The Belly of The Beast: Thoughts and Impressions from the Pitchfork Music Festival (Part 3)

19 July 2011, 19:24 | Written by Luke Winkie

(Live)

Kurt Vile / Photo by Leigh Ann Hines

Day three begins on a train. I’m sitting across from an utterly adorable little girl and her pensive father. The dad looks hip in that out-of-the-game way with cargo shorts and flip-flops but a secluded ponytail and pair of chic-leaning glasses in his hand. A few minutes after I get off the train I see them wandering towards the Blue Stage, folding-chairs in hand. It’s one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen in my life; I hope to turn out like that kind of parent – cool in that “I’ve got a life, I don’t need to wear skinny jeans anymore” kind of cool.

If nothing else, How To Dress Well wins the award for most charming act of the weekend. I’ve never seen Tom Krell in the flesh but I’ve heard rumours of his geekiness. Nevertheless, I wasn’t expecting the lanky, bespectacled, stringy-haired, mayonnaise-white figure singing full-hearted soul into a microphone. The guy couldn’t look any less of an R&B artist – his obvious obsession with ‘R’. Kelly and Aaliyah seem born out of a thorough outsider’s perspective, and I’m sure plenty of his acquaintances have either laughed at his craft or tried to talk him out of such a mismatched image before the blogs got a hold of him.

Thank god he was never discouraged. He seems so happy to be finally taken seriously, doing the look-down, moody-faced croon he probably always wanted to do in front of people who love his songs and are able to sing along. He introduces a new track that he wrote “for my mom” and people don’t giggle. A few even swoon. The HTDW project has now reached a place where Mr. Krell can apparently afford a string quartet to give his formerly lo-fi productions the stuff of gussied-up R&B – if that sounds like a mistake, I can assure you that Krell’s songwriting is in a place where it doesn’t need silly, if intriguing, aesthetic choices to make it interesting. The whole show makes for a happy short story, a true underdog tale but one that’s looking more and more like an entire movement.

Not to offer myself cred or anything, but I’ve probably seen Odd Future more than the average fan – one of the perks of living in Austin. At this point the howling evil-eyed rambunctiousness has worn a little thin on me. In high-90s heat, amongst a highly-concentrated group of white kids chanting the OFWGKTA slogans in one of the most blatant images of un-self-awareness I’ve ever seen, it’s pretty hard to stay motivated to keep my place.

Then the spectacle began and the OFWGKTA kids start jumping around and screaming and getting drowned out by the bass – all trademarks of their personal hell-raising bent. But this time I’m not enthused on a visceral level or engaged in a character study. I’m just bored. For the first-timers it’s the show-of-the-weekend, and that’s all good and fine: enjoy the feeling while it lasts. And it’s fun hearing that Pitchfork-diss on “Yonkers” screamed so loud.

Shabazz Palaces are responsible for one of the most inventive records of the year in Black Up which is wisely being talked about like an instant classic. One of the best things about it is its mystery, it lives in the darkened, dystopian corners of the world, glinting with a cosmopolitan, and deeply nocturnal suave. It’s an incredibly independent sound, and it was clearly never meant to be on a stage, especially in the daylight. It’s a little depressing and Ishmael Butler does the best he can, blitzing out his polyrhythmic beats with head-nod deftness. Yet hearing those tightly-packed lyrical-runs reverberate with minimal subtlety is pretty disheartening. I suppose I didn’t expect it to work, but I definitely had hope for some fraction of the brilliance on a stage – the music is there but the atmosphere is missing in a pretty stark way.

I spend a few songs flirting with Deerhunter. The band (or maybe just Bradford Cox) has had some pretty hostile things to say about performing live recently, and it seemes logical that the experience of playing a truncated late-afternoon festival set would catch most of his scorn, maybe even more so because it was Pitchfork. But despite Deerhunter’s best efforts at being distant they never can help but sound good. They may storm off stage or brutally shut down an over-reaching fan but they also play Deerhunter songs, and they play them incredibly well. Considering their longevity and constant shows, it’s feasible that this is everyone’s third or fourth time seeing the band. As it stands they stay about the same; aural, treble-driven smears, lush, bouncing guitar sounds, and Bradford’s schizophrenic shit-talk. Is there anything more played-out than disaffected hipsters acting faux-patriotic in order to further distance themselves from the incredibly divergent Palin-lovers? Come on Cox, you can do better than that.

One thing of note, they open with “Desire Lines,” giving Lockett Pundt center-stage first. I’m sure that means nothing in the long-run, but it’s still interesting.

Next up is Toro Y Moi. I don’t have much to say about Toro y Moi. He plays Underneath The Pine material with the added oomph of a bassist, drummer, and a guitarist, looking like an actual band instead of a weirdo North Carolinian bedroom-project. It blends together but it makes it easy to loosen hips, you know, kind of like the Underneath The Pine material. I watch a trio of Asians exchange a plastic bag of cocaine. Moving on.

When I sit down waiting for TV on the Radio, me and a few friends are interrupted by a group of overzealous Cut Copy fans who seem to be in some sort of drunk-savant headspace. They dance, they wear kind of uncanny flesh-coloured sunglasses, they jump up and down, and one of them tells me if I don’t get up and dance, he would kill himself later that night.

Later I see him collapse and give a thumbs-up to everyone looking his way. My friend Bela describes this sort of thing as “The Cut Copy Effect,” the power of an ultra-bouncy electro-pop group over a selection of yuppies who’ve had one too many Long Island Iced Teas. It’s fun to watch, even if I get some water spilled on me. Seriously though: I have nothing against Cut Copy, I like their music – but I’ve just seen them too many times in recent memory to merit an excursion towards their end of the park. Not when a decent TVOTR spot is on the line.

And TV on the Radio isn’t bad. Strangely it’s my first time seeing the band given how they’re like, festival warriors. They work through some sound issues and play the songs all the kids want to hear. You get a sense that they’re a band for which everyone has their specific song. That means a lot of exits after ‘Staring At The Sun,’ ‘Dancing Choose’ and ‘Wolf Like Me.’ But it’s nice remembering why they carried such a load of hype before they were a known quantity.

In a sense they kind of represent my only real complaint with the Pitchfork Music Festival. While the headliners Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes and TV on the Radio obviously serve a specific and very Pitchforkian demographic, I feel myself yearning for a bigger payoff. Say what you like about corporate, numbers-crunching productions like Lollapalooza – the looming presence of triple-A acts make the slow descent into nighttime that much more exciting. Knowing a band like TV on the Radio is nice, but it won’t give anyone butterflies.

Regardless my first experience with the Pitchfork Music Festival makes a strong case for a yearly pilgrimage. It’s not often you see that much buzz compacted in a single weekend.