I got to get my head out of the internet. Anymore festival lineup announcements feel like a reminder to me that having heard of a band is by no means the same as actually hearing a band. I know I spend too much time reading about music or listening to it while working on other things. More and more, I think I’m a one-sound-at-a-time kind of guy. Give me one album to listen to obsessively, or occasionally an entire micro-genre to explore, and I will listen until it has completely dried up. And it’s all SoundCloud embeds and Bandcamp streams: bands like Yeasayer, Menomena, or that collaboration between David Byrne and St. Vincent pass by silently just over my head, and I’m sure they are good, but I’m too obsessed with the crackliest beat “tapes” I can find or the new Animal Collective album and nothing but the new Animal Collective album. I don’t know if I even listened to the new Deerhunter album, Monomania. And I loved all of their previous albums. Why do I do that? In fact, I have definitely spent more time reading about Monomania than I have listening to it. Stupid.
The 80-35 festival is a mass booking of a bunch of Iowa bands playing the free stages surrounding festival main-stagers like Yeasayer, Deerhunter, Wu-Tang Clan, David Byrne with St. Vincent, Wavves, and Umphrey’s McGee, among others. The people at the Des Moines Music Coalition do a marvelous job of booking bands from a variety of different genres and levels of obscurity or fame while maintaining the local feel of the festival. I imagine their demographic is a tough one to please, which is probably why the lineup tends to stray away from the heavy-on-the-indie-music tendency of other festivals. Des Moines is a diverse city in somewhat off-kilter ways that other cities either haven’t figured out or just moved past years ago. And for the 80-35 festival to be successful, it can’t just cater to 20-year-olds or adults with families and jobs at Wells Fargo. It has to draw interest from both ends of that spectrum, which is how a main stage schedule of Umphrey’s McGee followed by Deerhunter followed by Wu-Tang Clan works, as long as the familiar faces of the local bands can serve as alternatives.
Day 1
Annalibera: Somebody told me that Des Moines band Annalibera was kind of a country band. I don’t think this definition works in the context of that genre so prevalent in the word “country.” When I strip away the years of skipping through the numerous country stations on Iowa radio while growing up and start thinking about the kind of creativity (or bored experimentation) that can only stem from big yards and big skies outside of town, the word country begins to make sense to describe this band. Like being caught in the clear-water current of the river baptism verse of an old church hymnal and nearly drowning because all of the shore-dwellers are too hot and bored to do anything but gaze at their own shoes.
Kitty (Pryde): When the local arts and entertainment publication previewed Kitty’s performance at 80-35 by mentioning the one-million views one of her songs has on YouTube… well, at least I didn’t have any expectations going into this one. Kitty and her press-play DJ dropped a few heavy ones between a couple of tall financial buildings surrounding the Kum & Go (a Midwest gas station chain) free stage. And in between songs, she repeatedly asked the photographers to stop shooting from their low angle or she would “seriously sue them.” Alternatively, she could have worn pants. She eventually wandered off the stage somewhere near what was probably the end of the set anyway, and her DJ just smiled and let the song ride for a while before spacebar-stopping it, closing the laptop, and walking off the stage herself. From the little bit I knew about Kitty going into this one, it seemed like a pretty ideal translation of an internet phenomenon to the live experience.
Yeasayer: “Yeah, I’ve heard one or two songs before. I remember them being OK.” Turns out it was only one song, and it was the one everyone else in Des Moines knew as well. Yeasayer seem the kind of band meant to be playing festivals around the time the sun is starting to set. Real professionals, ya know? I’ve grown too accustomed to the amateur, faceless quality that is the entire internet, so it was kind of nice to see a band flawlessly play their upbeat music to a receptive audience outdoors, where you can occasionally feel a breeze on your skin. I guess they call this “the festival experience.” Never heard of it.
Menomena: “No, I haven’t ever really listened to them before. I kind of just assumed they were like four dudes making some kind of unique rock music using two guitars, a synthesizer, and drums.”
“Nope, that’s Yeasayer, remember? You just saw them.”
I must have read about Menomena at least 30 times before, in various places, and I still don’t know a damn thing about them. I think I ran into about five different people I haven’t seen in six years at this stage, so I still didn’t really even hear any of their songs. I probably missed the boat on this one, and I don’t think it’s coming back for me.
David Byrne & St. Vincent: I just never loved The Talking Heads. I don’t know why. I figured if I didn’t like the hits they still play on the radio every now and then, I probably wouldn’t like their other music, which is a terrible assumption to make about a band. I guess there was just always another radio station, CD, YouTube video. St. Vincent is great, and I am never in the mood to listen to it, because I seem to not like things that are beautiful and good and well-made. Maybe someday when my quality of life isn’t so… poor… it will make more sense.
Their collaboration as a festival headliner was not something I had high hopes for, because I’ve always liked a real punch for a headliner. I was pleasantly surprised with this one, however, and I remember thinking how 80-35 really booked a perfect middle-ground band with this one, perhaps truly capturing that sought-after all-inclusive demographic.
Day 2
Tires: The majority of the second day was spent on the side stages, watching the wide variety of Des Moines local bands. Tires started the day out for me, because I had to work too late to see Wavves. Tires has been a real curveball for the Des Moines scene, which otherwise boasts few electronic-based bands. They combine the “add-a-synthesizer” tendency of pop-acts-gone-dreamy with fierce psychedelic jams, and are concerned just as much with quality of their set as they are with their always-changing array of MIDI visuals. They are somewhat of a complete package in that regard. I only wish they could have played after the sun went down, rather than four in the afternoon. Maybe next year.
Trouble Lights: Trouble Lights are an anomaly, sporting a punch of straight-forward, Top 40 pop music from a little town called Fairfield, surrounded by Iowa corn on all sides. The entire Sweat Power collective there has been concerned with dance music and dance music alone for the past six or seven years, and Trouble Lights are its biggest breakthrough yet, finding their way onto NPR last year with Maximum Ames full-length Endless Prom. It is becoming common knowledge that if you are attending any Sweat Power show, you are in for an experience because they don’t just play their music, they perform it. The shoulder-shrug attitude of so many musicians has not yet permeated the Fairfield city limits, and I can’t imagine it ever will.
The River Monks: The River Monks might just be Iowa. The five-part vocal harmonies swirl outward like wind across the fields, while the band’s traditional folk instrumentation is given Iowa’s unexpectedly progressive touch, leaving you with something entirely recognizable, yet completely new. I can’t believe it has taken me so long to see this band.
Deerhunter: I was more excited for Deerhunter than any other band. It may be the fact that Bradford Cox, good or bad, is always an interesting figure. They started late because, of course, some cord chose that exact moment to stop working, and when you are dealing with festival electronics, you probably have close to 100 different connections to check when something isn’t working right. But they still floated through every part of their set with a loose flawlessness. And at numerous points between songs, the set was dedicated to a punk teenager in a Black Flag shirt named Timmy. It was an oddly perfect detail coming from Cox, wearing a Cramps shirt and probably giving two shits about this one-off show in Des Moines, IA. Which isn’t to say anything about the band’s attitude, but more about the general direction of their newest album, Monomania, which everyone declared as a throwback to headlong rock & roll figures like Gene Vincent and Bo Diddley. Like “Just 22 and I don’t mind dying” type of carelessness. But they channel it through that old Deerhunter style of huge guitar sounds swelling up over the last half of 10-minute songs and it just works. To perfection. I remember some girl in a car telling me that she thought they were called Dragonslayer, and I told her that they might as well have been.
Wu-Tang Clan: “Iowa, I mean… wait, yeah, Iowa! How we doing tonight?” Oh, Method Man. Wu-Tang Clan in Des Moines, Iowa. Alright. I’ve always liked the group member’s solo albums more, but damn(!), Des Moines was in the mood for the relentless assault of 36 Chambers. By the time they took the stage, my relax-in-a-hurry was wearing off, my 6 AM work day that morning was wearing on, and my brain was still broken from the crushing onslaught of Deerhunter’s set, so I just hung out in the back where I could actually have 2-3 feet of space to myself. I listened to their crushing bass boom outward and decay the way it only can at festivals: from the massive tower of speakers, back and forth between buildings and through thousands of Wu-Tang W’s raised high on all of those drunken Des Moines hands. Maybe I was just too exhausted, but it seemed like the GZA tracks hit harder than nearly everything else but the Cappadonna verses, which carried heavily every time he took center stage.
A friend told me he saw Ghostface Killah play at Des Moines’ metal venue, The House of Bricks, about two years ago, during which Killah allegedly claimed he wouldn’t play Des Moines again unless more people showed up. I guess it took a festival to bring him back.
I’m not sure how much 80-35 has grown since its first year and accompanying headliner The Flaming Lips. I seem to remember just as many people watching that band as Wu-Tang Clan on Saturday night this year. In comparison to the crowds one has to face at Pitchfork, South by Southwest, or any other renowned festival throughout the nation, I can’t help but think that Iowans prefer more intimacy. And maybe next year I’ll actually have familiarity with the lineup beyond a few of the names and a handful of singles. I don’t know. Until then, back to the internet!
