With summer festivals becoming de rigueur for music fans and bands, alike, it is obviously becoming increasingly hard to put on a singular event. The lineups for most of the blue chip events – Coachella, Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits, Treasure Island, et. al. – often look like carbon copies of one another, with some bands planning their summer tours to make stops at each one.
Although the organizers of the Capitol Hill Block Party, a relatively minor player in the festival circuit, relied on a pair of headliners for their two-day event that will be playing at many of the aforementioned big events (The Jesus Lizard and Sonic Youth), they managed to pack three stages with a wide variety of touring acts and a huge supply of local talent. It made for a diverse and hectic two days, with few, if any, dead spots or dull moment and quite a few surprises.
One astonishing trend was how many bands seemed to be looking to the past in their sets. Perhaps spurred on by the fest’s headliners, many of the bands took a spin through a cover or two (or in the case of The Thermals, three) during their set.
Some felt perfunctory (The Thermals’ Alternative Nation trifecta of Green Day’s “Basket Case”, Nirvana’s “Verse Chorus Verse” and The Breeders’ “Saints”) and others quizzical (The Gossip’s spare, screaming “Psycho Killer” quotes). The most astonishing came at the hands of local acts, including a fine, jerky breakdown of OMD’s “Genetic Engineering” by Bow + Arrow and a brusque tear through the Black Flag classic “Thirsty & Miserable” by the snarling hard rockers Akimbo.
For The Thermals, it was an obvious move to play to the audience, and one that worked well as any talk of that band’s sturdy set was always begun with those three covers. And for another band, the audience was behind their set list’s rearview mirror approach. Built To Spill let the fans choose the songs they eventually performed on Friday night, all of which came from the band’s pre-2000 albums.
And, of course, there was the reunited Jesus Lizard, a quartet that hadn’t been seen in Seattle since a 1996 ban was placed on them for singer David Yow’s stage diving. The years and the band haven’t dimmed the band’s attack, however, as the original quartet tore through a set that wisely relied heavily on their Touch & Go albums. And, as ever, Yow spent the majority of the performance swimming atop the teeming crowd out to pay homage to these elder statesmen of the punk/indie scene.
Surprisingly, the band that looked back least was the one with more recorded music under their collective belts than likely any other act in the lineup: Sonic Youth. The hour-plus set relied almost exclusively on tracks from their latest album The Eternal, all of which sounded as dynamic as their recorded versions. They dipped into the back catalog only a few times, knocking out a pair of tracks from the opus Daydream Nation, and ending the night with a strangely restrained version of “Death Valley ‘69″.
OMD as in Orchestral Manouvres In The Dark?
July 27th, 2009 at 10:26 pm