- {Friday}
Though I may not have caught all I liked, I’m happy to say I spent my ATP kickoff right there for the first dusty amp clop and ensuing apocalyptic mottled tendril miasma that was Bardo Pond's Lapsed. No subtle way to start what’s essentially a rock fest – and not necessarily an uproarious one. With a sound like a lackadaisical Hawkwind without all of the ’70s trappings, it inspired an interesting mix of both excitement and the desire to forget you’re at anything but a Bardo Pond show spacing out. However appropriate, it was nice to start the weekend off with such a massively cool band.
Friday was the shortest day, dedicated to ATP’s Don’t Look Back series spotlighting live sets of classic albums. As one might expect, an idea like this can bond you to an album in new ways. In addition to rediscovering what a great, globular immersion in sweet nausea Lapsed is, I’m now completely won over on Millions Now Living Will Never Die. Standing there taking in Tortoise’s unique tweak on the funk aesthetic, the underlying musical themes, however augmented by odd syncopations and disruptive synth sqwuarks, put me in mind of the movie Westworld. If a THX-1138-era Lucas had made Westworld, Tortoise would have been the band to go with. Because they’re not just a good instrumental rock band: Given their precise orchestration and mysteriously evocative energy, I’d say they’re the greatest score composers of the greatest movies never made. Or at least the greatest future-noir movies never made.
Tortoise, like Growing and Harmonia after them, played a seamless set of otherwordly sounding music to get lost in. All had the dance-a-bility factor going for them, but I found them to be arrestingly out of body. Built To Spill’s Perfect From Now On was more body movin'. I’d seen them along with The (unstoppable) Drones and Meat Puppets the night before, and I still found the material riveting. Something about the urgency of the vocals combined with the mundane weariness of the lines just clicks, just feels classic – especially when the triumphant “Out of Site” rolls around. Unfortunately I didn’t get much beyond the impressive technical rawkability with The Meat Puppets when I saw ‘em Thursday so I ate a gyro instead. I think they’re fun, but for every high-five inspiring turn they pull, there’s one that simply rubs me the wrong way. They’re pretty righteous in a lot of ways, but at times they have a crunchy vibe going, and it always throws me off.
Thurston's set was cool enough (Steve Shelley’s patented drum work sounded particularly fine to these ears). I hadn’t heard Psychic Hearts, and I’m not sure I want to again. It reminded me of the SY song “Panty Lies” played a lot of different ways, with some cool Pollard-sketch-like ideas thrown in. As he fumbled through his lyric sheets, he mentioned that the album was recorded in a day. The music sounded good for that. In fact, I bet he craps good music before his morning coffee. But the inclusion of Psychic Hearts as a truly noteworthy album is still somewhat mystifying to me.
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- {Saturday}
Friday was pretty great, but I knew Saturday and Sunday were the milestone days, the bands whose music has been a consistent part of my life for over a decade were playing these days. Some (Low, Mercury Rev, Mogwai) have lost me with their newer material, but it doesn’t begin to upset the momentous strength of heart-wrenching pleas like Low’s “Little Argument With Myself” or Mogwai’s tectonic plate-spinning with “Like Herod.”
Unfortunately, Mercury Rev (who played Sunday) didn’t revisit their first three albums, and I got bored with the new material. Donahue’s a tough sell as a vocalist. His fearlessness is both mincing and convincing, even on their best stuff. But all these new mooning, space-gospel blasters lack the versatile what-the-fuck-just-happened madness of their best work. We’re left with gorgeous music, with what had to be the best lighting work of the festival, but distractingly inane vocals. It was a bit of a snake oily experience for me, being lured in by lush sound and showstopper presentation only to find something garish and annoying.
Good as Low and Lightning Bolt were, my main thrill on Saturday was getting to see The Drones again. THIS BAND IS ENORMOUS! I don’t mean famous mind you. Or fat. They’re all pretty skinny actually. But that sound. THAT SOUND. They sound like a rotted wind machine jammed with a thousand rusty metal filings, the house band in a lepers-only club, guns, roses and flesh-eating bacteria. They sound like defiance in the face of your compliance and a writhing wriggling gut buggy that takes you to the heart, rut by gaping muddy rut. NONE OF THIS IS HYPERBOLIC WANKERY. I’ll save that for Lightning Bolt. Yeah so, The Drones nearly cleared the room. Maybe one of the few bands I saw that did that. I didn’t want to report it, but it’s my job. I was so transfixed watching these cats, beyond cool, slapping the corpsemilk molten clay of “The Miller’s Daughter” (much better live, imho) around my head I didn’t notice till the lights came up. Man were they good! They’re not at all trendy and classically rocking without feeling too clichéd. Who knows why this crowd didn’t bite.
Lightning Bolt and Les Savy Fav were the real fun-makers of the day. Both bands know what it takes to deal with crowds – pure sound + pure presence. Somehow both bands achieve this time and again, without ever once feeling stale. I was never a big fan of Les Savy Fav, but Tim Harrington really gives it his all on stage -- and in the crowd with his cordless mic. Not a lot of frontmen to post-punk bands have this weirdo pep rally vibe, and I can’t say, as a non-fan, that I mind it at all. In fact, he made me appreciate what the band was doing all the more, rather than taking attention away from the music. It sounded like get-tough anthems for the heartbroken, and it felt good to feel that vibe whether I knew the songs or not.
LB was all new, and there was a lot of incoherent vocalating by Brian Chippendale and the presenting of a rubber mask by way of an Obama campaign plug. The new stuff sounded cool, a lot stranger with less overtly dude-rock trajectories. It sounded like colliding, so you collided sometimes with one another. It didn’t really feel like moshing. It was more, like, I couldn’t see standing still for Lightning Bolt, and I’m not about to worry about people’s personal space when we’re scrunched-in like cattle. If colliding around and convulsing is moshing, then I guess I was. Maybe the band sets up on the floor cause they don’t just wanna be gawked at. Maybe they just want to get us into a sweaty puddle and electrocute us. Why not? My only complaint is that they didn’t play on and on till B.C.’s arms flew off like pinwheels.
Shellac played themselves a gnarly little set. Tight, spindly Touch and Go punk that rained down the bad vibes. They were pretty convivial between songs, however, reminding me (much like Edan) of how little bands had been interacting with the crowd (Edan and EPDM were the only hip-hop acts at ATP, and they were all about crowd interaction). But most bands seem to want to let the music speak for itself. Shellac were just killing time while tuning, but it brought things down to earth a bit. Edan played earlier in the day with a set that was dazzling, warm, innovative, and funny, but somehow fleeting, musically.
Low looked so stark and gorgeous on that stage. Even when they rocked out with “Canada,” there was an ornate stoicism to it all that felt like old magic. Alan even made some ballsy stage patter about how the ATP crowd must’ve looked to the regular guys working security. It broke the ice. They had a uniquely insulated-feeling sort of warmth. When Alan asked us to go jogging tomorrow morning, it sounded tempting.
Harmonia was transportive and shimmering. Like LB, you didn’t need to see what the group was doing to feel it. Next to Low’s brilliant, choking set and the riproarin’ Trail of Dead, Harmonia was the best-sounding thing at the low-ceilinged second stage. I’m very grateful that my first live krautrock experience was one performed by legends of the scene. Growing actually had a similar command of that strange space, making refracted metronome glitch hypnotics out of guitar loops and lots of effects swim through our shared shallow-end.
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- {Sunday}
Sunday was a let-down only on a few counts. Mogwai was pretty powerful, but kinda got dull at times for me. They never had the intrigue of Tortoise for being instrumental, nor the hooks of The Drones for being fellow mope-rockers. It’s not like I’m new to the band. Mogwai got me started on instrumental rock in the late-’90s. But aside from the moments of dazzling brutality, I failed to find much of interest in their plodding, predictable grey day jams. Then Yo La Tengo didn’t play nearly long enough, and My Bloody Valentine wasn’t nearly as loud as I’d hope they’d be. Of course, this last is an out-and-out lie. MBV was louder than an atom bomb; I defy anyone who was there or in an atomic explosion to say otherwise. And it wasn’t so bad that Yo La Tengo only played a few tunes. When one of those songs is the Mogwai-can’t-eat-this-song's-boogers greatness that is “The Story of Yo La Tengo,” it’s hard to complain. Not to mention they did a Georgia ballad! She sounded so sweet. No it wasn’t “Shadow” or “Don’t Say a Word” (though either of those would’ve been choice). It was “I Feel Like Going Home” and it was one of the most crystalline, intimate moments for me all weekend. The sentiment was counter-productive for those of us who were getting a little weary and ragged around the edges, but oh well. It’s such a damned pretty song and played so delicate and perfect, you wanna immerse yourself in the sentiment, even if only to abandon it at the song’s end.
EPMD, like fellow hip-hoppers Edan and Dagha, were much more about verbal communication and getting the crowd to liven up (sadly, I was not a success story) and wave there arms to and fro. Their rhymes and beats were hulking and rubbery, they mourned some lost legends (evidently, the duo’s not caught up enough to know about J Dilla, who one audience member vehemently appealed for a mention of) and left the frillspace to everyone else.
One surprise was the charmingly slight, art-damaged chamber pop of Le Volume Courbe. They were pretty fine and pleasingly distinctive up until an irksome cover of “Freight Train” by Elizabeth Cotten. When you’ve heard Cotten’s version (and you should!) you’ll see what I mean. Also a nice surprise was Robin Guthrie. Unsurprisingly, it wound up sounding kinda like Cocteau Twins. I almost thought I heard Fraser’s voice in there, but it was more or less instrumental. The surprise here was how perfect the way his rear-projection imagery (something that bands either used or skipped completely) and ambient dream pop sounds turned that entire mainstage area into a sort of sound spa. You could just kick back and soak it up for once. No big nothing, just the precious precious strypps of milky gauze emanating from Guthrie’s gear. His set was a much-needed decompression chamber and a pretty keen one at that. When the evening wound down, after much schedule delay and confusion (I just barely caught a handful of songs from Trail of Dead’s set. They were a big beautiful mess – especially with their climax misplacement on the leveling finale of “Totally Natural”), Dinosaur Jr. took the stage and absolutely killed, providing a scrappy, sloppy, fun mood in between spiky blasts of shred. They were the perfect aperitif for the band of the hour, something day-glo bog before the day-glo glacier.
I’m sorry but My Bloody Valentine just can’t be compared to anyone. The music they’ve made is so beyond gorgeous and righteous and heavy as to be something purely unto itself in terms of pure artistry. It is pop. It is rock. It is punk. But it’s none of these. And seeing them live (after an excruciatingly epic lathering wait for the band to emerge) in person, I can still say without reservation that this music is the stuff of genius. Beyond having all the anthemic qualities of rockers and anemic qualities of aesthetes, there’s something transcendently tragic about their songs. Live, you could really feel emotions that can’t just be pegged down to touchstones of adolescent outsider angst. It’s the music of eternal yearning and the knowledge that grace is fleeting -- in the embodying and in the witnessing of it. It’s the music of the unnamable rogue pains brought on by living a life of escape into oblivion. When they launched (they really did launch into their songs, as though they were all rigged with jetpacks) into “Feed Me With Your Kiss,” it’s not a feeling of romance, but one of facing blind lust and shuffling the mess in your head around so much you might as well be waltzing with it. Closer “You Made Me Realize” lifted the roof off and pinned us to the ground with its unrelenting depth charge squall interlude. “Soon” (the ultimate dance-track ever as far as I’m concerned) was the ultimate pinch-me moment of the weekend. I AM SEEING “SOON” PLAYED LIVE, I thought. I was pretty damned pleased with myself then.
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- {Monday}
So where did I go, and what did I do, when Monday came around? I drove home and slept away the day. Pushed the whole thing from my mind. I realize now that as great as music is, sometimes the drab, unmomentousness of everyday reality wins out. A lot of the time I was sore, tired, regretful that I’d missed this band or that. Wondering why I hadn’t just worn a backpack instead of schlepping my sweatshirt and notebook around. Sometimes there’s that person standing in front of or around you that acts so inconsiderate as to distract you from taking in the band you love. Sometimes the band takes forever to get started. As I mentioned, the sound felt imperfect (this time, there was entirely too much domineering bottom end). Perhaps the vocals were buried more than they ought to’ve been, but the instruments ably filled in a lot of the best vocal melodies. The sound throughout ATP was uneven, but I assumed no more than what was usual, as Terrastock ’08 was similarly hit-or-miss in this regard. If you loved the music as much as I did at times, you likely weren’t too bothered about the lack of album-quality balance. And, as the drink prices were astronomical, I frequently wondered if I should bother getting sauced. Sometimes it’s hard to just relax at a festival, even though that’s basically what you came to do when all’s said and done.
And this venue, Kutsher's, was absolutely enchanting. Sure it was a bit rundown, but that was what made it work. I saw Dinosaur Jr. at a club in Burlington that was so sleek that it almost made the band's scruffy image seem almost cast in shiny plastic. Despite all the irksome details I’ve mentioned, the venue itself was a very choice place to chill- and check-out some great performances and (if you could manage it!) see some Criterion screenings. I almost forgot to mention, there were comedians booked as well! I only managed to catch Patton Oswalt, and he was excellent. I got some nice hearty belly laughs that I’d desperately needed. He’s a sharp, imaginative dude with a really memorable lynchpin bit about KFC’s “Famous Bowls” that is both despairingly piteous and mean in a drop-dead funny fashion. Live stand-up comedy is new to me, but Patton is not. I would gladly see stand-up again, as it is an immense thrill. The person is under immense pressure, and you can almost hold it in your hands. I think it produces a pretty interesting bond, where you’re sort of pulling for the person to be as funny as they can be rather than sitting back and waiting to be amused. He of course picked on Kutsher's a bit, but everything he said only served to reaffirm the location as a perfect home to the spooky, elegiac, raucous, and dark sounds swirling about its grounds. As to future ATP hosting plans, I say this: next haunted old hotel resort please!
As the schedule kinda slipped out of sync on Saturday and Sunday, I missed out on a fair share of acts. For this I am truly sorry:
- Fuck Buttons (was wary of their moniker, and later kicked myself repeatedly after hearing how great they are)
- Meat Puppets (saw ’em in Northampton the night before and wasn’t into enough for another go -- they certainly did shred like hell, but I guess I don’t get totally get the appeal)
- Comedians Eugene Mirman, Joe Derosa and Maria Bamford (Thurston)
- Polvo (Low)
- Autolux (dinner)
- Bob Mould (Yo La Tengo)
- Alexander Tucker & Apse (missed these guys because I wanted to win a Gimme Shelter DVD. Turns out they were giving away a poster instead. Didn’t know the quiz answers anyway. After the movie, which was fun to watch with a group for the first time, I stuck around for Dave Markey and his film The Year Punk Broke. Hadn’t seen this since I lent out my VHS copy long ago, to never see it again. It’s a fun, aimless festival tour flick, but I couldn’t bear to miss The Drones even if I had just seen them in Northampton on Thursday. Not to mention the head of the person in front of me took up the majority of my view of the screen)
- Om (had to eat something)
- Spectrum (ditto, but they sounded pretty good from directly outside)
- Lilys (Robin Guthrie)
- Brian Jonestown Massacre (This is where things get fuzzy. From Yo La Tengo on, there was a lot of delay. Think I was seeing either Mogwai or Dinosaur Jr. at the time)
- Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra (already seen ’em, so I went with Les Savy Fav. For the record, I think they put on a pretty good show so – it was with some regret.)
