We entered Saturday with renewed spirits. We’d dried off and so had the world; nothing but blue skies and slightly less health-endangering heats awaited us. The plan was to get to Pitchfork at around 1 p.m. and catch White Lung and Pissed Jeans for a notably punk afternoon, but underestimating both Chicago traffic and the lunch rush threw us off and we arrived too late to do either. Instead we headed over towards the blue stage, our consistently shady bastion, to see Julia Holter.
My thoughts on Holter have changed slightly since I reviewed Ekstasis last year—her fleshed out live sound, featuring Holter on keyboard, with a drummer, cellist and other backing musicians– sounded lovely, but the songs just didn’t click with me in the way they had before. Maybe it was just the atmosphere. We were all tired and hot, and Julia and the crowd seemed equally unenthused about each other—there just wasn’t that spark. Aside from a take on the still infinitely ear-worming “Four Gardens,” the set passed without note, and we all clapped politely as she left.
I stuck around for Parquet Courts while others opted out for Phosphorescent and …And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, a risky gamble for a buzz band I’d never actually heard before. The group looked a bit nervous onstage as the crowd was a bit bigger than they’d likely seen before, but they played exceptionally well. Within moments of starting, the grounds were whipped up into a frenzy, and the band grounded through cut after cut of vaguely hardcore shout-a-longs. They closed with “Stoned and Starving,” an extended eight minute jam bookended by short verses that felt more like an excuse to rock out that anything else. And you know what? They could’ve doubled that length and I still would’ve eaten it up. Parquet Courts definitely gained a fan in me that hot afternoon.
Merchandise were great much in the same vein. I’d sort of lost interest in the group in the releases since their debut EP as they slowly grew into a more propulsive and goth take on The Smiths, but their live incarnation, featuring a drummer in place of their in-studio drum machine, has warranted a reconsideration. They focused predominantly on their later material (I considered shouting for “It’s a Man’s World,” but that would have been cheeky of me) ripping through “Time,” “Anxiety’s Door,” “Become Who You Are,” “I Locked the Door” and a few others I wasn’t familiar with. The band sounded wonderful, churning through their 80’s anthems with sufficient glam charm, but the crowd didn’t seem to come around until the ten minute “Become Who You Are,” despite lead singer Carson Cox’s frequent attempts to get everyone riled. The set came with a happy ending, though, and even if the crossbred indie/hardcore crowd wasn’t quite sure what to make of Merchandise I certainly fell in love all over again.
We got some food and then made our way over to the red stage for Swans’ set, my personally most anticipated set of the weekend. It was blistering hot outside and the sun was still shining full blast, but the band looked undeterred as they set up their own instruments in suits and thick button downs. I wasn’t worried how the band would perform; they were veterans, after all, and Swans in various incarnations had been abusing audiences since the early 80’s. I was, however, worried about how a festival audience would receive an uncompromising group like Swans—they don’t exactly cater to the average person’s tastes—but the crowd was remarkably accepting. When Michael Gira came out and began to noodle out the extended droning guitar intro for “To Be Kind,” without saying a word to the audience, they acquiesced silently. When, with a swing of his leg, Gira kicked the song into overdrive and into pummeling, almost painful volumes, a few left, but most stayed.
By the time the band finally closed out the song (I like to think that Gira laughed quietly every time the crunching guitars stopped and people began to clap, only to be silenced by another megaton explosion of noise), the naysayers had seen all they needed to, and fled to the Green Stage to wait it out for The Breeders and Belle & Sebastian. After the song, Gira greeted his remaining cult devoted with “Hello, Forkheads.”
The people that stayed were dedicated to wait out the onslaught. People even swayed and danced to the mutant groove of “Oxygen,” a full band take on the acoustic Gira song that lent one of its lines to the title of 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to Heaven. The band closed with a slightly hemmed take on “The Seer,” which, during its 20 minute running time, had people again clapping with mounting enthusiasm every time the music lulled. “The Seer” segued into “Toussaint Louverture Song,” which saw Gira howling the title with a slight French accent while flailing his arms like a grotesque mix of Mozart and Isabelle Adjani in “The Possession.” Afterwards, the whole band gathered together, held hands and bowed over and over again to growing whoops and applause. If anyone deserved a send-off like that, it was Gira and his gang—they had by and far the best set of the entire weekend.
I wandered over to the Green Stage to watch a bit of the Breeders. I wasn’t as enthused as everyone else seemed to be (my nostalgia heyday was the early 2000’s, hearing Last Splash in full wasn’t exactly on my bucket list). Kim Deal and company sounded good, but after hearing “Cannonball,” the one song we all agreed was on our bucket list, we decided to take a short break and bound around the festival grounds and experience all the peripheral activities. I grabbed a Swans shirt and flittered around the Chirp Record Fair, chatting up the fine people from Don Giovanni records about Waxahatchee, the presumed highlight of my Sunday. I listened to a few cassettes here and there and made promises about buying things the next day when a trek home through a rainy apocalypse wasn’t so fresh in my mind. As always, I was impressed with the comprehensiveness of the vendors and their excitement for their products. I left wondering how many things I could carry home the next day.
Afterwards we settled back on the Green Stage to secure good spots for Belle & Sebastian. Solange played across the field at the Red Stage in the interim. I didn’t catch much of her set, but a pretty gorgeous take on Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness is the Move” stuck out as a highlight. She only played forty minutes or so, but it looked like a fun time.
Belle & Sebastian dug deep and opened with theinstrumental “Judy is a Dick Slap” from the “Legal Man” single and then plunged straight into “I’m a Cuckoo,” and the crowd immediately ate it up. They played material from virtually all of their studio albums, with understandable bias in favor of If You’re Feeling Sinister (and with understandable bias against Write About Love). The band was wonderfully inclusive, especially considering the majority of their output reeks of shy bookishness. They pulled a volunteer on stage to do the spoken word bit of “Dirty Dream #2” (who may or may not have been my girlfriend) and later invited a plethora of people (predominantly women who wouldn’t have looked out of place living in any of the band’s songs) on stage to dance for “Legal Man” and “The Boy with the Arab Strap.”
I was surprised both by how large the band was and by how nuanced they sounded—I guess I’d always known how layered Belle & Sebastian songs were, but to see 10 plus people on stage producing such delicate and controlled music was sort of a revelation. The band came out after “Judy and the Dream of Horses” to do a quick encore of “Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying.” Despite the rain everybody danced and sang along to the melancholic pop gem, and I like to think the crowd trudged home that night with smiles on their faces.
The night wasn’t over for me, though. A friend and I wandered out to the Marshstepper/Pharmakon/Wolf Eyes show at the Bottom Lounge afterwards to chase all the tweepop with some power electronics (for the uninformed, a genre of music marked by “screeching waves of feedback, analogue synthesizers making sub-bass pulses or high frequency squealing sounds, and screamed, distorted vocals”). Marshstepper was the only act I was unfamiliar with, and his set was appropriately jarring. A smoke machine in overdrive flooded the room with miasma and red lights lent the foggy scene an eerie edge.
The music was impossibly loud and atonal, to the point I occasionally felt like I was going puke. People danced, but most stood dead still and observed with reverence. I couldn’t see until about halfway through the show when the crowd parted, but in front of the stage there was a performance art aspect to the set, as two men, both nearly naked, writhed on the floor and paid reverence to a single shining lamp. It was incredibly bizarre, but in the setting it felt absolutely appropriate.
Pharmakon, a recent crossover darling between the more esoteric branches of the avant-garde crowd and the more conventional indie scene, walked out silently about half an hour after Marshstepper finished and began to fiddle with her soundboard. In her early 20s, blonde and conventionally beautiful, Margaret Chardiet doesn’t look like the kind of person who makes the music she does.
Her set was less abrasive than Marshstepper’s, focusing more on atmosphere than pure violence, but not by much; a highlight moment saw her pounding on a piece of sheet metal with microphones attached, looping the noise, and then scratching the metal again until it all washed together until it formed a pulsing wave of noise. And every once in a while she would storm away from her soundboard and scream into a microphone, her voice terrifying and destructive even without the amplification. She closed with “Crawling on Bruised Knees,” the standout track of her recent debut and the closest thing she has to a single. A pulsing, industrial beat carried the song, interspersed occasionally by bass thumps and Chardiet’s heavily altered vocals—and yet it was the gentlest thing I heard all night. She left the stage without saying anything, and shortly afterwards we left the Bottom Lounge, our ears ringing and our minds racing.
Favorite Set of the Day: Either Swans or Pharmakon, with Belle & Sebastian as a close second.
Least Favorite: Julia Holter
