pfork day 2: the national, doom

no picture, because my hotel’s wireless is garbage

“It’s so 90s indie rock,” remarked Alex a few songs into Cymbals Eat Guitars’ rousing, rollicking set. He was right, and it wasn’t a dis: Cymebals Eat Guitars offered lean, energetic rock songs, topped with their singer’s hoarse, searching yelp. They were first up on Saturday’s Pitchfork lineup, and they proved to be the right choice: their songs are tidily constructed, cruising quietly along and then suddenly erupting in a fit of noise and wailing. And though I’d missed signature song “And the Hazy Sea,” the band seemed to be gaining momentum as they went on, gaining confidence and force.

Midway through the set, I met up with flamgirlant, her sister and ptolemyclark, who turned out to be just as awesome as I’d expected. The four of us headed over to check out flamgirl fave Plants and Animals. I’d seen them once before and though they were just fine, but they’ve certainly honed their gifts in the intervening years. The new songs seemed more restless and exploratory. They opened with an aching, lost-in-space number not too far off sonically from recent Radiohead, and even the jammy passages in older songs seemed more treacherous and toothy. Lyrically, they remain fascinated with the possibilities of syntax — another new song opened with the couplet “When they did it the first time / they only did it to say that they had done it” — and by the time they finally arrived at cacophonous closer “Bye Bye Bye,” they had the crowd thoroughly mesmerized.

The good thing about the Pitchfork Festival is that it’s set up so that as one band is ending, another one is starting. Just a few seconds after “Bye Bye Bye” came crashing to a close, a great howl came up from the main stage: Fucked Up had started their set. I’d never really paid much attention to them before, but that’s all going to change. Their performance was spectacular: loud and angry and irreverent, the best kind of brutal post-hardcore. At one point, their vocalist grabbed one of the beach balls being batted around in the crowd, ripped it open with his teeth, and wore it as a hat.

It’s quite a transition, going from Fucked Up to the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, but I give the Pains infinite credit for making it feel seamless. At this point, the band is firing on all cylinders. They’ve perfected their set, and their buoyant pop sounded great bouncing out across Union Park.

I managed to catch the tail end of Bowerbirds, who were (unsurprisingly) lovely, figuring out ways to make their gentle Appalachia play for a festival crowd. It worked remarkably well, loping cello and delicate guitar enveloping the crowd slowly and tenderly.

So you can imagine the shockwaves when Bowerbirds were followed by Ponytail. I’ve seen Ponytail a number of times now, and I emphatically believe that they’re one of the best live bands going. That doesn’t mean they’re not alienating, though: for the first few minutes of their set, the crowd seemed genuinely baffled by them (Jayson pointed out to me a tall redhead who was just staring at them open-mouthed, flummoxed). But then, a remarkable thing happened: the crowd, all at once, fell in love with them. By the end of their set, half of the audience was hollering along to Molly’s manic, monosyllabic yelps, thrusting their fists in the air. It was an incredible thing to behold, the site of a band slowly bringing a sea of people around to their way of thinking.

To say that Doom was a letdown is being polite. Simply put: he was boring as hell. He took the stage 15 minutes late, and then when he finally showed up, he sucked all of the charisma out of the crowd. Jayson and I are 80% sure he was lip-syncing. The man has no stage presence at all, and he seemed bored and uninterested. I had been waiting to see Doom live for years, and I ended up walking away before he finished.

But the best set of the day by far came from — no surprise here — the National. I had wondered how they were going to pull off a headlining spot. Their songs are quiet and fragile, and while I’d seen them work in arenas before, this seemed like a completely different kind of arrangement. But when they took the stage, something magic happened: a field full of people actually stopped talking to pay attention. There was no low murmur of conversation — just total, reverential, incredible pin-drop silence. The group opened with a new song, the one with the chorus “We don’t bleed if we don’t fight,” and proceeded to run through the best of Boxer and Alligator. This was the industrial-strength National, bolstered by a brass section and Padma Newsom on manic violin. Simply put: it was spectacular, the songs swelling to huge finales, building up blistering sheets of white noise. It all came to an apex near the end with “Mr. November,” when Matt Berninger lept from the stage into the crowd, and was immediately surrounded by a sea of enthusiastic fans. It was a jaw-dropping conclusion to a fairly terrific first day.