Pitchfork Music Festival 2012 – Sunday
The final day of Pitchfork Fest 2012 brought with it clear skies, hot temperatures and a rock-heavy lineup to close things off with a bang. Click on to check out the final round of reviews and photos, including Vampire Weekend, Beach House, Ty Segall, Real Estate and more.
Sunday’s first Green stage set was from the inscrutable Dirty Beaches, whose sound is a singular lo-fi combination of droning noise, ghostly vocals and fifties rockabilly. Mastermind Alex Hungtai operated a sampler and drum machine under his heavily distorted, otherworldly croon, and was joined by a guitarist casting shards of noise across the field. The mix was a strangely captivating experience which pulled off the rare feat of effectively translating a lo-fi project to the stage.
After a brief interlude to catch a few scrappy songs and a dose of really weird stage presence from Milk Music, I ventured back to Green to catch Danish punks Iceage. When they weren’t being delayed by recurring amp issues, the quartet delivered on the promise of their nihilistic debut LP with clanging, noisy tunes which inspired a small but passionate mosh pit. Guitarist/vocalist Elias Bender Rønnenfelt wore the role of disaffected punk frontman well, radiating with frustration and a general disagreeability. It was everything one has come to expect from an Iceage show.
Tour-mates/friends/garage rock compatriots Thee Oh Sees and Ty Segall suffered an unfortunate timing conflict, with the former’s 2:50 set on Blue overlapping the latter’s 3:20 slot on Red. I opted to catch a few songs from Thee Oh Sees’ joyously raucous set before heading over to Segall. The band’s upbeat songs were laden with guitar and vocal hooks, and they appeared to have just as much fun playing them as the crowd did jumping around to them.
Segall was joined on stage by a full backing band (a second guitarist, bassist and drummer), and the group immediately and energetically began tearing into the man’s ever-expanding discography. The set was predictably heavy on noisy material from and in the spirit of Segall’s latest release, Slaughterhouse. The songs were fast paced and laden with fuzz, feedback and shredding guitar solos. It was pure rock and roll bombast, and it sounded perfect in the bright Sunday afternoon sun. The band was tight and Segall himself in high spirits, encouraging plenty of audience participation and crowd surfing all the way back to the sound booth during an instrumental. Hell, he even managed to get a crowd of hipsters to join in with fist pumping “Oi!”s for a surprisingly great AC/DC cover (“Dirty Deeds Done Dirty Cheap,” in case you were wondering). One of the day’s finest and most fun sets for sure.
After strolling to Blue and hanging around long enough to see noise-rockers The Men tear through “Turn It Around,” it was back to Green for a confident, laid back set from Jersey’s Real Estate. A hot summer afternoon seems the inspiration for much of Real Estate’s breezy, guitar-driven catalog, and thus it was the perfect setting for soaking it in. The set opened with the melancholy “Green Aisles” and ventured through the highlights of last year’s Days, including the hooky “oh-oh-oh”s of “It’s Real.” After an early set on the Red stage in 2010, Real Estate rightfully graduated to a later afternoon slot on the main stage this year. They’ve made great strides as songwriters and especially as a live band in those two years. Their keys, rhythm section and jangly interlocking guitar harmonies sounded tighter and more polished than ever, but their relaxed stage presence made it all look easy.
A much different but equally precision driven band, Chavez, took the stage at Red following Real Estate. In spite of having played only a handful of shows since going on hiatus in the nineties, Chavez immediately proved that they’ve lost none of their edge. Their angular dual-guitar/bass/drums attack came out roaring with cuts from 1995’s Gone Glimmering and 96’s Ride the Fader. The band was one of few reunion-type acts at this year’s festival, but played their songs with a ‘written last month’ rather than a ‘written two decades ago’ urgency. Even amidst the atmosphere of a mostly bored looking crowd (many of whom were only there to secure a spot for Beach House), Chavez delivered a tuned-in, energetic set. Here’s to hoping they come through on those rumors of a new record.
Post-Chavez, I camped out at Red for a much-anticipated 7:25 Beach House set. From afar I caught hip-hop producer Araabmuzik deliver a blistering electronic set on the main stage. Araabmuzik does something somewhat remarkable by singlehandedly creating high BPM dance music without the help of programmed loops. He triggers samples and taps out every drum pattern by hand with inhuman speed and perfect timing. The set’s dubstep-tinged sound contained little variation, but the technique was unstoppable and the crowd didn’t seem to mind. The only break from the dance barrage came toward the end of the timeslot, when seventeen-year-old Chicago rapper Chief Keef and associates appeared to perform the now-ubiquitous “I Don’t Like.” Araabmuzik himself didn’t appear to be doing anything other than hanging back awkwardly during the performance, making it a weird finish to his set, but the crowd went wild regardless.
The day finally began to cool down as one of the weekend’s largest crowds gathered at Red for Beach House. The hype surrounding the dream-pop duo has built steadily from album to album, but seems to have reached a fever pitch with this year’s universally lauded Bloom. It’s a rightfully earned hype though, proven by their gorgeous set on Sunday night. Amidst glowing lights and fog machines, the core duo of keyboardist/vocalist Victoria Legrand and guitarist Alex Scally rendered beautiful music that was easy to get lost in. Delayed, reverb-y guitar melodies and ethereally textured keys characterize their sound. They’re also joined by a live drummer this tour, who makes the back catalog cuts especially sound livelier and more immediate. The setlist was heavy on Bloom and Teen Dream, but also included a stunning slow-motion take on Devotion’s “Gila.” The set’s most arresting moment (and one of my favorites of the weekend) came toward the end of set-closer “Irene,” as Legrand’s mantra-like repetition of “it’s a strange paradise” intensified among the pounding drums and Scally’s high on the neck guitar vamping. A climactic and surprisingly loud finish to a restrained but powerful set.
Sunday headliners Vampire Weekend would close out the festival with a fun and danceable indie pop set that was surprisingly light on new material. Contra was released well over two years ago, and it’s been roughly a year and a half since the band’s last tour. Still, they showed few signs of their time off as a live band taking any toll. Tight renditions of nearly every song from Contra and their self-titled 2008 debut sounded great and were rapturously received by an enthusiastic crowd. Frontman Ezra Koenig made mention of the band’s forthcoming new LP, but only a single unreleased song was a part of the setlist. Animal Collective, another critical darling band with a much-anticipated new record due out in the near future, chose to headline Friday of last year’s festival with a set almost entirely comprised of new material. Vampire Weekend took the safer route of sticking mostly to the songs people already know and love, but I certainly can’t fault them for it. I was despondent upon learning that they were to play in a headlining spot previously occupied by the likes of Pavement and The Flaming Lips, but I have to say that I still left feeling satisfied. Percussive, upbeat tunes like “Oxford Comma” and “California English” translated well to a festival crowd, and the band’s energy and general charisma were infectious. “I Think Ur a Contra” and a few other slower-paced songs meandered slightly, but not enough to kill the momentum. A four song encore concluded with probably my favorite Vampire Weekend song: “Walcott.” Blame it on the pseudo-hometown connection for me (the song concerns getting the hell out of Cape Cod), but it felt like the perfect way to finish this year’s festival.
So yeah, this brings Everybody Talking’s Pitchfork 2012 coverage to an end. So much for rundowns being posted daily (one forgets how incredibly tiring a music festival can be), but all the better for more thorough discussion of each set. The festival was an absolute blast, and I hope these write-ups and photos conveyed at least a bit of the magic to you. Until next year, Chicago!