LIVE REVIEWS

Throughout the first show of the Mountain Goats’ current tour with the Baptist Generals supporting, John Darnielle kept mentioning how nervous he was. “I didn’t use to be nervous,” he said toward the end of the evening, sweaty and smiling broadly. “But there didn’t used to be 1,200 fucking people at our shows.” And the sold-out crowd at D.C.’s venerable 9:30 Club let up a sound that shook the beams.

Darnielle needn’t have worried. The current tour of the Mountain Goats is a two-man affair—the first duo incarnation of the band since 2007, as Darnielle pointed out—and from the moment he and bassist Peter Hughes stepped onstage, both they and the crowd were in it for keeps.

The whole night was a family affair, of sorts. Denton, Texas-based act the Baptist Generals, who released the dark, trippy, excellent No Silver/No Gold in 2003 and then seemed to fall off the map, came roaring out by playing new release Jackleg Devotional To The Heart in sequence, setting out a low-end thunder that rumbled and rattled through the 9:30’s ground floor and two upper decks. After a live soundcheck, the Generals roared into “Dog That Bit You” from Jackleg, and most of the crowd conversation stopped abruptly as singer/songwriter Chris Flemmons led the audience through the new record’s dense tangle of songs about bad love and worse love, while Darnielle and Co. watched happily from the upper-stage left balcony (“You guys look like those old Muppets,” quipped Generals bassist Ryan Williams to loud laughter). Still, by the time Darnielle joined the Generals to play keyboard on “Turnunders And Overpasses,” the repeated coda “What do you want?/What do you want/For your heart?” hinted at the raw, beating pulse beneath the anguish of the thudding arrangements. The mutual respect and affection between the Generals and the Mountain Goats was apparent throughout the set; even fans who’d never heard the Generals seemed to come away impressed.

And then Darnielle and Hughes took the stage. It’s hard to know how to figure Darnielle sometimes. He’s a singer/songwriter whose prolific output and frequently high-verbal lyrics could easily come off in less adroit hands as precious navel-gazing. And yet somehow, this gangly guy who learned American Sign Language in junior high because he thought it might help him meet girls (as he mentioned at this show) is damn near the most affable, most charming frontman in current rock music. Even at the 9:30 Club, which is small but by no means all that intimate, Darnielle and Hughes gave off a vibe like they were playing in the back yard of someone’s house, all high energy, broken picks and even one charmingly flubbed ending. (“That was my fault,” said Darnielle sheepishly. “I forgot how we’d decided to finish it.”)

So the high-energy happiness with which the Mountain Goats invariably perform, like they’re just goddamn glad to be there, is one part of the charm. Most significantly, though, Darnielle’s songwriting—which was, after all, the focus of the evening—is as openly confessional as a Sylvia Plath poem without ever trying to solicit an iota of sympathy from the crowd. That’s the nut of it, I think. When he tries his hand at genuine grownup gravitas, as evidence that night in a tune like “It Froze Me,” he’s a fine enough songwriter. But where he really shines is in those moments where he fully engages the id of the beaten kid in all of us, and the strongest, most riveting performances of the night were those full-throated here-I-am barnstormers: “Ox Baker Triumphant,” “Dance Music” and opener “Pure Gold” aimed for the back wall and trailed fire as they passed overhead. The set list reached back into the crates, but also featured especially riveting performances of “The Diaz Brothers” and “Cry For Judas” from last year’s Transcendental Youth. For the hardcore fans, too, there were treasures, the most electrifying of which was a performance of the legendary, still maddeningly unreleased “Alpha Chum Gatherer,” which appears only on an exceedingly rare bootleg of an early board mix of songs recorded for the album Tallahassee.

When all his cylinders are firing, Darnielle writes like a five-year-old kid would, if that wide-eyed little guy experiencing everything for the first time had a 40-year-old poet’s long-range perspective and razor-keen turn of phrase. I can think of individual songs by certain artists that approach that target, but I cannot think of another songwriter whose body of work pins it as reliably or as extensively as Darnielle, which is likely the reason that people who get bitten by his songs get bitten hard. That connection was apparent in what was likely the evening’s most stunning moment, the air-raid rendition of “No Children,” which the entire crowd seemed to sing (and occasionally scream) in unison with Darnielle in an act of group catharsis, and after which most acts would probably have been content to walk off the stage claiming victory. It was there in the enthusiastically received encore “The Best-Ever Death Metal Band In Denton,” a treat from the upcoming remastered release of All Hail West Texas, as the audience gleefully yelled “Hail Satan!” at all the right moments. It was apparent in Darnielle’s several playfully filigreed pre-song introductions, touching on his well-documented childhood abuse, 1970s-era pro wrestling’s parallels with indie-rock “neighborhood scenes,” and a long, hilarious routine about the worst-attended gig the Mountain Goats ever played (head count: literally zero) at which they encored (!) with absurdist stomper “Furniture Store.”

And since the rhythm section rarely gets its due, let’s give it here. Darnielle often mentioned the absence of drummer Jon Wurster as a minor terror for the duo to overcome. But though he spoke little throughout the night, Hughes anchored the entire set with precise, indeed impeccable timing. Case in point: When the duo set up for “Tallahassee,” Hughes’ loop-pedal bass line got hung up on maybe an eighth-of-a-second delay on each repeat—just enough to notice—and Hughes course-corrected for it , as he had to under Darnielle’s more fluid keys and vocals, every single time. That’s what you call a consummate pro, friends.

In each of their sets, both Darnielle and the Baptists’ Flemmons recounted a somber gig they’d once played together, many years ago, for all of 24 people, most of whom were in the bar to watch football. After the sound faded and the lights came up, Darnielle stuck around like a mensch by the merch table, to sign and shake hands with hundreds of the fans, many of whom embraced him with unembarrassed affection. For a self-described weirdo to have reached this level of artistic skill and popularity ought to give hope to every current weirdo kid in America. And that night, with Darnielle a sweat-soaked mess and the thank-yous passing every three seconds between him and the milling, grinning crowd, it looked like it had.

—Eric Waggoner

If you heard a distant rumble or saw a flash of light on the Northwest horizon Tuesday night around 9 p.m., that was Nick Cave, like a bat out of hell, smiting Glenside, Pa., to a crisp as per his satanic majesty’s request. And it was good. Very good. How could it not be? Everyone knows Heaven has better weather but Hell has all the best bands. Cave looked and sounded in peak form (good hair, great suit, whipped himself about the stage like an electrocuted Elvis), and his voice contained multitudes. Deep, dulcet and strong like bull. Part angel-headed hipster, part Pentecostal preacherman. All pomade and sweat and Old Testament gravitas.

So too, the Bad Seeds, who these days paint within the lines and with much more subtle strokes thanks in no small part to the addition of the Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis a decade back. With his enchanted fiddle on “God Is In The House,” magic flute on “We No Who U R” and his chiming, incandescent, Velvetsoid guitar thrum on “Jubilee Street” Ellis made grown men cry in their souls—this grown man, anyway. Prior to Ellis, the Bad Seeds seemed to come with only two settings: Mellow and Maelstrom. Tuesday night, they mapped out all the emotional peaks and valleys in between with nuance and precision.

Cave was wickedly funny. During the gangsta-rific “Stagger Lee,” he mocked a loutish woman up front whose incoherent shouting marred more than song. “Where the fuck is my husband in this fucking place?” he whined, though it was unclear if he was merely mimicking her outbursts or pleading with the missing husband to come fetch his trainwreck wife and spare us all this indignity. When some goober shouted out repeatedly that the stage volume was “too soft” (get a Q-Tip, Goob; they were loud as fuck), Cave silenced him with “‘Too soft?’ You deaf cunt!” Ah, good times. Glad to see that Cave still doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

After opening the show with a handful of long, slow-burning potboilers from the new Push The Sky Away, Cave and Co. released the bats and let rip with the classics (“The Mercy Seat,” “Deanna,” “Red Right Hand,” “The Weeping Song”) as well as some deep-catalog nuggets for the devout (“From Her To Eternity,” “Your Funeral, My Trial” and a hellfire-and-brimstone “Tupelo” for an encore). But the real revelation last night was “Higgs Boson Blues,” a song that, sequenced eighth out of nine songs, gets lost on the new album, which suffers somewhat from an overabundance of meditative midtempo-ness.

On record, the song is largely notable for the metaphysical cleverness of its title, but live “Higgs Boson Blues” was a long, sweaty noir-ish hallucination that somehow combined Lucifer, Robert Johnson, the Large Hadron Collider, speaking in tongues, Hannah Montana crying with the dolphins, the assassination of Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and the God Particle into a dream narrative whose surreal profundities, as they are wont to do, defy literal explanation. But it all ends satisfyingly with Miley Cyrus floating face down in a swimming pool in Toluca Lake like William Holden at the beginning of Sunset Boulevard. Let us pray.

—Jonathan Valania; photo by Eric Ashleigh

“There is nothing better in the world” than playing for his hometown crowd, shouted locally based electronic artist RJD2 into the microphone in the middle of his set of controlled chaos at the TLA in Philadelphia late Saturday night. Ramble John “RJ” Krohn, who has multiple albums, EPs, collaborations and the Mad Men theme song to his name, looks more like your company’s IT guy with his rumpled collared shirt and slight frame than one of the most prolific hip-hop producers of the last decade. Watching him live mixing and deftly swiveling records on his multiple turntables, however, you can see why he’s onstage and not in the cubicle down the hall.

The most recent incarnation of RJD2’s experimental spirit is Icebird, which features the smooth and passionate Ne-Yo vocals of singer Aaron Livingston and the instrumental alchemy of Krohn’s productions. Supported by a band that evening, Icebird opened with vigor, punctuated by the frenzied skill of “Chuck” the drummer.

Close to midnight, RJD2 emerged in a button-adorned robot costume and addressed the crowd through a voice scrambler, a play on his moniker’s R2D2 namesake. He then pulled off his costume and jumped behind the five turntables and multiple mixers and computers to kick off his mesmerizing performance. He glided among the various pieces of equipment, frantically switching discs, scratching actual records and adjusting dials and levels as Chuck’s hands flew over the drum set. “I could have put all of this stuff on a neat grid,” said Krohn. “But that would be fucking boring.” Playing fan favorites like “1976” and “Deadringer,” RJD2 put his skills front and center—he was truly a disc jockey this night.

—Maureen Coulter

MAGNET’s Matthew Irwin reports from the 2012 Fun Fun Fun Fest in Texas.

Saul Williams destroyed Fun Fun Fun Fest … for me. After his midday performance on Saturday—the second day of the three-day music festival—I had a hard time having a good time again.

Let me temper this post with the acknowledgement that Austin’s Fun Fun Fun Fest is the best metropolitan music festival I’ve attended. It’s small(ish) and caters to fans more than frat boys, it emphasizes local bands (the Black Angels and the Sword, for instance), and it provides unmatched access and benefits for fans with a little more cash to spend (in the FFF vernacular, Pretty Important People, or PIP). The portable handwashing stations, however, did run dry by midday Friday, and I never found a wet faucet again, which seems like a small oversight, but it’s one that speaks to a greater failure of FFF. It skimps on the details.

After Sharon Van Etten’s set Friday afternoon, I went backstage to find a port-o-potty and a bottle of water, discovering that, not only did PIP enjoy exclusive spaces full of complimentary booze and private bathrooms, but they also had access to the inner sanctum, the cordoned off region that gives staff, media, artists and other workers reprieve from the festival craziness. Then, in addition to an unprecedented absence of drinking water, sunscreen or other traditional considerations for media, they actually wanted me to pay for food and drinks, even coffee and water. The nerve.

I trotted my unquenched, dirty-handed self back to the Orange Stage, where I sat down next to Sharon for a minute. By “sat down next to,” I mean that she was sitting and I was sitting, 10 feet away, and staring at her. I seriously start to question my professionalism as a music journalist when it comes to SVE. She’s so awkwardly endearing onstage, talking between songs, then she confidently strides into the specifically personal and sad world of her lyrics. Her compositions undulate like breath around her words. She’s both the dark Brooklyn troubadour and the Tennessee girl. I swear my crush exists on a professional level.

The rest of the day found me over at the Yellow Stage, which, reserved for comedic performances during the day, hosted some of the smaller and lesser-known musical acts come late afternoon. Earth performed the anti-festival set with uber-low tempo, doom meditations. Festival goers worried about missing an act on another stage found plenty of reason to jet, and in truth, Earth isn’t much of a middle-of-the-day band, but I at least found Dylan Carson’s battle with the “asshole photographers” who refused to turn off their flashes entertaining.

The highlight performance of the weekend took place next, when San Antonio’s Girl In A Coma stepped onstage. I’ve been following them since 2010’s Adventures In Coverland, which revived and retooled a smattering of popular rock music of the last 50 years, and they own that shit the way Patsy Cline owns “Crazy.” Onstage, the girls remember that rock is as much about persona and presentation as it is about music, but it’s the intensity of their relationship to the music that gives the illusion that a whole lot more is happening. Exits & All The Rest was a next-level album of originals for the group that made a number of end-of-the-year lists in 2011, but I think Girl In A Coma has greater material in store as they continue to define their sound outside the boundaries of badass chic rock.

Saturday, I returned to the Yellow Stage and caught an “angry,” mediocre comedian and a comedic vaudevillian magician whose greatest trick was downing bottles of Budweiser, before Saul Williams took the stage. Williams lifted a wide, dark notebook with words scrawled in big letters, and proceeded to dis … everyone. He said that the song lyrics of your average festival band are full of abstract complaints, but ultimately meaningless. He belittled hipsters and their cute, little mustaches. He said that problem of technology is that it reflects us back and we don’t like that. And he said that if we wanted to hear women scream, we should try prisons. The audience of mostly white hipsters stood silent, jaws open, for a palpable pause, before a few hoots and whoos shot out. Williams went into his piece “Telegram,” which notes, in a telegram to hip hop, that cash and murder have not been added to the table of elements. Somewhere in there, my eyes welled up with tear, though none fell.

I returned to the wild expanse of festival glee, un-gleeful. I shuffled through with my head down, until I came to the American Spirit trailer, and decided to poke my head inside. Whereas Austin City Limits posted its no smoking policy throughout the Zilker, FFF actually invited Marlboro and American Spirit to set up camp on the festival grounds. I smoked cigarettes for 15 years, and quit because, well, it’s a stupid, miserable fucking thing to do, and I wanted to know what the hell was going on in those tents, with lines 20 people deep. A nervous, fast-talking young dude quickly took my license and scanned it while asking about my smoking preferences. I noted the wood-paneled walls and the pairs of people, one American Spirit rep per smoker, kicking back as if it were some 1960s-themed lounge, rather than a data collection point for cigarette marketing. I admitted that when I did smoke, I smoked the yellow pack, the smooth, light version of their cigarettes, and he suggested I try something more robust. He reminded me that American Spirit uses natural tobacco, and it has an organic line. Though he never said it, the suggestion was clear: Smoking is hip, and these are good for you. Finally, the dude gave me a coupon for two packs of cigs for $2. I bought them with the intention of giving them to a friend, and picked up a pack of matches that read “freedom to smoke without harassment.” Forget 40 years of awareness campaigns, illness and death, this isn’t about your health, this is about your freedom, hipster.

I walked over to the Blue Stage, where I found Schoolboy Q chanting something along the lines of “Fucked her once; I’ll do it again,” so I kept moving, found a place to lie down in the grass, and yes opened a pack of cigarettes. I smoke two, mindlessly, with a cup of coffee, before the taste of carbon monoxide brought me back to myself, and threw both packs out. Forget passing them on to a friend; I’m done participating in that scheme. And my mood the way it was, I was nearly done with the festival, too, but I had to see the Sword. Though the doom-metal band paid off by actually making me feel better—smoke, lights, crowd surfers and heavy guitars, where have you been?—the deeper damage had already been done. Festivals may be a thing of the past for this music lover.

MAGNET contributor Michael Jackson attended this year’s Riot Fest in Chicago and sent us these great photos. More after the jump.

Read More »

MAGNET’s Maureen Coulter will be reporting from the 2012 FYF Fest in Los Angeles.

My only other experience with Los Angeles was the time I walked down the Venice Beach boardwalk alongside a muscular, radioactive-orange man wearing nothing but a bear-claw necklace, a loincloth and Hawaiian Tropic, and then watched pedestrians leave me in the dust as I inched my car through the notorious L.A. traffic. I’m excited to be heading there again for music (the city’s pièce de résistance), which might refashion my first impression of L.A. as a polluted battleground for artists and misfits.

The FYF Fest, formerly known as the Fuck Yeah Fest, is being held this weekend at the Los Angeles State Historic Park, a 32-acre oasis plunked in the midst of ethnically diverse neighborhoods like Chinatown and Lincoln Heights. Fifty-plus performers, ranging from psychedelic pop quintet Yeasayer to punk rockers Against Me! to comedic acts like David Cross, will claim the park as their playground from noon to midnight both Saturday and Sunday, the first time FYF is stretching to two days in its nine-year history.

Previous years have featured hipster faves Matt And Kim, Broken Social Scene, Ted Leo And The Pharmacists, Dan Deacon and Girls. This year it’s French shoegaze dream-pop group M83, Balkan electro-folk band Beruit, digital noise-pop duo Sleigh Bells and English house-music twosome Simian Mobile Disco, among others. Over the past decade, theFYF has concocted its own flavor—it is the Pop Rocks/Fun Dip to Outside Lands’ Ghiradelli chocolate or Bonaroo’s Tootsie Rolls: it’s noisy and messy and tends to attract purple-haired and tight-panted Millennials, rather than arugula-noshing San Franciscan boomers or tie-dye wearing neo-hippies.

Headliners the Faint is emerging from a long hibernation, in which three members have been living the life of a garden-variety DJ: remixing others’ jams, playing small venues and dabbling in another project under the name of Depressed Buttons. Dynamic alt-rock band Dinosaur Jr, which scientists believe originated in the late Cretaceous Period (or at least prior to the birth of most FYF concert-goers), still wields the sonic power that made it popular with punk fans in the ’80s and ’90s. Those who plan to check out the enthusiastically punctuated Against Me! might be surprised to see a new lead singer: Frontman Tom Gabel has become frontwoman Laura Jane Grace, thanks to hormones and electrolysis treatments. Paul Banks, the Interpol singer whose epically monotone voice has the cinematic sweep of a National Geographic film in black and white, performs solo at the fest.

A growing trend among festivals is to have some comedy relief injected into the basic cable offerings of bass and guitar and synth, and FYF’s lineup looks like Thursday-night primetime on NBC. BJ Novak (of The Office fame), David Cross (Arrested Development) and the Eric Andre Show are sure to provide cramp-in-your-side laughs. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a California festival without the requisite vegan, gluten-free, organic and local-food vendor options. I’m pretty confident that even if I hit traffic that makes me want to munch an entire bottle of Xanax, FYF will be well worth the drive.

MAGNET’s Maureen Coulter reports from the 2012 Outside Lands Festival in Golden Gate Park.

In the past five years of its existence, the Outside Lands Festival has morphed into much more than a music festival. It has cherry-picked pieces of our culture—food, wine, comedy, art—and designed a San Francisco product that is hip and cool—but still appeals to the masses. Does that sound like some other Bay Area enterprise just a quick jaunt down Highway 280?

Outside Lands is on its way to becoming the Apple of music festivals. Its marketing alone was pretty genius: spoon-feeding fans bits and pieces of the lineup over social media and press releases as we all salivated for more, whipping up a frenzy that resulted in a sellout almost a week before the doors opened. As with customers of Apple, concert-goers are so hungry for the experience they are willing to fork over oodles of cash for items that would cost less anywhere else (even in San Francisco): $5 cups of black coffee, $40 parking 20 blocks away, $70 for thin (but really artsy and cool!) hoodie sweatshirts.

They sweat the small stuff, so we didn’t have to. After half a decade of maneuvering through all sorts of kinks, from parking to ticketing to congestion inside the festival, it seems that the concert organizers have got it down. Another thing I noticed: In three days, I did not see one festival-goer doing a Randy Travis and being escorted out by security guards. Everybody seemed to just be having a good time—probably because there were so many cool activities going on, the main focus wasn’t on getting obliterated.

That’s not even to mention the lineup, which was stuffed like a gourmet portabello sandwich at one of the venue’s 60-plus restaurant vendors. With aioli sauce. Big names like Metallica, Jack White, Stevie Wonder and Neil Young attracted a wide audience, while a multitude of up-and-comers like Tame Impala and Electric Guest impelled those same folks to download new albums on their iPods. Like Steve Jobs, Outside Lands knows what people want even if they don’t know it yet. I’ve already heard rumors that some parents have been converted to Skrillex.

On Friday, it was 90 degrees and blazing when I left my home an hour south in San Jose. By the time I reached Golden Gate Park, the comparatively arctic San Francisco wind and fog made me regret not bringing a winter parka and hand warmers. Yes, it was that cold. I pitied the fresh-faced Outside Lands virgins who wore flip flops and scanty H&M tops, who bull-rushed the merch stands stocked with sweatshirts once the evening acts came on.

I made my way into the park and checked out a musician who became popular long before MTV stopped playing music videos. The normally playful alt-rock troubadour Beck began his set in a mellow fashion, lulling the crowd with songs like acoustic ballad “Lost Cause,” before grabbing his electric guitar and leather-jacket swagger and jamming out “Gamma Ray” and “Where It’s At.”

Andrew Bird is the Michael Phelps of musicians. The classically trained warbler can deftly pluck a violin, play a xylophone and whistle simultaneously—then switch to strumming a guitar three seconds later. Even if you don’t appreciate his music, simply watching an artist at the top of his game, effortlessly performing his craft, is a masterpiece to behold.

I slipped in a little comedy that evening at the Barbary tent: Hot Tub with Kristin Schall, Kurt Braunohler and friends. True to the variety theme, they had a set from a juggler, who managed to be witty and hilarious while riding a seven-foot high unicycle and throwing sabers in the air—at the same time. The Barbary was legit: stained glass windows, wood paneling, bar booths that looked like something out of a fancy steak joint.

Early on Saturday I had a sit-down with electronic DJ MiMOSA (well, we sat on the back of a cart as we drove to the VIP area). The man, the myth. The Armenian-born California artist arrived at the interview sporting tinted aviators with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other—something that didn’t change unless he was pushing a button on his equipment during his performance onstage. When I watched his set a few hours later, even then he stepped away for about a 40 seconds to take a generous swig from a bottle of Patron he kept handy on the side of his equipment table.

The guy was energetic, I’ll give him that—gold chain swinging, arms thrashing, amping up the crowd with his glitchy beat-heavy remixes and dubstep, reflecting his background in the L.A. hip hop and Bay Area pysch-trance scene. He also gave hope to all of the 22-year olds living in their parents’ basement doodling with Frooty Loops. “At first, my parents were not so sure about my music,” MiMOSA said during the interview. “They were like: Oh no, our kid is a stoner and sits in his room all day listening to this weird trance stuff. We don’t know what he’s doing with his life! Now that I’m successful and making money, they think it’s great.” After taking that aforementioned pull from the Patron bottle during his set, he gave a shout-out to Mama MiMOSA, who happened to be in the crowd. Supportive indeed.

San Francisco-based threesome Geographer was one of the best bands in the Saturday lineup. The singer’s sweet-yet-powerful vocals were accented by burgeoning, throbbing bass and synth, as well as an electric cello. They sounded like a bit like Passion Pit if the frontman from Keane was their lead singer. A throng of multicolored heads and bodies in the crowd whirled to the looping vocals and synthesizer beats as the afternoon sun peeked out from behind the fog.

I headed back to the media tent to rest my legs in the late afternoon, and Explosions In The Sky was the perfect chill-out theme music for the occasion, the band’s electronic instrumental jamming a massage for my weary ears, which had just been assaulted by MiMOSA’s bass.

Several hours later I found myself loitering in the midst of a throng waiting for hipster favorite Passion Pit, which ended up being too much pit and not enough passion, as you would expect from the usually electrifying dance pop crew. I blame it on the Live 8-sized crowd, which muffled all sound and created an uncomfortable situation where I was involuntarily hot boxed by 40,000 people smoking California’s finest green and counting the hairs on the back of the person’s neck in front of me, watching a couple strobe lights blinking at the top of the Twin Peaks stage. It was enough to make me leave the festival to sit in my car, blasting “Sleepyhead” and remarking how pleasant it was not to be crunched like a used Beer Land plastic cup.

Outside Lands built up to Sunday like a Sigur Rós crescendo. It was easily the most crowded day, seeming to be at capacity by Franz Ferdinand’s set, which consisted of its usually lively thumping beats and Alex Kapranos-climbing-on-the-amplifiers guitar riffing.

Sunday afternoon’s highlight was youthful indietronica group Electric Guest, whose rabid fans sang along with all of their lyrics. A diverse set featured songs ranging from MGMT pop funk to Frankie Valley-type ballads infused with synthesizers and bass. Fans around me “flower-bombed” the crowd with petals and washed us down with an influx of bubbles emanating from bubble torches they were carrying—signifying the commencement of the Awesome Games.

Weaving through the array of costumed college kids, wine-sampling parental units, mustachioed hipsters and chattering families, I noticed everyone seemed to be wearing the same wide-eyed, toothy-smiled expressions. Before the lights went out in Golden Gate Park, I could hear festival-goers already talking about Outside Lands 6.0. And next year you can be sure they’ll deliver, just like that little company down the road.

More photos after the jump.

Read More »

MAGNET contributor Michael Jackson attended this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival and sent us these great photos. More after the jump.

Read More »

It’s the 34th annual Copenhagen Jazz Festival. MAGNET’s Mitch Myers translates the action.

These days, everybody is down with Fela Kuti and the Afrobeat sound, but what about the Afrofunk style? Representing the truest exponent of Afrofunk is legendary drummer Tony Allen, who was an integral part of Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s band, Africa 70, for more than a decade (1968 through 1979). Nowadays, the Lagos-born drummer lives in Paris and has played with a wide range of modern musicians including Blur/Gorillaz mastermind Damon Albarn, who has joined Allen along with Clash bassist Paul Siminon in the Good, The Bad And The Queen and, more recently, along with Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea in a group project strangely entitled Rocketjuice And The Moon.

The bottom line is that Allen is a master drummer who brings his own distinctive sound to any group he plays with. For this summer season Allen brought his own band to the Copenhagen Jazz Festival, performing outdoors at sunset as part of the Jazz By The Sea series. Allen’s group is a solid mix of French, African and American musicians, and although he doesn’t have any spellbinding female dancers in his band like Fela did (or Femi Kuti or Seun Kuti do), they still put on an entertaining, danceable show. Declining to speak of political or social concerns because “talking doesn’t change things,” Allen spoke to the crowd through his music, engaging in long, intrinsically rhythmic chant-songs like “Don’t Take My Kindness For Weakness.”

I spoke with one of Allen’s guitarists before the show. He looked very familiar, and it turned out to be Andre Foxxe, a Detroit-bred musician who came up as a teenager playing with George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic. Foxxe said that while he’s still devoted to Clinton and the P-Funk, Allen’s intricate African rhythms are the real thing and not nearly as easy to perform. Foxxe also said both Clinton and Sly Stone are totally off crack these days, so who knows how reliable of a reporter he is. Anyway, Allen’s band is just getting it together this summer, and although they were clearly under-rehearsed, they still had no problem getting the Copenhagen crowd up and dancing. Have you ever seen the Danish get funky? It’s a trip.

After moving and grooving with Allen, the only thing to do was chill out with some introspective avant-garde. Heading over to the amazingly beautiful Danish Parliament buildings within a large annex that houses the ornate little Theater Museum/Court Theater (the Teatermuseet i Hofteatret; built in 1767), I watched a super-serious performance by an arty group led by saxophonists Lotte Anker and Tim Berne called Still Arriving. This Danish/American collective included violinist Mat Maneri, cellist Hank Roberts, electric guitarist Marc Ducret, bassist Nils Davidsen and drummer Gerald Cleaver. The heady group played a few shorter pieces,  then after a quick break performed a full-blown suite, all composed by Anker. It was challenging and offbeat but not hard to take, with lots of sonic squeaks and moans and long overtones. It was the polar opposite of Allen’s Afrofunk, and I dug them both

It’s the 34th annual Copenhagen Jazz Festival. MAGNET’s Mitch Myers translates the action.

Why does a nice Jewish guy like me keep ending up in church whenever I leave the country? Music. Here in Copenhagen there are more than a hundred venues participating with the jazz festival, including the beautiful Christians Kirke, an old church with a lovely outdoor garden. It was there I caught an afternoon performance by singer Kurt Elling, guitarist Charlie Hunter and drummer Derek Phillips. This unlikely trio worked together quite well, as Elling charmed the crowd with a number of jazzified pop songs while Hunter filled out the sound playing lead, rhythm and bass parts on his eight-string guitar—simultaneously. Opening with Cheap Trick’s “I Want You To Want Me,” the band twisted the rock tune into a swinging jazz anthem. Elling occasionally used a phase-shifter on his voice, giving a trippy, futuristic bent to the proceedings. He was in really fine form, segueing easily from Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” into the mournful Hank Williams tune “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.” Hunter was funky as hell on the strings, and he somehow made the three-piece band sound like a party of five. Elling traded percussive scat vocals with Phillips before closing with a mind-blowing version of “Fly Like An Eagle.” This gig was completely weird but still made perfect sense. And it was fun.

From there it was off to catch an early evening set by veteran guitarist Jim Hall with bassist Scott Colley. Playing vintage tunes like the bluesy “Bag’s Groove,” “My Funny Valentine” and “All The Things You Are,” Hall and Colley displayed great intimacy, possessing an internal rhythm and momentum, which made their interplay quite compelling. For a guy in his 80s, Hall can still play out of the box, and his occasionally strange chord choices helped to keep these old tunes sounding as fresh as ever. For the latter part of the show pianist Kenny Werner, saxophonist Benjamin Koppel and drummer Jonathan Blake joined the talented twosome. But for me, it was off to see the Wayne Shorter Quartet, one more time.

With drummer Jorge Rossy substituting for Brian Blade, the Quartet was great, but missing that intangible something that comes from playing together for 14 years. Shorter seemed content, though, and the whole band was playful in its very spontaneous interactions. Pianist Danilo Perez was energized, and bassist John Patitucci was on fire, pushing the group and prodding newcomer Rossy into the fray. Shorter also had a very good night, playing confidently on both tenor and soprano saxophone, not to mention whistling over and over until Danilo encouraged the audience to do the same by shouting, howling and whistling from the bandstand.

Once again, I have no idea what tunes they played, except for “Orbits,” which can be found on the Miles Davis Quintet’s 1967 album (with Shorter) Miles Smiles and again on Shorter’s own magnificent 2003 album Alegría. He didn’t say one word onstage, directing the band with facial expressions and hand signals. They played two encores to standing ovations, and once again proved to be a phenomenal working unit. Shorter is a genius bandleader and saxophone star, and it should be understood and remembered that he is one of the world’s most brilliant living composers—and that goes beyond jazz. He’s steadily getting accolades but always underestimated. Catch up with him while he’s still around.

It’s the 34th annual Copenhagen Jazz Festival. MAGNET’s Mitch Myers translates the action.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire. If the Montreal Jazz Festival was a mainstream party meant to appease the masses by including heaping helpings of rock and pop, the Copenhagen Jazz Festival is a genuine jazz celebration for genuine jazz fans. The Danish appreciation for creative exploration and spontaneous improvisation was already in high gear when I arrived on Sunday, and I was happy to catch several genuine jazz shows, all featuring fantastic drummers.

Besides performing with Wayne Shorter’s group for the past 14 years, drummer Brian Blade leads his own collective, the Fellowship Band. Blade’s group of young lions turned the lovely Betty Nansen Theater into a house of musical reverence, playing ballads, blues and post-bop with great feeling. Blade himself was an adroit and sensitive timekeeper who worked with a high nervous energy that enlivened his bandmates. The tasty dialogue between saxophonists Melvin Butler and Myron Walden was impressive, but Blade’s own jittery backbeat and sublime soloing was the most entertaining part of the show.

The newly reconstituted Jazzhouse nightclub flooded out last year during the festival and had actually been closed for eight long months before reopening. Just in time, I say, as the Joe Lovano/Dave Douglas Quintet presented a rousing performance to a full (jazz) house. Showcasing monster drummer Joey Baron, the Lovano/Douglas band is a still-evolving collective called Sound Prints, inspired by the dancing musical spirit of Shorter. The group doesn’t play the compositions of Shorter, but rather, they’re happily goaded by the nature and the temperament of the great composer/performer (who’ll be playing here at the festival tomorrow, by the way). Playing original tunes by both Lovano and Douglas, the group is showing growth and cohesion on the road, and with Baron drumming up a storm, this is an all-star ensemble that cannot and will not be denied. Over breakfast this morning Lovano told me that that they’re not-so-secretly hoping to commission Shorter to write a new piece especially for this band. I really hope so too.

After the Douglas/Lovano group and its very satisfied audience left the Jazzhouse, I stuck around the near-empty club to see drummer Bob Moses with the Østergaard/Nilsson Experience. Whoever Østergaard and Nilsson are, they sure sounded good, especially with Moses pushing the group. Moses has been around since the 1960s and played with Larry Coryell in one of the first-ever jazz-fusion ensembles (the Free Spirits) and even appeared on Pat Metheney’s solo debut disc, Bright Size Life. Last night, Moses put on a miracle of a show for about two dozen people—playing his tiny drum kit with brushes, mallets, sticks, rubber tubes and lord knows what else. Moses gave off a spiritual vibe as he went about the business of playing the drums. He resides and teaches in Boston but is clearly a citizen of the world who brings a lifetime of experience to any gig that’s lucky enough to have him.

I’m kind of jetlagged and jazzed out after coming straight to Copenhagen after 10 days in Montreal. Stay tuned for more cogent and informative jazz coverage as the week goes on.

It’s the 33nd annual Festival International de Jazz de Montreal. MAGNET’s Mitch Myers translates the action.

OK, enough goofing around. Just a few more days in Montreal and time to get serious with some deep listening of the festival’s up-and-coming jazz stars. Starting early at the Gesù Theater, ECM recording artist and Norwegian pianist/bandleader Tord Gustavsen played his first of several gigs for the festival’s “Invitation Series.” Kicking off the series by inviting his usual working group to perform, Gustavsen and his ensemble fell into the classic ECM style, playing intricate, cerebral piano jazz with reserved intensity. Reveling in the subtlety and gentleness of pacing, saxophonist Tore Brunborg added his own burnished sound, and occasionally the ensemble reminded me of Keith Jarrett’s old European quartet. The mood was down-tempo, and the group floated gently in wordless dialogue. Gustavsen was never dominating but always in control, and the rhythm section of drummer Jarle Vespestad and bassist Mats Eilertsen were extraordinarily restrained. These nuanced arrangements were spacious and the group improvisations impressive, especially on tunes from Gustavsen’s newest CD, The Well.

Then, for something not completely different, I strolled over to the L’Astral nightclub to hear the Swiss pianist/bandleader and ECM recording artist Colin Vallon and his trio. Along with bassist Patrice Moret and drummer Samuel Rohrer, Vallon’s group played material from their recent disc, Rruga, which is highly recommended. There’s a clustered, rhythmic intensity to the trio’s work, as Vallon explores various European folk forms (as opposed to American swing or bop) in his playing. Vallon also seemed to have deadened his piano strings with odd objects, making an even more rhythmic sound as he vamped in sync with drummer Rohrer. This show was very hypnotic, very classy, and well worth checking out.

Finally, I ended up back at the Gesù for the Ambrose Akinmusire Quintet. It’s always nice watching the bright new voices in jazz, and this young man is the very latest trumpet star/bandleader to catch that particularly heavy buzz. Playing in a progressive post-bop mode to a packed house of new admirers, Akinmusire played quite well, leading his talented touring band through a number of challenging, well-structured tunes. Saxophonist Walter Smith was quite adept as a soloist, but it was actually drummer Justin Brown who held my attention. If you’re trying to keep up with the ever-changing jazz landscape, check out the Quintet’s recent Blue Note release, When The Heart Emerges Glistening. The kid has a quiet confidence, and people are already comparing him to the old masters. Somebody has to represent the next generation, and it just might turn out to be Ambrose Akinmusure.

It’s the 33nd annual Festival International de Jazz de Montreal. MAGNET’s Mitch Myers translates the action.

You got to keep things fresh, even at the Montreal Jazz Festival, and that’s why I went to see Angelo Parra’s bio-musical The Devil’s Music: The Life And Blues of Bessie Smith. This is the first time a musical has been incorporated as part of the fest, but the production fits right in. Featuring the very talented Miche Braden as iconic proto-blues mamma Bessie Smith, the show revolves around bawdy (bisexual) Bessie drunkenly reminiscing with her backing band in banter and song just prior to her untimely death in 1937.

Sharing the stage with just a bassist, piano player and saxophonist as her musical and dramatic foils, Braden brings Smith to life with a brazen confidence so necessary to the role. The performances of classic songs like “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out” and “Downhearted Blues” anchor the show, but it is Braden’s outsized performance that makes this essential history lesson so instructive. The playing of Keith Loftis also stood out, and Braden’s sexualized musical duet with the saxophonist was as entertaining as it was provocative. While the whole death premonition thing is a little corny, Smith speaking directly to the audience isn’t, and the production is an apt remembrance of an uncommonly successful female musician who overcame obstacles of poverty and race in the early 20th century. A volatile personality with a troubled love life and a fond affection for alcohol, Smith influenced everybody from Billie Holiday to Nina Simone to Janis Joplin. Catch this if you can.

I also will admit that I went to yet another Miles Davis tribute gig—the Montreal Jazz Festival loves Miles Davis—this one entitled Miles Smiles and featuring late-era Miles alumni including electric bassist Daryl Jones, saxophonist Bill Evans and keyboardist Joey DeFrancesco along with trumpeter Wallace Roney (subbing for the big man), monster drummer Omar Hakim and veteran fusion guitarist Larry Coryell. Anytime you have Hakim and Jones as your rhythm section, you are going to have a badass band, and they did. Playing loud and electric, the outfit would usually introduce the vamp, then take turns soloing, vamp again and out. Strangely, the order for the soloing was almost always with same, with Roney going first (and usually leaving the stage when he wasn’t playing) , then Evans, then Coryell, then DeFrancesco, then back to the vamp. Hakim only took one or two solos all night, but just watching him work the backbeat was more than enough. And as far as thundering Jones is concerned—thundering Darryl Jones for president. Coryell was hands down the best and most interesting soloist of the evening, ripping it up and down and playing bluesy (like the Texan he is) or jazzy or frenetically or whatever. As I’ve said before, Coryell is the most versatile and talented guitarists-for-hire working today.

Walking out of the show, everybody was humming the most catchy and bombastic of latter-era electric Davis tunes, that being “Jean Pierre.” Check out the most memorable version of this iconic tune from his classic live album, We Want Miles.

Nuff said.

It’s the 33nd annual Festival International de Jazz de Montreal. MAGNET’s Mitch Myers translates the action.

Happy Canada Day! Sorry the holiday is on a Sunday this year, but you can take off work tomorrow. Last night’s gigs at the Montreal Jazz Festival were just all right, but I did notice there were a lot of lovely ladies playing around. Pianist Elaine Elias is distractingly cute, and her Brasileira Quartet features her husband/master bassist Marc Johnson, so be advised! Speaking of Brazil, sensational singer CéU returned to perform to her dedicated fans at Club Soda, Mexican singer/dancer Lila Downs played the much larger Metropolis, and Montreal singer/cellist Jorane performed her classical pop in collaboration with the L’Orchestra I Musici De Montreal at the glorious Montreal Symphony House. You go, girls.

I personally got sucked into a weird ’70s nostalgia trip, and continued to attend shows featuring old grey-haired guitarists. Actually, Larry Coryell’s impressive mane is snowy white, and he looks like George Lucas up there onstage. Performing as part of that darn Guitarissimo series, Coryell is a fantastic improviser and unafraid to take risks. Playing mostly solo acoustic, Coryell thrilled the crowd with his fleet, furious picking and masterful chording ability. Opening with a poignant rendition of the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home,” Coryell favored emotion over precision, revealing both his daring and his sense of humor. Serving up original compositions (from the ’70s) as well Ellington tunes, jazz standards and even a rave-out of Ravel’s “Bolero,” Coryell stayed in the moment and was inspiring to watch. Basically, he’s a master musician and well-traveled journeyman who can play guitar as well as anyone when called upon, and he did.

After a nice nap at the mammoth Tangerine Dream concert, I returned to the scene of the crime at the Gesù (Centre de Creativite) to catch Norwegian guitar hero Terje Rypdal. Rypdal was in town reprising his 2009 live performance and ECM recording of Crime Scene, a strange mélange of Hendrix-styled guitar wailing, offbeat big-band embellishments and sampled dialogue from classic gangster films like The Godfather and GoodFellas. Supported by his old friend, Danish trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg and the Bergen Big Band, this gig was weird, disjointed jazz fusion with just enough noir to peak the interest of cinéphiles and jazzbos alike. Opening with “The Menace,” Rypdal played stratospheric lead guitar while Mikkelborg blew a clarion call of echoing, spacey trumpet work before the rest of their sizable band joined them onstage. I missed some of the sampled movie spiels because of the crowd applause, but am convinced I heard Michael Corleone mutter at least one deadly vendetta near the end. Still, they should have made room for “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.”

Next time.

It’s the 33nd annual Festival International de Jazz de Montreal. MAGNET’s Mitch Myers translates the action.

I had to go all the way (north) to Canada to beat the crazy American heat, but the onset of Montreal’s 33rd annual Festival International de Jazz served as a welcome reminder of how cool this city can be—even on a hot summer night. Decidedly populist in its approach to music programming, the Montreal festival doesn’t ever get hung up on the definition of jazz, topping off its Thursday-night potpourri with a mammoth outdoor free concert showcasing favorite son Rufus Wainwright.

It was something of a homecoming for the Montreal-born singer, and Wainwright took advantage of the opportunity by pulling out all the stops and escalating his usual concert performance to a wider revue that included family, friends and Francophiles. Resplendent in a glittery red outfit (dedicated to Liza with a “z”), Wainwright indulged himself and his audience for nearly two hours, pouring it all out onstage and leaving nothing left for the morrow. And yes, he did sing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” to great fanfare. Unfortunately, the massive outdoor sound system had a lot of problems, and it failed to properly service many thousands of indulgent fans standing more than a block away in the very crowded square.

While the Wainwright show was a heavily promoted spectacle that attracted loads of attention, there were many other high-profile performances going on around town including Ziggy Marley, Stanley Clarke and even James Taylor. Still, the most satisfying show (musically speaking) had to be guitarist Bill Frisell’s early evening tribute to John Lennon, entitled All We Are Saying. Performing instrumental versions of Lennon compositions at the Club Soda, Frisell was extremely well accompanied by pedal-steel/guitar player Greg Liesz and the ace rhythm section of bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen.

This was a hypnotic performance that just got better and better as Leisz’s atmospheric steel guitar weaved and parried with Frisell’s own playing, and the Wollesen/Scherr tandem laid down a flowing groove that couldn’t be beat. Naturally, the Lennon melodies were beautiful, with the band flowing in and out of songs like “Across The Universe,” “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” and “In My Life.” Frisell’s guitar playing integrated his love for jazz, rock and country/bluegrass, resulting in a sound that actually resembled Jerry Garcia at his most improvisational—and that was a good thing. The sold-out crowd was enthusiastic but politely restrained, my fantasies of a Dead-styled dance party evaporated with the fading strains of “Imagine,” and I was out on the street again before it even got dark.

The music here is sure to amaze as the week progresses, and as long as the summer weather stays tolerable, this festival is a viable alternative to frankfurters, fireworks and the good old July 4.

Stay tuned.

When electronic/dubstep disc-scratcher Bassnectar (a.k.a. Lorin Ashton) hosted his mini-festival at the yawning, expansive Bill Graham Auditorium, the downtown San Francisco venue was overrun with thousands of barely legal ravers chewing on glow-in-the-dark binkys and chattering excitedly (with and without the binky). So popular was this event—also featuring Baltimore-based electronic maestro Dan Deacon and jamtronica duo Big Gigantic—that the lines for any normal concert-going activity—bathroom, coat-check, water fountain—took approximately 18 years. The lines actually seemed to be the only orderly element of the entire shindig, as no one really knew who was playing at any given time, and once you stepped into the dancing throng, you didn’t really care.

The Auditorium was an orgiastic pep rally for misfits. It was the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video if Kurt Cobain had been using Prozac instead of heroin and Nirvana was into LED lights. About half the girls seemed to have picked some lingerie from the Victoria’s Secret catalog and forgot to put actual clothes over them, then complemented their non-outfits with knee socks or furry boots, as though that will keep them toasty. The dress code for guys was a little more diverse, but many seemed to be accessorizing with a fat joint.

There is a burgeoning dub-step movement wobbling its way up and down the West Coast. This makes sense, since missionaries of the genre, including Santa Cruz native Bassnectar, seem to either hail from some hippie city in California or from Denver (which legally gave double meaning to its “Mile High City” nickname years ago). My East Coast friends aren’t as familiar with this species of music, which features clipped samples, breaking beats and that perpetual, rhythmically manipulated, bone-rattling bass. But in places like the Bay Area, there is a massive subculture as devoted to the music and the lifestyle as Deadheads had been in their heyday. In fact, Bassnectar fondly refers to his followers as “Bassheads,” and I spotted many folks sporting T-shirts bearing the name. There are even websites dedicated to dubstep dancing, replete with videos and how-tos.

When Ashton and his mop of early-Anthony-Kiedis hair ascended his throne of keyboards and synthesizers, the crowd flew into a frenzy of lights and skin that didn’t peter out until three hours later when the DJ closed up shop. I was pretty amazed by the endurance of the concertgoers, but Bassnectar seemed finely attuned to his crowd: staff kept us fully supplied with glow sticks, blinking light necklaces and gulps of water, and every time the collective energy appeared to wane, he pumped us up with a Blur or Hawaii Five-0 sample. Ashton—hair flying, silhouetted against a giant illuminated wall—had the entire room pulsing with his glitchy beats, precipitous drops and the wobble-wobble of the mind-numbing bass. After the full-frontal assault on my eardrums, I will probably require cochlear implants.

When I managed to peel my eyes away from the mesmerizing LED light show (which I’m pretty sure is the same thing you see during near-death experiences), I took in the crowd behind me, grinding and flailing on the floor and up in the stands. It resembled the scene you may see when flying over New York City at night, lights flaring and twinkling. A concertgoer decided to show off her pole-dancing skills by climbing up a support beam and performing pretty impressive acrobatics, and another twirled multicolored hula-hoops so dexterously that it made me think she should be onstage as a backup dancer.

With rapid support of young binky-sucking fans who like road trips, the dubstep movement, led by Bassnectar, is poised to infiltrate the rest of the country. Amid the chaos of blinding lights, near-toxic levels of pot smoke and writhing, sweaty bodies, that much was clear.

—Maureen Coulter

MAGNET’s Maureen Coulter reports from the 2011 Outside Lands Music And Art Festival in Golden Gate Park.

With the third and final day of Outside Lands came the lousy Sunday-night feeling I used to get in college when I spent the entire weekend watching Entourage marathons with my roommates instead of studying for Monday morning’s bio exam. Two-thirds of the lineup had already packed their gear and headed out on their tour buses, and I hadn’t caught nearly as many acts I had intended to see. My first, panicked instinct was to cram. And cram I did.

Major Lazer, the electronic/hip-hop mind-meld of DJs/producers Diplo and Switch, gave a balls-to-the wall performance—literally, as the rapping frontman mounted the scaffolding mid-set. Major Lazer took full advantage of the keyed-up crowd by pulling its strings like a marionette: “Make some noise!” “Say yeah!” “Louder!” “Take off your shirts! Everybody take off your shirts!” That last one actually worked, as about 20 percent of the audience ripped off their tops and started waving them in the air like Terrible Towels at a Pittsburgh Steelers game. The group thumped, blipped and dropped, whipping the crowd into a frenzy. Major Lazer continued to irritate the scowling, burly security guards: “Let’s get some girls up on this stage!” About 40 chicks in bras charged the platform and gyrated amongst themselves as the yellow-shirted staff loitered nearby for the right time to escort them off.

Dreamy Swedish synth-pop quartet Little Dragon, led by shiny, diminutive lead vocalist Yukimi Nagano, played a simmering, melodic show perfect for a Sunday afternoon. Nagano’s tinkling voice blended with the jingling and chiming of assorted percussion and often veered off into a hypnotic electronic swirl of bass and synthesizers. While simultaneously dancing and scribbling in my notebook, a guy next to me inquired about my odd choice of concert activity, which begat more conversation. Turns out, his brother and his friend played in Latina breakout star Ximena Sarinana’s band the day before at the festival (and on Jay Leno this week), and I wound up backstage after the Little Dragon set. I then followed them through the VIP section (where the media were banned from this year, natch) to watch the Decemberists at the Lands End stage.

Decked out in hide-leather shoes and hats and blazers fit for an afternoon jaunt at the Kentucky Derby, Colin Meloy and friends were the savory filling of Meloy’s described “John Fogerty and Arcade Fire sandwich.” The band members acted out many of the narrative lyrics in their epic, instrumentally diverse songs, including the finale “The Mariner’s Revenge.” They mandated that the crowd scream as if they were being devoured during the whale-swallowing line. Live video on two large screens bordering each side of the stage would often cut to guitarist Chris Funk’s facial expressions, The Office-style. He is the band’s resident John Krasinski/Jim Halpert. Whenever something would happen onstage, the video would cut to his reaction, which ranged from fake surprise to theatric indifference. While the rest of the players collapsed to the ground during the “death” scene, Funk meandered over to his cup of beer, took a swig, then dropped to the floor dramatically.

En route to see DeadMau5 across the park, I stopped to watch a combination drum line/marching band dressed like they were in the King of Hearts’ court and adorned with gold bells and red-and-black flair. Several men on stilts with faces painted like mimes were lurching around the group, which had attracted several dozen enthusiastic festival-goers. Maybe they’ll be onstage next year.

One thing I learned at Outside Lands was that the tanking economy has had little affect on the drug market. In the few minutes I spent waiting for the DJ/producer’s signature oversized mouse ears to appear silhouetted against the backdrop, about three people asked me for “dry goods.” I was sporting a sweater, glasses and a button-down shirt; I looked like a Sunday-school teacher, not an ecstasy peddler. So if these folks are willing to ask Sister Kathleen McDougle for a hit, the demand is obviously there. However, the rumbling bass and fluid house beats of Deadmau5 could be enjoyed regardless of your present state of mind.

The fact that Outside Lands was a near-sellout affair alone points to its wild success this year. But the beaming faces I encountered as we filtered out of the park were evidence that festival-goers already have 2012 on their minds. I know I do. And next time, I’ll make sure to study up.