Pitchfork Music Festival 2012 – Friday
A series of foreboding thunderstorms cleared just in time for the kickoff to day one of the 2012 Pitchfork Music Festival, which featured performances from Feist, Dirty Projectors, Japandroids, Olivia Tremor Control and more. Read on for plenty of photos and set reviews.
San Francisco’s Lower Dens started things off at the Red Stage with a set of restrained but propulsive post-punk tunes. Their sound was a haze of guitars and keyboards punctuated with vocals and a driving krautrock rhythm section. The style was all there, but the songs began to blend together by the halfway point. To be fair though, that could be almost entirely a result of my limited familiarity with their catalog. Still an enjoyable introduction to the weekend.
Veteran Elephant 6 psych rockers Olivia Tremor Control delivered the day’s first main stage set. Despite being beset with some unfortunate sound issues (Will Hart’s vocals were mostly inaudible and instruments seemed to occasionally drop out of the mix entirely), OTC enthusiastically played a set of fan favorites from Dusk at Cubist Castle, Black Foliage Animation Music and beyond. They eschewed some of their more experimental tendencies (no more “Green Typewriters” suite) in favor of their purest pop songs, including “Jumping Fences,” “The Opera House” and “A Peculiar Noise Called ‘Train Director.'” Shaky mixing or the occasional moment of sloppiness couldn’t bring the band down. It was almost befitting to their ramshackle charm. 
The rains began to close in again as Tim Hecker took the stage over at Blue. He would be the single Friday act for which inclement weather was less a frustration and more an appropriate mood-setter. Hecker conjured up a storm of his own with waves of ambient noise and crushing swells of bass. The results were moments of transcendent earth-shaking brilliance. Hecker is pretty much the ultimate ‘man with a laptop’ act though, and hence there was little to see. That, in combination with sound-bleed from the A$AP Rocky set across the field during quieter moments, led to a distracted and talkative crowd that ruined the music’s mystique after a while. Atmospheric noise and drone artists like Hecker are tailor-made for small, dark venues much more so than outdoor festivals.
One of Friday’s biggest draws was surely Vancouver garage rockers Japandroids, who managed to pack an unfathomable number of people around the Blue stage. In direct contrast to Hecker, Japandroids are pretty much the ultimate summer festival band. The guitar and drums duo of Brian King and David Prowse tore through cuts from this year’s Celebration Rock and 2009’s Post-Nothing with an unstoppable energy as the sun finally re-emerged. Japandroids are as no-nonsense as a rock band can come, both in their sound and their approach to live shows. “We only have 45 minutes, so I’m not gonna talk after this,” King told us, in an effort to cram in as many songs as possible. The set included the highlights from both records, inspiring enthusiastic fist-pumping shout-alongs from start to finish. The band is clearly popular enough at this point to have played one of the two larger stages across the field, but the packed and sweaty atmosphere of Blue felt more appropriate. It was the closest approximation to the band’s much-heralded club shows, and sufficiently proved that they’re earning their reputation as a stellar live act.
Still riding the buzz of last week’s release of the (rightly) well-received Swing Lo Magellan, Dirty Projectors headlined the Red stage with a seriously impressive set. The Projectors deal in complexity, with songs which are almost impossibly intricate in both instrumental and vocal arrangement. Their ability to pitch-perfectly reproduce each one on stage, complete with slight but noticeable new twists and turns, is stunning. Swing Lo Magellan was well-represented in the setlist, but the band didn’t ignore 2009’s much-beloved Bitte Orca either. “Useful Chamber” remains a highlight of their live show, wherein the band takes an already intense album track and tears into its explosive loud sections like the noise-rockers you never knew they could be. Other highlights included Magellan‘s “Gun Has No Trigger” and “The Socialites,” the latter of which saw guitarist/vocalist Amber Coffman temporarily assuming band leader position from frontman Dave Longstreth. Coffman and bandmate Haley Dekle also drew stunned applause from the crowd for their rapidly alternating vocal harmonies on “Beautiful Mother,” from the Projectors’ 2010 EP with Björk. Longstreth and Coffman’s complex and melodious guitar work was equally striking. The band’s heady but upbeat art-pop was a perfect fit for Friday evening.
I had my doubts about Canadian songstress Leslie Feist as a Friday night headliner, but her set ended up being a pleasant surprise. Complete with a backing band including a second guitarist, keyboardist, drummer and a trio of backup vocalists, Feist breathed new life and energy into her oft-restrained album cuts. The set drew heavily from last year’s Metals, including opener “The Bad In Each Other” and “Comfort Me,” which started off slow but built to a stomping climax and an audience singalong. The crowd’s “na-na-na” chants “made our arena rock dreams come true,” Feist told us. In general, the songs came across as more muscular than their album counterparts, including a guitar heavy(er) “My Moon My Man” from The Reminder. Feist herself was in high spirits, with a playful and confident stage presence which made the set all the more enjoyable. An unexpectedly strong finish for day one.
