The first annual Harvest of Hope Festival was sponsored by Gainesville's No Idea Records, a label that Against Me!, Less Than Jake, and This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb have all called home at some point. While the talent buyer wisely booked a good number of very reputable indie-rock acts, the organization and set times were detrimental to the festival as a whole. Rather than alternating pop punk with hip-hop or “indie rock,” the lineup was, for the most part, divided up into neat chunks of the same genre, band after band. Still, the festival's goal of “providing financial, educational, and service oriented aid to migrant farm workers all over the country” seemed much closer to accomplishment with the high turnout.
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- Saturday
I showed up at about 1 PM, trying to orient myself to the festival grounds before Deerhunter's set at 2. While they sound-checked, Bradford Cox jokingly remarked that few in the audience (if any) had even listened to their music or knew who they were. This was met with objections from half of the crowd, prompting an apology from Cox. Most of the material played was from Microcastle, but they also included a few tracks from Cryptograms, Fluorescent Gray, and even an unreleased (and quite good) new song. While every member was in top form, I couldn't help but notice how disinterested and tired they all looked. Their set just one night before (in Florida State University's Club Downunder) was breathtaking, due in no small part to the healthy rapport established before their set. The band has noted their preference of playing in a club over a festival performance, and the sentiment showed.
Later in the day came an acoustic set from John Vanderslice, who treated the crowd to material from all across his discography, songs from the upcoming Romanian Names, and a Mountain Goats cover. The atmosphere was just right, and he was clearly in his element as the sun set on his native Florida. Although his densely arranged songs sounded stark and unfamiliar when performed unaccompanied, it was a solid and enthusiastic set no less.
The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle took the stage quickly after Vanderslice left, only to encounter technical difficulties. After confusedly searching for a minute, he realized that his guitar simply wasn't plugged in. Vanderslice, who tuned Darnielle's guitar prior to the performance, received the blame of the crowd until Darnielle hushed everybody. The acoustic set was more aligned to what we were all expecting, and though the audience was rather small, everyone seemed satisfied, especially with the impassioned performance of “This Year.”
Stage two, Saturday's punk-leaning stage, was by far the day's most popular. The diminutive attendance at stage one can be attributed to the back-to-back lineup of mainstays The Bouncing Souls, Bad Brains, Against Me!, and Propoghandi. Against Me! saw the highest attendance of any show that day (and possibly the whole weekend). The cloud of cigarette smoke and dirt stirred up from the moshing mass of packed bodies hung heavily above the crowd as the Gainesville favorites tore through a set of their incendiary political punk.
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- Sunday
As I walked through the gates, the dirty riffs and wailing vocals of Israel's Monotonix met my ears. The debris-littered ground around the stage was torn up with a crowd of happy kids moshing around the band; Monotonix refused to play on stage, opting instead to play on the “floor.” Ami Shalev was as wild as ever, scaling the stage's huge steel beams and leaping into the crowd from the massive speaker stacks. He ended the set while held aloft by the crowd, pounding on cymbals and the snare drum.
Canadian quartet Holy Fuck was up next and delivered an intense, unbelievably solid set of favorites, including “The Pulse” and “Lovely Allen.” I'd never seen them before and was pleasantly surprised. Dirt-covered hippies danced, and hipsters nodded appreciatively. The rhythm section provided a stable, clean foundation with subtle variations, while Brian Borcherdt and Graham Walsh manipulated fractured electronics and samples through a vast array of effects pedals. Each member was in perfect sync with the other, and I was reminded just how tight non-quantized or sequenced electronic music could be.
I headed over to stage one to check out Murs' set; to my surprise, Jacksonville, Florida's Whole Wheat Bread, a self-described crunk-rock band, accompanied the rapper. Together, they called themselves The Invincibles, and their rap-rock hybrid schtick was absolutely terrible. Limp Bizkit brought enough shame to Jacksonville with their “rap-core” in the late '90s, and The Invincibles did nothing to reconcile the city with its... actually, Jacksonville never really had a sterling reputation as a breeding ground for great music. Anyway, WWB left the stage after an all-too-long set, and Murs performed fan favorites from Murs 3:16, a far more enjoyable experience.
KRS-One was by far the most exciting rapper to perform all weekend, delivering classics and freestyles in equal measure. The Brooklyn emcee was all over the stage, rousing the crowd to unprecedented levels of excitement, and even threw several boxes of his CDs to them. About halfway through his set, he stopped for a “public service announcement,” in which he began to wax metaphysical. “You know what I'll be doin' tonight around midnight? I'll be sittin' in my hotel room, on the edge of my bed, visualizing myself at age 17, sleeping on a park bench in NYC. The me I'll be visualizing will be imagining me, here, on this stage -- a success. It'll be like there are two of me. Make good decisions while you're young.” After the speech, he got back to rhyming. After such an impressive set from KRS-One, GZA's performance was extremely disappointing. The Wu-Tang member seemed bored, moving slowly back and forth across the stage.
After a few songs, I left and got ready to take pictures of The National, the band I'd been waiting for all weekend. They began with the chiming guitars of “Start a War” and moved through an unfortunately short set, consisting mostly of songs from Alligator and their breakthrough, Boxer. “Secret Meeting,” “Slow Show,” “Guest Room,” “Baby, We'll Be Fine,” and of course “Fake Empire” were all performed. Matt Berninger noted that the band would perform a new song, but warned that recent attempts at their new material live ended up as train wrecks. “This one's called ‘car-wreck,'” he joked, before launching into a somber ballad that sounded similar to many of Boxer's tracks. After only an hour, the band closed with the cathartic “Mr. November,” and I went home satisfied.
While some monotonous lineup choices plagued the weekend, those sort of issues can be expected from a nascent festival. Catering to such a polarized crowd is difficult, but the Harvest of Hope festival planners did a pretty good job in appealing to diverse tastes.