which may make for a better intimate club show than great festival fare.
After such a quiet opening to PMF’s last day, Boris took the Connector Stage at 2 p.m. with nine hits on the largest gong ever to grace a Pitchfork stage. The Japanese metal outfit’s cult-like following meant that the audience was stacked with fans ready to applaud the group, no matter what happened during the show. Aside from the apparent dichotomy between serious band and silly music and the obvious cultural differences in demeanor, Boris’ set was a reminder that conceptual bands don’t always make the best showmen live.
It just so happened that this case was made clearer with HEALTH’s arrival on the Balance Stage. The Los Angeles experimental-rock band wiped the stage with all the other early-afternoon bands in a set that both musically and visually brought to mind old Atari video games, in that the members spastically bounced around the stage like Pong balls and made their electro-heavy tracks sound like the funkiest, hardest grooves since Rick James.
Sandwiched between two amazing sets were the Apples in Stereo, whose performance could only be enjoyable for true fans of the music and not for those standing out under the glaring sun watching a best-of set. The intermission provided by skipping the majority of the Apples in Stereo set gave folks some time to catch the King Khan and the Shrines’ performance running unforgivably concurrently on the Balance Stage with Les Savy Fav’s set.
Whatever curses can be hurled at the organizers for putting concert-goers in such a predicament are well-deserved. To PMF’s credit, a late cancellation by El Guincho meant that Les Savy Fav began its set early and also ended later than expected, giving the PMF audience more than an hour of the sporadically performing Brooklyn group. Vocalist Tim Harrington used the time well and, as to be expected, stole the main-stage best-performance title with his green-fringed yellow sweat suit removal (revealing a red satin, one-legged, tight-panted thingy underneath) and headcam sweatband that jumped back and forth between the audience and PMF’s concert footage overhead.
On the other side of Union Park, another superhero of a sort pranced about the stage in his cape and gold headdress like a long-lost brother of Sun Ra and stole the best-performance title of the day for the smaller Balance Stage. Khan is first and foremost a storyteller, and the funk-tinged numbers provided the most spectacular backdrop for his bohemian old-school soul show. Highlights of his set included a song about being on Welfare, where the crowd was asked to wave dollar bills above their heads and a song that Khan introduced as “a gospel song,” but which turned out to be a song about giving oral sex to his lady.
The funky vibe continued with the arrival of Chicago’s Central-African Afro-beat band Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, who quite possibly rivaled the previous day’s Boban & Marko Markovic Orkestar’s set with a horn section that must have sent the predominantly indie-rock crowd back to the drawing board on their ideas of what vocalist Kofi Cromwell called “appiah, African music.”
Back to American-soil roots, both M. Ward and Ghostface Killah & Raekwon took the stage at simultaneous set times. It’s fitting that a hip-hop act and a folk-country act were concurrently on stage. Both music genres are the most beloved and simultaneously the most hated forms of American-bred genres, more so for their hokier aspects than the music. But M. Ward’s clear, piercing voice never sounded better than on the Connector Stage, and Ghostface Killah & Raekwon packed the Balance Stage field with tributes to ODB in covers of songs like “Baby I Like It Raw.” The only drawback to the lineup was that after opening night’s bombastic Public Enemy production, the Ghostface Killah & Raekwon set came across on the thin-side with crowd-pleasing, but cliché sampled tracks like Rare Earth’s “I Just Want to Celebrate,” and illustrated how important original production is to the future of hip hop.
San Francisco’s the Dodos brought things back to what Pitchfork has become known for with its tight, perfectly-timed “happy hardcore” compositions that showcased a knack for beautiful transitions and tropicália leanings. Though the original lineup had the Dodos on the Balance Stage, their set was moved to the Aluminum Stage, which made the trio work that much harder to engage the audience, a feat they managed to pull off with sheer musicianship and despite being the band that preceded Spiritualized.
Just as the sun was swallowed by the few remaining low-lying clouds, Spiritualized hit the stage with two angelically dressed backup singers and proceeded to entrance the crowd with its beatific, psych-drenched, ballad-heavy dirges. The Aluminum Stage’s sound was never utilized better than with Spiritualized’s “Sweet Talk.” The sweaty, beery crowd swayed and moaned along, some even breaking down into spontaneous interpretative dance not seen since the previous night’s Animal Collective set.
Under the canopy of Spiritualized’s set, Bon Iver packed the Balance Stage field with fans of its earthier folk-based instrumentalism, but was eventually drowned out by the ministrations of legendary rockers Dinosaur Jr. on the Connector Stage. Lou Barlow and J Mascis ran through classic Dinosaur Jr. numbers, Barlow popping around the stage and adding energy to what was a wooden, by-the-record performance from Mascis.
Would it were that Cut Copy could have taken some of the attention during the long Dinosaur Jr. set, but further scheduling, or perhaps sound, issues meant that Cut Copy’s set was delayed by more than 30 minutes and eventually missed by folks tired of walking back and forth between the fields.
Thankfully, the headliners of PMF’s last night came out at the allotted time on the Aluminum Stage. Spoon arrived to quite possibly the largest final-day crowd in PMF’s history with fans squeezing in and cheering the group after a momentary confusion resulting from a hip-hop MC intro that left lead vocalist Britt Daniel cheekily smiling as he entered.
The now larger-than-life Austin group relied heavily upon its older tracks for its Pitchfork set, which left Daniel’s voice a bit weary, but as always the band is nothing if not professional and came back for one encore, this time joined on guitar by Atlas Sound’s Bradford James Cox, who wrangled his way through the last song on the last night of PMF. The jarring change seemed a fitting end to a long weekend of legendary musicians doing strange things, last-minute lineup changes, sound issues, and brief spurts of genius that was PMF 2008.
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READ MORE OF VENUSZINE.COM’S PITCHFORK MUSIC FESTIVAL COVERAGE
Day 1: Warning: You are now entering Pitchfork Music Festival
Day 2: The aliens land on Pitchfork’s second day, but another foreigner steals the show
Issue #35
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