The last Lollapalooza of the this decade is in the books and despite, what on paper, looked like a less than impressive lineup, it turned out another weekend of exciting and memorable moments just as in years past. Every year going at Lolla, one is expected to battle oppressive heat, but on Friday this year, Mother Nature decided to throw in a little something extra - a rain storm that only seemed to pick up steam throughout the day. The showers fizzled out by nightfall, ushering in the heat and wind for the rest of the weekend.
Due to a lack of veteran artists in the middle of the lineup, this year’s festival allowed many relative newcomers to strut their stuff in front of large amounts of festival goers. Miike Snow brought their debut album to life at the Vitamin Water stage while wearing Phantom of the Opera-esque masks for the first third of their set. Despite being a new band, they worked the crowd with the confidence of a group with much more experience. They worked through much of their album only to jam out and turn it into an electro-dance party by each song’s end - the advantage of having two fantastic producers in the band. Passion Pit and Lykke Li were thrown on the small Citi stage, only to draw impressive crowds and put together equally impressive sets, with Passion Pit’s set having one of the more energetic crowds during the entire festival. Dan Deacon and Of Montreal were the only other bands that I saw that were able to rile up their crowds in a similar frenzy…
It’s a curious name these four Canadian men have taken. If there was a definite article, or if the music were very different, you could maybe put it down to macho attention-seeking or glammy affectation. In fact, ‘women’ is simply the opposite of what they collectively are: an erasure of self that extends to the cover of their debut album, an old Felix Greene photograph of regimented, anonymous Chinese citizens.
This erasure continues in the suburban blandness of the song names and, significantly, the music itself. Probably you’d call it eclectic, but eclecticism often serves to define bands, marking them as dabblers, dilettantes or restless spirits. For Women, it’s a mask. Folk, noise, musique concrète and sun-dappled melody all inhabit this set, but origins are obscure and elements oddly unbalanced. Opener ‘Camera’ thumps and then flickers into life, an echoey hymnal set to choked hiccups of guitar, accelerating through dry, percussive booms, warm veils of fuzz and lonely old synths. It’s pretty – almost hummable – but it evaporates at the one minute mark into the heavily distorted, oddly nostalgic clangour of ‘Lawncare’, which, in turn, becomes lost in the blank throb of ‘Woodbine’.
We’ve chosen to do a gallery of our favourite Russian writers. Some people might say ‘that sounds a bit pretentious’ but why should it be?
We’re not pretending; these guys are no different to us...
Photos from a recent FOE gig - a friend of our friends Hold Your Horse Is - she’s gonna be big!!! Read the gig review after the jump.
Shots of North Carolina’s folk-rocking Avett Brothers’ stop in Glasgow - 22.08.11
Read the review of the gig here.
Take a look at the acts and art on offer at this year’s Latitude Festival in Suffolk. Included are the likes of Fight Like Apes, Lykke Li, Sea of Bees and Seasick Steve. Photos from our own...
Good time with Bad Guys. Photos from the May 29th gig at the Old Blue Last. Read the review by the Bad Guy himself, Stuart London after the jump.
Artrocker.com exclusive: for fans of White Lies and Crocodiles we’ve got some fresh pictures from their UK show at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire earlier this month, courtesy of Alessandro...
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