Pitchfork Festival review!

Pitchfork Music Festival
Union Park, Chicago
Friday, July 13 – Sunday, July 15, 2007

Last year the second Pitchfork Music Festival (the 2005 Intonation Festival was curated by pitchforkmedia.com and booked by the same promoter, so technically it was the first Pitchfork Fest) made the jump from one of the also-rans of Chicago’s summer fests to one of its biggest players. This summer, pitchforkmedia.com and promoter At Pluto tried to seize the momentum gained in only two years and push the weekend concert into a whole different league. Did they succeed?

Yes. First, adding a Friday night schedule made Pitchfork Fest a true weekend-long celebration. And by selling out all three days, they proved there’s more than enough room for both Pitchfork Festival and Lollapalooza. Ironically, though, for many music fans Pitchfork Fest has become the “alternative” to Lolla, the festival that made alternative cool. Of course, as far as sheer size, there is no comparison: Lollapalooza draws 60,000 people per day to its gigantic spread at Grant Park while Pitchfork brought in 17,000 daily (13,000 Friday night) to the much more confined Union Park.

But Pitchfork doesn’t seem concerned with being the biggest, only the best, and arguments could be made both ways about that. But now’s not the time for that, right? You want to know what happened, and we’re here to provide some of the highlights, lowlights, and, er, flashlights of the 2007 Pitchfork Music Festival.

OVERRATED: Slint. To quote Eric Cartman: “What’s the big fuckin’ deal?” They contributed to the construction of a genre, post rock. Got it. Acclaimed, modern-day, acclaimed bands like Pelican, Russian Circles, Explosions In The Sky, and Mono all owe a litte of their existence to them. Understood. Does that make Spiderland, the 1991 album they performed in its entirety Friday, one of “the best albums ever” as Tim Tuten, Hideout co-owner and part-time Pitchfork stage announcer, called it before the band took the stage? Hardly, and the Kentucky group’s Pitchfork set only proved how the hype surrounding the album has, over time, made us forget its true worth. If At Pluto and Pitchfork wanted the first night to get off to a bang they fired a blank with Slint, whose sluggish material and lethargic stage presence convinced about half the crowd to go stake their spots at the Aluminum stage for GZA. And why did Slint need setlists taped to the stage to play one of their two albums in chronological order?

UNDERRATED: Heavy metal. There were definitely some blank hipster faces when Mastodon, the festival’s only metal band, played early Saturday evening on the Connector Stage, but the overall response for the Atlanta quartet was surprisingly strong. Some devil horns appeared during “Crystal Skull,” air guitars were pulled out, many crowd members knew the words to “Blood And Thunder,” and the Pitchforkers even knew how to mosh. More importantly, Mastodon sounded far better than previous Chicago stops — certainly good enough for promoters to consider booking one or two similar heavy acts next summer.

SAVIORS: Friday’s highly touted “classic albums night” would have ended disappointingly if not for Sonic Youth. Though GZA at least brought some energy after Slint’s lullaby session, the Wu-Tang rapper and his cast of anonymous (minus Cappadonna) hype men hardly did justice to Liquid Swords with ramshackle renditions of the songs. While Spiderland seemed like a chore for Slint, and Liquid Swords appeared nothing more than an excuse for GZA to promote a new Wu-Tang record that will never come out, Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Steve Shelley, and Lee Ranaldo actually enjoyed themselves. The giant roar that followed the band’s introduction and the animated applause after classics like opener “Teen Age Riot” and “Eric’s Trip” proved whom vast majority of Friday’s crowd was there to see. Sonic Youth responded with genuine enthusiasm (Moore still plays with the energy of a 16-year-old) that proved to be Friday’s saving grace.

WHAT THE F!@#: A fellow scribe covering Pitchfork shared an interesting theory with IE regarding the puzzling decision to book Yoko Ono as Saturday night’s headliner. He suggested she was booked in that particular slot because A) people would be curious enough to stick around all the way until she went on at 9 p.m. but B) she would be bad enough to clear everyone out quickly, making the security and cleanup crew’s jobs much easier. Sounds far fetched until you consider the results. Her set got off to a tedious start with an already skeptical crowd when the first 15 minutes were devoted to a mini-film played over the big screens describing Ono’s Onochord, her own Morse Code designed to say “I Love You” with a flashlight (small flashlights were passed out in the crowd as well). The time it took to show clips from her in Tokyo, at the Venice Film Festival, and in Munich holding press conferences to direct people how to flash once for “I,” twice for “love,” and three times for “you” seemed better spent on Ono’s performance. That is, until we found out what an Ono performance was. Starting with a song she wrote two days ago, her signature shaky, quivering, primal “singing” style fell somewhere between orgasm and exorcism and literally had festival-goers shaking off their blankets, packing their things, and flocking for the gate 35 seconds in. At times the whole thing was so surreal and borderline comedy-ish, you half expected her to end each song with “Rock over London/rock on Chicago.” Though her reputation says she doesn’t care, you couldn’t help but feel bad for Ono as the mass exodus began (the Ashland El platform was jam packed at 9:40) and those who stayed offered only drunken, sarcastic cheers. But on the other hand, why even put Ono in the position? Her adventurous, extreme avant garde certainly had a place in a festival as genre-spanning as Pitchfork, but that place wasn’t headlining Saturday night.

WORTHWHILE: Battles played the Connector Stage Saturday afternoon, and were one of the weekend’s most interesting acts. Live instrument/voice looping, excessive electronic twiddling, and live instrumentation were common occurrences throughout Pitchfork, but nobody did it as well as Battles, whose ranks include Tomahawk/ex-Helmet drummer John Stanier and ex-Don Caballero guitarist Ian Williams. Stanier did nothing flashy behind his kit, but his beat-keeping was locked down and was the foundation for Williams and multi-instrumentalists Dave Konopka and Tyondai Braxton’s angular electro math rock . . . Deerhunter was an engaging and noisy kick off to Sunday. Fronted by lanky, skeletal (he suffers from Marfan syndrome) vocalist Bradford Cox (who wore a sparkly gold dress and dangled finger puppets in his bandmates’ faces), Deerhunter also had an addiction to noisemaking gadgets, but when they got past the ambient intros and distorted loops like on “Hazel St.” and “Strange Lights,” they were a very good brass-tacks punk band.

FRUSTRATING: Technical difficulties. Though the only major incident was early Sunday afternoon when the PA shut off during The Ponys’ set, leaving the Chicago band playing through just their amps most of their first three songs (frontman Jared Gummere continued to struggle with his guitar‘s effects though the rest of the set) sound problems plagued the weekend. GZA’s mic cut in and out toward the end of his set Friday night; static wrinkled part of Iron & Wine’s slot Saturday, though the breeze was enough to carry away Sam Beam and co’s hush folk; Cat Power apologized for “sound problems” after her first song and continued to show frustration after; and Mastodon’s Brent Hinds was one of many guitarists whose pedal boards worked off and on . . . Aware we had ignored the Balance Stage (the third stage, tucked away at the end of Washington Blvd.) all Saturday, we tried to make amends Sunday. Problem is, things were painfully behind. So when we showed up at 2:00 to see Brightblack Morning Light all we saw was 20 minutes of stage set up. We left. Back at 5:15 to check out local hip-hop act The Cool Kids but were instead greeted with the free-jazz jamming of Craig Taborn’s Junk Magic. Then, we gave up.

BEST QUOTE: Pasty Sea And Cake frontman Sam Prekop on the great outdoors: “It’s a freakin’ pleasure to play here. I barely go outside, let alone play outside.”

RUNNER UP: A female audience member minutes before Iron & Wine played Saturday afternoon: “Listening to Iron & Wine makes me sleepy – in a good way.”

BETTER THAN LOLLA: At Lollapalooza you get Budweiser products – puke! Pitchfork? Goose Island, baby!

WORSE THAN LOLLA: Huge lines for the bathrooms . . . after way too many Goose Islands.

– Trevor Fisher

Category: Live Reviews, Weekly