Now that you’ve read our interviews with G-Side and Chrissy Murderbot with MC Zulu, checked out our aftershow reviews and looked through our photo albums, we present for you our final recap of Pitchfork Festival 2011. On a hot weekend full of fun and special sets, these five were our favorites. Enjoy.
Gang Gang Dance
Oh shit, Gang Gang. Going into this set, I had a few concerns about how the act would translate live. Considering the multiplicitous elements the band invoked in each track, the ridiculous and bizarre time signatures they often employed, Lizzi Bougatsos’ siren-like vocal work, the gigantic outdoor venue they were working with, etc., it would have been easy for any these things to ruin the entire show. Somewhat shockingly everything went smoothly, more smoothly than I could have ever pictured it going with the five piece picking through a dozen instruments, a thousand different effects pedals, and genres that have not and possibly will never be properly defined. Lizzi was charming as ever, killing it on vocals and percussion and endeavoring a five minute crowd surfing session while the rest of the band ran through an instrumental number, while the rest of the assemble, keyboardist Brian Degraw and guitarist Josh Diamond in particular, were on point to a degree that was studio-worthy, exemplified by their tearing through the opening to ‘Glass Jar’ unfazed while the sound guys sorted out an issue with Lizzi’s mic. Though the crowd was oddly pensive at first—the same jerks who were climbing over people to get to the front just stood there while very danceable music was being blasted into their faces—a set heavy in cuts off their recent album Eye Contact—which had just received “Best New Music” designation from the fucking webzine putting on the festival, by the way; really, why was everybody acting so strange? Was it the heat?—eventually loosened everyone up, and the largest, weirdest dance party the weekend begat was able to commence on my favorite set of the afternoon.
G-Side
Heading into Pitchfork, G-Side were probably the least identifiable commodity for most fest-goers, and thus I worried how my beloved Alabama-bred two-piece would be received by the dainty, mostly white masses they were performing to; credit to the crowds for being more engaged than I had realistically expected them to be, though to be fair G-Side made it damn near impossible not to be entertained. Swaggering across the stage like they own the place, ST 2 Lettaz and Yung Clova quickly set the mood from curious to ecstatic as they rushed through their heady Southern hip hop in the sweltering Chicago heat. Mixing equal parts of their last two releases, this year’s THE ONE…COHESIVE and 2009′s Huntsville International, G-Side stepped swiftly back and forth between their smart flow and the gangsterisms that dirty South is known for, coming out to ‘Y U Mad’ and its minute long piano solo and tongue-twisting line “It’s so complicated you can’t even compliment it when I refuse to compromise my composition to coincide with whatever the common trend is”, then subsequently leading a chant of “We get money” during the chorus of ‘Jones’ and teaching the crowd how to “lean to the left” during ‘I’m Sorry’. Their most memorable moment, though, was closing with the Beach House sampling track ‘How Far’. “How many of y’all like Beach House?” ST queried the audience, to raucous applause. “Love that shit.” It’s likely most who watched this set walked away thinking the same thing about these guys.
TV on the Radio
It’s been a bittersweet year for TV on the Radio. They broke their first radio single from their most mainstream-ready album and started headlining festivals, only to lose bassist Gerard Smith to lung cancer last month. You wouldn’t know they were affected by any of it, though, taking the stage as coolly as ever. But then Tunde exploded with emotion, and seemed frustrated with having to confine himself to the stage. As usual, the high point of the set was ‘Wolf Like Me’, but they speckled in a few other rarities by inviting Shabazz Palaces to join them for ‘A Method’ and turning in a fantastic rendition of Fugazi’s ‘Waiting Room’.
James Blake
After besetting myself to a thoroughly exhausting and kinetically challenging day at the Blue stage, going from tUnE-yArDs to Curren$y to Das Racist consecutively, it was nice to close out a Friday of brash personalities with James Blake’s sleepy, bluesy dubstep. Putting his boyish charm fully on display—he giggled every time Neko Case’s music wafted over from the Red Stage, and blushed sincerely and bashfully upon every shout of “We love you James!” and “I want to have your babies!”, which came more often the more embarrassed he got—the 21-year-old towed the crowd through his introverted subconscious, opening with a troika of ‘Unluck’, ‘I Never Learnt To Share’, and ‘Give Me My Month’ and sucking the air out of his breathless, enraptured audience with his soulful warble and heart-stopping bass. Though he focused almost exclusively on his cloistered self-titled rather than the more animated (and perhaps more fest-worthy) material from his EPs, he did break towards the tail-end of his set with extended renditions of ‘CMYK’ and ‘Klavierwerke’ before closing with CD single ‘The Wilhelm Scream’, all of which were met with boisterous approval by the crowd. Overall, a pretty good way to close out the fest’s first day.
OFWGKTA
Apparently I’m a ‘fa***t, writing a fa***t-ass review for a fa***ot-ass blog’, but whatever. The show was tight. Fuck Tyler.
And kudos for opening with Marley’s ‘One Love’, stage-diving with a cast, and bringing cupcakes to your ‘protesters’. That was cute. Wolf Gang.
Paul Bulow and Brian Riewer
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