Category — Music Festivals

OK, hipsters, get ready cause all the acts and the set times have been announced for Chicago’s Pitchfork Music Festival.

“Only individual day tickets for the 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival remain, and they’re going fast! Snag yours while you still can via TicketWeb for the sweet price of $30 each.”

The end of the Day 1 bill has No Age, and then Animal Collective closing things out as headliners.

It appears that on Day 2, the last 3 bands are Dinosaur Jr, Cut Copy and Spoon. This is surprising to me as I thought Dinosaur Jr would play after Cut Copy, but this is probably a testament to just how popular Cut Copy is now.

Check out the full lineup, with set-times and more over at Pitchfork.

A few months back Noel Gallagher of Oasis remarked to the press that he felt it was wrong for Jay-Z or any hip-hop artist to be headlining the main stage at Glastonbury. Jay-Z, in turn, responded back in the press by defending hip-hop in general.

When Jay-Z’s set commenced, he strapped on a Fender strat and “strummed” along to Wonderwall by Oasis and proceeded to sing the song very out of key, as a sort of “screw you” to Noel Gallagher.

Now, I feel like I should comment on this after having read some people’s responses on sites like Stereogum. It is kind of cool that he came out and basically mocked the Oasis song, but he obviously can’t actually play guitar and it just looked stupid seeing him pretend to play. Also, they just put on the album version and he sang along to it, like someone would in their car.

I dont know, to me it just seems lame. Jay-Z did get a lot of great critical response from the performance, but also some critics saying it started to wain mid-way through. To me, this kind of proves Noel Gallagher’s point in a way. Not that hip-hop shouldn’t be a festivals, but that in my opinion, hip-hop just isn’t very good live.

Check out the video here.

The tenth Voodoo Music Experience will be happening this year, Oct 24-26 at New Orleans City Park. The festival is starting to release an impressive lineup of big name acts.

“Death Cab For Cutie, Erykah Badu, Wyclef Jean, Panic At The Disco, Joss Stone, Lupe Fiasco and Dashboard Confessional are among the top names joining headliners R.E.M., Nine Inch Nails and Stone Temple Pilots.”

“Billboard.com can reveal that the event will also feature performances by DeVotchKa, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Cold War Kids, Ghostland Observatory, Joseph Arthur, Old 97’s, Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, the reunited Shudder To Think, the Gutter Twins, Thievery Corporation, Tokyo Police Club and Man Man.”

“Among the dozens of local and/or non-rock acts set to appear are the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Irving Mayfield’s New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, the New Orleans Bingo! Show, Ozomatli with Chali 2na, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Kermit Ruffins, Dirty Dozen Brass Band, the Iguanas, Bonerama, Marc Broussard and King Britt, the latter staging a tribute to local legend Sister Gertrude Morgan.”

Weekend passes for the event are priced at $115. Three-day VIP passes will sell for $450 and both go on sale Monday, June 23rd.

Personally, I feel that there really aren’t that many bands I’d like to see but the lineup does boast a small number of unique acts. Besides solid headliners, R.E.M. and Nine Inch Nails, I’d love to see the reunited Shudder To Think and wouldn’t mind seeing Death Cab For Cutie, as I’ve never seen them live before. I think one of the most interesting thing about this festival would be the local talent. Usually, you look at festival lineups and every single one lists the same artists. It’s nice when a festival makes a point to add some local flair to its lineup.

Source.

Over the weekend Metallica revealed, (via their website), their new album’s title: “Death Magnetic.” I’ll be honest, it sounds pretty cheesy. I don’t know how permanent the title is, but one would assume it is the final title as the album’s release is not too far away in September. Let’s hope the music is the return to the early albums, they’ve been promising.

Metallica also played a well-received headlining set at the Bonnaroo Music Festival this weekend. After the band was introduced by comedian Chris Rock, they proceeded to play the following songs…

01 “Creeping Death”
02 “For Whom The Bell Tolls”
03 “Ride The Lightning”
04 “Harvester Of Sorrow”
05 “The Unforgiven”
06 “…And Justice For All”
07 “No Remorse”
08 “The Memory Remains”
09 “Fade To Black”
10 “Master Of Puppets”
11 “Whiplash”
12 “Nothing Else Matters”
13 “Sad But True”
14 “One”
15 “Enter Sandman”
—-
16 “Last Caress”
17 “So What”
18 “Seek and Destroy”

Cool to see a lot of earlier material in there, no new songs played whatsoever though. A lot of guitarists will be excited as Kirk Hammett is doing early-Metallica-style solo’s on this new record (so says Kerrang! and Metal Hammer).

Find more information, photo’s and anecdotes over at Stereogum, who have excellent Bonnaroo coverage…

Source.

So, over a week ago it was announced that Prince was added as a headliner to the Coachella Festival (look above, they even made special graphics for his appearance!). I had sort of already planned on not going, so I was just a little annoyed finding out that this bumped Portishead to sub-headliner status. Sub-headliner status means a shorter set-time.

While Prince is kind of cool, he’s not someone who I would ever really care about seeing. Its a little bit of a shame because Coachella will be Portishead’s first show in 10 years. I know people who are just going for them, or mainly going for them. Anyway, as long as Prince doesn’t let his super-male-diva side take over for too long everything should be alright. Remember what happened with Madonna?

At this point its pretty easy to see that Coachella’s kind of…well…blah, but there still are a ton of good bands playing that I’m kind of bummed to being missing out on…Battles, Aphex Twin, The Breeders, Portishead, Kraftwerk and Autolux. Although I have seen a few of those bands before, and will be seeing The Breeders on their own tour and presumably Portishead, since they have a new record coming out.

- Also: Have a happy Earth Day 2008! Do something positive. -

*(Graphics courtesy of coachella.com).

So I haven’t posted in a few days. Some interesting news has been reported in the past couple days, namely this years annual Lollapalooza lineup. In case you haven’t heard, a few years ago Lollapalooza changed from a touring festival to an annual one held in Chicago’s Grant Park. It takes place from August 1-3 this year.

The lineup this year looks pretty good to me, and features a lot of alternative, guitar bands.  Here are a sampling of the bands playing this year that I’d like to see…

Radiohead, Rage Against The Machine, Nine Inch Nails, Wilco, The Raconteurs, Gnarls Barkley, Broken Social Scene, Cat Power, Explosions In The Sky, Battles, The Black Keys and a rare festival appearance from Witchcraft.

Just based on those bands alone I’d be up for going. The early bird tickets have sold out, but at $195, the current ticket prices are dramatically less then Coachella at almost $300. Lollapalooza ticket prices also have no service charges. Although the lineup looks good, I have to see if a trip to Chicago at the beginning of August will work out for me.

So MacRock 2008 is coming up. And while I don’t think I will be attending, just wanted to note that there are a few bands I’d want to check out. If you haven’t heard of MacRock here is some more info…

MacRock Festival 2008

Some of the notable bands that have played in the past…

An Albatross, Animal Collective, The Appleseed Cast, Avail, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Black Mountain, Bobby Bare Jr., Converge, Darkest Hour, Dillinger Escape Plan, The Dismemberment Plan, Elliott Smith, The Faint, Fin Fang Foom, Fugazi, Hot Water Music, Magnolia Electric Co., Man Man, Matt Pond PA, Mastodon, Medications, Mewithoutyou, Owen, Prefuse 73, Q and not U, The Walkmen, Wolf Eyes, and The Wrens.

 
I figured I’d do a post about South by Southwest just because it has been mentioned so much. I didn’t get to go but instead of attempting to do some extended coverage from the internet, I figured I’d list off the bands I’d like to see if I had gone. One of my friends attended SXSW and he probably saw some of these bands…

-Kinski

-Blonde Redhead

-Rob Crow

-F**ked Up

-The Breeders

-Pissed Jeans

And a bunch more I’m forgetting.  Maybe next year…

So I finally found a music festival I’d be interested in attending. The name’s a little stupid…and its got a bunch of corporate sponsors but its also got a pretty good lineup of bands compared to the other festivals. It is the, Sasquatch Music Festival, May 24-26, in Washington State, at the Gorge amphitheater.

The lineup includes…The Cure, REM, The Breeders, The Flaming Lips, Mars Volta, Mike Patton, Steven Malkmus and The Jicks, Modest Mouse, Kinski, Built To Spill and a ton of others.

Sasquatch Festival Website

So it’s gearing up to be Music Festival Season in the US again. What this means, is if you’re a hardcore music fan you have to decide, (assuming you aren’t rich) which festival you are going to attend, if any at all. Having been to both Coachella and Bonnaroo I can attest to it being a completely kick ass time. The lineups when I went, (Coachella 2006 and Bonnaroo 2007) were exceptional, and a lot of the bands playing complemented each other in a certain way. I have come across many threads online of seasoned festival goers remarking that Bonnaroo 2007 was one of the best festivals they ever attended. After looking at some of the lineups for some of the 2008 incarnations of these festivals, things seem a little different…

Before I rant about that…I thought I’d try to understand this whole seemingly recent, (for the US) music festival trend/phenomenon. First off, Europe has had huge, annual music festivals since the late 60’s and early 70’s. Some of these include the Reading Festival in England, which is one of the biggest, (around 100,000 people) and others like the Roskilde Festival in Denmark (around 80,000). There are a slew of others…so many I couldn’t possibly name them all here, but most major European countries play host to an average of 5 to 10 festivals on a yearly basis. It seems that besides a few random occurrences such as Woodstock and a few others, music festivals were not very common in the United States, especially annual ones.

This all changed after the Coachella Music & Arts Festival debuted in April, 1999 in the Indio, California desert…well not exactly… The first Coachella was a decidedly alternative festival, which featured Beck as a headliner on the first day, and Rage Against The Machine headlining the 2nd day. Other bands such as Tool, Pavement, At The Drive In, Cornelius, Modest Mouse, Spirtualized, and many others rounded out an extremely great lineup. Tickets for the festival were priced at $50 per day or $90 for both days. Around 10,000 people showed up each day, dealt with the pretty intense heat, (assisted by promoter Goldenvoice supplying everyone with as many free water bottles as they needed) and enjoyed themselves. This is a far cry from what the festival would become years later.

Following the 2002 edition of Coachella its reputation and number of attendees continued to grow…so much so that in 2004, the festival experienced its first sell out, (50,000 tickets sold for each day). This was due in part to the Pixies reunion and Radiohead as headliners. The 2007 edition of the festival saw 100,000 attendees present for Rage Against The Machine’s reunion set. Admission costs continued to increase as well. Single day passes for 2008 are $90 and 3-day passes are $269, (not including service charges).

After such success, many other promoters started to take notice. A lot of other annual festivals started to spring up all over the US and continue to do so. A few others established themselves with their own identity and vibe, such as Bonnaroo in rural Manchester, TN. Bonnaroo featured everything from alternative rock, to folk singers with acoustic guitars, to jam bands who play all electronic instruments (STS9). Concerning Bonnaroo’s atmosphere; the festival prided itself on being environmentally friendly, allowing taping of any artist, having local art, musicians and even microbreweries represented at the festival. In sharp contrast, several other events were obviously just pure attempts at corporate money-making fests, (such as the Virgin Festival in Baltimore, MD and Vegoose in Las Vegas, NV) and don’t really represent any sort of culture or strive for higher ideals or even an individual style. These totally corporate driven festivals charge very high prices for water and food and typically book the most mainstream/safe bands, to guarantee that the organizers will make a pretty penny.

It recent years; some of the originators are starting to become guilty of the same decisions many of their extremely corporate competitors continue to make. Coachella, for example, (a pretty much decidedly alternative festival) have booked generic pop acts such as Madonna and other heavily mainstream acts as headliners in an attempt to draw more people. As a result, many cult bands and acts who have given the festival its good reputation are relegated to smaller stages and shorter set times. This was seen as a slap in the face to most fans of the festival.

Bonnaroo’s lineup this year has Pearl Jam and Metallica as headliners as well as Kanye West. I’m not trying to insult fans of these artists, but compared to what Bonnaroo fans have come to expect this isn’t really their style. As much as the organizers say in press releases and articles that they are trying to “be more diverse” it is hard not to feel like they are just trying to make more money (ticket prices for this years festival are significantly more than years past and capacity has been increased to 130,000 people).

To further frustrate hardcore festival goers, is the fact that many of the bands booked on one festival, (usually Coachella) play ALL of the remaining festivals, making the lineups and the experience almost identical. As is the case this year with, most notably, Jack Johnson headlining Coachella, Bonnaroo AND the new All Points West Festival!!

I’m happy with my past 2 festival experiences, but this year, due to cost, and in my opinion - crappy lineups, I dont think I will be attending any. The way things are going this year doesn’t look good for the future of American music festivals. They’re just getting too bloated. I haven’t lost hope yet though, there is always next year…