Words and Photos by Andrew Parks

Summer festivals are always scatter-brained affairs, but I’m still not sure what to make of Pitchfork’s sixth annual soiree. In many ways, it felt like the first time I covered Coachella: 2005, the year Bright Eyes, a newly-reunited Black Star and a bunch of spandex-wearing grasshoppers (The Locust) brought the weekend to a something-for-everyone close on three separate stages.

In Pitchfork’s case, any given moment provided such diametric options as the following: bathing in the morose synth-pop of Darkstar or relishing the ravaged psychedelic riffs of the Fresh & Onlys; braving the growing mosh pit at Kylesa or absorbing the washed-out drones of Deerhunter; and my personal favorite one-two punch, chasing the everybody-dance-now exultations of Cut Copy with the 21st century punk rock of HEALTH.

Meanwhile, everything that didn’t involve music was overwhelmingly positive compared to Pitchfork’s more experienced competitors, from the laid-back lines to Union Park’s actual layout (stages that are perfectly spaced; copious amounts of free water and sunscreen; food booths that are fairly priced and — generally speaking — not simply alcohol-absorbing calorie bombs). The only catch? It’s kinda hard to sift through crates in a pop-up record fair or sit on a stationary Chicago bus with air conditioning (also known as a “cooling station”) when you’re bouncing between three stages and 31 sets (you trying making all 45!).

I’m certainly not complaining, but I am about to share what stood out, from the woofer-wrecking blue-eyed soul of James Blake to the one Animal Collective song their fans actually recognized…

The Pied Pipers of Dance Party USA: Cut Copy
Melbourne’s finest have always been a killer live band, but I’ve never seen them as confident as they were near the close of Pitchfork’s final day. It was as if they could sense how exhausted the entire crowd was and took it upon themselves to revive us all with a neon-tinged tonic of guitar-guided, rhythm-centric dance tunes. With LCD Soundsystem now retired from the road, it looks like Cut Copy have assumed the mantle of forcing us all to uncross our arms and embody the phrase, “Come on, vogue.” For better or for worse, certainly.

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The Set That Sounded Like a Shot In the Arm: HEALTH
All of the tension-building “I wonder what Tyler’s gonna do!?” talk leading up to Odd Future’s mid-afternoon set made the anticipation for it far more exciting than the hip-hop collective’s one-dimensional music: a crowd-riling combo of blustery rhymes and cold-pressed beats that stops being provocative when you realize it’s really the work of immature kids who’ve capitalized on the pressing need for music to say something — anything — that feels raw and real.

On the other side of the L.A. underground spectrum was HEALTH, a quartet that fuses fractured rhythms and epileptic noise with blissful melodies and an overt sense of losing one’s proverbial shit while in the company of others. No other band leaped off the deep end in a partially drained pool quite like these guys. Don’t believe me, though; believe the arm that de facto frontman Jake Duzsik busted open a couple songs in.

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Best Use of a Sea Foam-Colored Wig: Twin Sister
Ever wonder what it’d be like to watch a tattooed elf front one of Brooklyn’s most promising indie rock bands? Go see a Twin Sister show.

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Metal We Can All Relate To: Kylesa
Aside from the aforementioned HEALTH, very few artists at the Pitchfork Festival could be classified as “brutal,”  “crushing,” or “music-that’d-make-your-mom-cover-her-ears-and-wonder-what’s-wrong-with-you.” Georgia’s crustiest peaches were one exception to the weekend’s overriding passive but pleasant rule (a.k.a. the P4K Principle), delivering a course on how to convert a field of skinny indie kids to the dark side. Which makes perfect sense in the scheme of things — Kylesa’s latest album, Spiral Shadow, is as close extreme music gets to writing a Built to Spill record. Extra points go to guitarist/singer Phillip Cope for somehow incorporating a thermin into their piston-powered mix.

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If Only 1 P.M. Really Meant 1 A.M.: Darkstar
Or 11 at the very least, which is what I witnessed the next day at the trio’s first headlining gig in New York. Unlike the paranoid android bent of their North LP and the K-hole lapses in their lumbering Chicago set, Darkstar in a dimly lit club amounts to a slow descent into the blackened heart of decidedly British music — a rather wonderful world of  steam-pressed beats, lethargic BPM rates, and the kind of vocals you expect to hear from Thom Yorke when he’s trying to be down with producers like Four Tet and Flying Lotus. No wonder why the group just got signed to Warp.

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A Groove-Locked Return To Form: Battles
If you’re like me and didn’t quite get the glistening post-everything vibe of Gloss Drop, Battles’ first Tyondai-less record, you absolutely have to see their live show. Now pared down to a power trio, they’re like a marching band stomping on the ashes of a man-made apocalypse.

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Sloppiness As an Artistic Statement: Guided By Voices
While I still don’t know what a “Tractor Rape Train” entails — frankly, I don’t want to know — GBV’s crypt-cracking rendition of that indie rock standard was reason enough to celebrate the band’s recent reunion and forgive Robert Pollard’s blood alcohol level.

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An Excuse To Hump the Nearest Subwoofer: James Blake
I’m still on the fence about how James Blake went from being one of the UK’s most promising dance producers to the country’s greatest chance at cracking the F&F (Frappucino & Feist) market. But the heavy bass lines in songs like “The Wilhelm Scream?” That’s a religious experience waiting to happen right there.

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“Finally!”: The collective, albeit brief sigh of Animal Collective fans
You know, there comes a time in an band’s career where they’ve gotta decide if they’re going to write and perform the purest music possible — songs they want to play — or simply give their growing fanbase what they want. Animal Collective chose the former path a while ago, always opting to rehearse unreleased material in public over replicating familiar singles like “My Girls” and “Fireworks.” And that’s fine; welcome, really, as I absolutely hate hearing pitch-perfect renditions of a record I could hear at home for free. That said, when these unlikely indie stars cut through the tension with a track we all know (see: “Did You See the Words?” on Friday night), the result is downright magical. If they did that for a whole hour, heads would most likely explode.

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Dude, What’s With the Incense?: Woods
If there was ever any doubt about whether Woods are hippies at heart, tape manipulator G. Lucas Crane squashed it by cleansing the evil spirits Neko Case apparently left behind the night before with freshly lit sticks of incense. Music wise, the Upstate-based space cadets set the afternoon off right with honey-dipped hints of Neil Young and — yes, really — the Grateful Dead.

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Talk About Doing Whatever the Hell You Want: Ariel Pink
How Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti band are able to keep up with his seemingly nonsensical actions as a “frontman” — carrying around a mixer for no particular reason, screaming into a headset that could have been loaned from Britney Spears — is anyone’s guess. The guy’s idea of putting on a show is like karaoke in front of a live studio audience, and yet, he’s captivating in a train wreck sort of way.  That is until he takes what he’s doing seriously and plays relatively straight versions of standout songs like “Round and Round” and “Bright Lit Blue Skies.” Then he reveals what he’s really like under all the art-damaged posturing: a total pop auteur.

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Wait, He’s Working With a String Quartet Now?: How To Dress Well
Tom Krell has a reputation for being a godawful live performer, the kind of guy who spends an hour sound-checking a laptop and his microphone. At least that’s the way things used to be. Now he’s suddenly performing with a full-on string quartet that helps him translate his phantasmagoric R&B songs in a way that doesn’t feel like watching a lanky hipster sing off-key R. Kelly covers in his bedroom. He’s still not amazing by any means, but not-exactly-amazing is obviously better than so bad you want to hit the guy.

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The Stage Dive Heard ‘Round the World: Tyler, the Creator
As I mentioned above, Odd Future’s set showed that their youth-in-revolt sound is better suited to a small club than a festival stage. That said, I can appreciate their fearless leader’s dedication to giving the kids what they want — namely him stage-diving with a cast-sheathed broken leg.

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Chillwave? What’s That?: Toro Y Moi
Here’s the thing about Chaz Bundick: like his close friend Washed Out, he’s a consummate entertainer that knows how to turn his sepia-toned pop songs into a B-roll episode of Dancing With the Stars. That was true when it was simply him and a laptop, and it’s even clearer now that he’s fronting a full band that’s got as much to do with classic funk and disco than anything that could be classified as “chill.”

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And You Thought You Were Hot: Cold Cave
Lest you think that Cold Cave frontman Wesley Eisold and his synth-slinging cohort Dominick Fernow (see also: Prurient) aren’t devoted to their own special brand of abject darkness, the duo was wearing nothing but black and leather in 90-degree heat. Oh yeah — they also finally figured out how to transform Eisold’s bedroom project beginnings into a real deal band, one that’d appeal to Depeche Mode fans and those of us who fall asleep listening to Wolf Eyes.

So this year, Jayson & I snapped some quick videos of the Pitchfork Festival — we talked to a few bands and shot some performance footage (we also interviewed Flamgirlant and Ptolemyclark, which you can watch above). We thought we’d close out our Pitchfork Fest coverage by sharing some of those videos with you. The clips are short, somewhat intentionally.

One caveat: the sound on these, admittedly, is rough — this was our first video experiment, and clearly we have some fine-tuning to do!

Watch after the jump!

The Flaming Lips perform “Fight Test.” Slowly.

I interview Scott from Frightened Rabbit

Frightened Rabbit performs “Good Arms Vs. Bad” (fragment)

Jayson interviews Women. I should have instead written “Jayson hits on Women.” Sigh. Puns.

Damian from Fucked Up staggers around with a beach ball on his head (fragment. amazing.)

I interview Bowerbirds

The Mae Shi cover the audience with a parachute

Japandroids perform (fragment)

Sadly, Pharaohe Monch did not come onstage looking like this

…or all the stuff that Joe didn’t mention, or that he already covered and I am chiming in with my two cents’ worth regardless.

Like I said, this was my first Pfork festival, and I (rather predictably) had a blast. I agree with Joe, however, that there were lots of really good shows and zero oh-my-god revelations. Which is sort of a churlish observation, considering that it is still the most immaculately run, vibrantly curated festivals in the country — that’s just the way things played out. Wayne Coyne, in one of his many “now-I-will-address-my-disciples” monologues from the stage (with his graying temples, enormous shock of hair, and white suit, dude is seriously getting deep into his Captain Eno/Rasputin phase) marveled aloud at just great everything at Pfork is. “I mean, even the goddamn food is top-notch, and food is always terrible at festivals,” he said. (He’s right –I’ve never had satay chicken skewers and cucumber salad or a beef brisket sandwich at a rock festival before.)

Pharoah Monche was incredible, as was The National — probably the two highlights of the festival for me, mostly because they both went for it. As a friend remarked, you’ve never lived until you’ve seen a sea of slightly fratty dudes pump their fists and holler “Squalor Victoria!!!” Pharoah, likewise, got all the music critics awkwardly but enthusiastically waving their hands in the air. It’s pretty much impossible to be in the same room as “Simon Says” and not get amped.

The one big headliner Joe left out, as ptolemy noted, was Grizzly Bear, and I have to say, I was more excited than I ever thought I would be to see them live. Their new songs have a fire to them that I never suspected Droste and co. had in them, and I was looking forward to hearing them recreated live. And they were, technically speaking, perfect. The harmonies were all there, shimmering and full-bodied, and every instrumental line of filigree pealed out cleanly into the evening air. And yet, it was still somehow completely unstirring. Part of it was set list that lingered in their languid, draggy mood pieces, and the rest of it was just a lack of energy. I couldn’t help but think, as I watched them bounce their way politely through “Two Weeks,” that these boys could have stood to have availed themselves of some of the free Sparks that was flowing freely around the park.

Wavves, whose name I find tossed around as a punchline these days more often than not, were one of the possible wild cards. After Nathan’s onstage meltdown in Barcelona, and his shattered wrist, there was a lot of skepticism — and morbid curiosity — about what would happen in Chicago. There were lots of not-so-charitable jokes being thrown around in the crowd beforehand (hell, I made a couple), but when they came out, they disappointed all of the buzzards, playing an effervescent, fun and totally together set. Kids moshed and crowd surfed and knew EVERY WORD in the audience. It was heartwarming, in a small way.

If I was forced to sum up this year’s Pitchfork Festival in a simple, two-word phrase, that phrase would be: modest pleasures. None of the bands pulled off mind-blowing sets, no one upped the creative ante or brought out special guests or strange inventions. Instead, all the performances hit a kind of amiable consistency, all of them solid and satisfying, but none especially game-changing. Even the National, whose Saturday night set I cannot say enough good things about, were more a model of simple virtues than aggressive paradigm-shifts.

Sunday’s lineup was a bit more eclectic than Saturday’s. The Mae Shi performed one of their final shows as a band, ad their revved-up spazzy post-punk was the perfect start to the day. I’ve seen the Mae Shi before and, while I don’t love them on record, live they’re engaging and entertaining. Midway through the set, they draped an enormous parachute over the audience, making for a kind of makeshift tent in the center of Union Park.

From the Mae Shi’s sonic turbulence to Frightened Rabbit’s emotional turbulence: I’ve seen FR five or six times now, and they improve a little more with each go. Their songs are ragged and falling-apart live, and Scott Hutchinson’s brogue gets more pained and plaintive as the show progresses. They drew mostly from Midnight Organ Fight, and it was a kick to see a whole crowd of kids near the front of the stage chanting: “I feel better, and better, and worse — I mean, better.” I got to talk to Scott for a bit after the show and he told me that the group’s new album is nearly done. He wants to title it Swim Until You Can’t See Land, and said the songs are all about drowning — drowning in liquor, drowning in work, drowning in bad love. In other words: it sounds like our beloved Scots haven’t changed a bit. For all the dark themes in their music, Scott himself couldn’t be more charming, and I enjoyed having a few minutes to chat with him.

I caught a few minutes of Blitzen Trapper, and about that I’ll politely say: not my thing. Very much my thing? Pharoah Monch. He put Doom to shame, delivering a passionate, energetic, exuberant set, steadily winning over a lukewarm crowd with his unending charisma. Monch is a wordsmith with few equals, and his clean, precise flow only accented his lyrical proficiency.

The Thermals figured out a quick way to win over an unfamiliar audience: covers, covers, covers. The group opened with Sonic Youth’s “100%,” and also delivered rowdy versions of the Breeders “Saints” and, strangely (and awesomely) Green Day’s “Basket Case.” I caught up again with flamgirlant and p-clark for a bit of DJ/Rupture, which I loved. Rupture dug hard into a reggae groove, and his dank dub was the perfect remedy for a restless crowd.

I’ve seen the Walkmen quite a few times now, so I figured I’d skip them to see Japandroids instead. Their record is one of my favorites of the year so far, but live it seemed to take them forever to get it together. The songs were sloppy — and not in a good way — and they didn’t have the manic snap of their recorded counterparts. The set had some sparks, but overall I think I’d like to catch up with them in a few months, when they’ve had some time to perfect things.

M83, on the other, hand, is already road-tested. I saw them shortly after Saturdays=Youth came out and was underwhelmed, but they’ve clearly kicked it up to fighting speed lately. They got the hit out of the way early, opening with “Graveyard Girl,” and then dove straight into a set of vibrant, quaking electropop.

So at this point, I guess I have to be a killjoy and say: I think I might be over the Flaming Lips. I get what they do, and it’s hard to talk shit about a band that brings such joy to their performances, but lately it’s felt like they’ve been running on fumes. I had high hopes for their Pitchfork set, as it fell under the banner of “You Write the Night.” I figured, with fans requesting the setlist, it would force the Flaming Lips out of their comfort zone a bit.

Not so. The opening was terrific: a vibrant run through “Race for the Prize” followed by an awesome and surprising spin through “Bad Days,” followed by the never-played (and never to be played again, according to Wayne) “Enthusiasm for Life Defeats Existential Fear.” After that, though, it was Flaming Lips by-the-numbers. Two terrible new songs from their forthcoming record, a bunch of Yoshimi songs, some songs from the forgettable last record. Pandas. Frogs. Confetti. Balloons. Like, man, I know, it feels like I’m hating Christmas here or something, and I feel like a stooge saying it, but am I the only one who’s starting to find the Flaming Lips a little bit…boring?

My dream for their set? They had left the balloons, furries and special effects at home, opened with “Turn it On,” and treated their fans to 80 or so stripped-down minutes of rarely-played gems. So, yeah, that didn’t happen.

Apparently while I was being bored by the Flips, Ptolemy and Flamgirlant were having their minds blown by the Very Best. So clearly I chose poorly.

“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.

Doug basking in the glorious rays of his indie guitar jammery

I have seen Built To Spill live somewhere between five and seven thousand times. When I was 17, I listened to Perfect From Now On the way I used to listen to, like, Led Zeppelin IV or Paul’s Boutique. That is, endlessly, with Talmudic intensity. For a long, long time, it was the only tape I had in my car. The love runs way deep.

So watching them last night in Union Park on a gorgeous (if chilly) night, big white church looming over the trees over my shoulder, was a pretty great experience. As Joe has already mentioned, the headliners last night were (or were supposed to be) playing all-request set lists. This made for an interesting group-listening experience: when they started playing, say, “Kicked It In the Sun,” the ungodly beautiful penultimate song from PFNO, you looked around you grinning, as if to say to everyone, “Good job, guys!” When they played “Big Dipper,” you could practically fucking hi-five the stranger next to you. Sometimes it was like a live-show version of Missed Connections: when they started playing “Stab,” for instance, or the dreamy little pop song “Else,” off of Keep It Like A Secret, there was the charge of hearing it performed live for the first time, but there was also this weird, quiet validation: I had never heard anyone else, ever, tell me they loved “Else,” but clearly lots of people did, and we were all sort of making that discovery together simultaneously. It was neat.

But THEN they played the pseudo-Eastern brain-fart “In Your Mind,” the third track off of Ancient Melodies From the Future, which, apart from “Strange,” is justifiably the most unloved spot in their catalogue. And then there was audience-wide bafflement. We voted for this? It was, more or less, the only “off” moment of the entire set. Otherwise, the night was spilling over with good vibes. Doug Martch’s scruffy, indie-rock-dad charm was in full effect; with his too-tight baseball cap on, a swatch of hair sticking out the back, he appeared ready to go fishing with a bunch of Cub Scouts the second he finished up his last 11-minute guitar solo. Alas, apart from “Kicked It In the Sun,” live Perfect From Now On songs remain as tantalizingly rare as jackelope sightings (Bloom County ref, anyone?). No “Velvet Waltz,” no “Randy Described Eternity,” no “I Would Hurt A Fly.” But it was a fantastic show nonetheless. For the curious, here’s the entire set list:

Liar
Stab
Strange
You Were Right
Kicked It In the Sun
Conventional Wisdom
Else
Big Dipper
In Your Mind
Virginia Reel Round the Fountain
Goin’ Against Your Mind
Carry the Zero

Further updates to come!

There was a point during Night 1 of the Pitchfork Festival where I realized that I had just watched Yo La Tengo, was currently watching Jesus Lizard, and was about to go watch Built to Spill. This made me wonder if my plane had skipped decades, and I had somehow ended up at a festival in 1997.

Thing is: I’m on the older side of the Pitchfork demo, and so a night featuring Yo La Tengo, Jesus Lizard and Built to Spill suits me just fine. Owing to the vagaries of air travel I completely missed Tortoise, who opened the night. In truth, I also missed about 3/4 of Yo La Tengo: I was still waiting on line to check in when the light, gorgeous strains of “Let’s Save Tony Orlando’s House” started floating my way. I got inside in enough time to see them tear through a fierce, spirited, endless version of “Moby Octopad” and a cheery run through “Sugarcube.”

Friday at Pitchfork followed the theme “You Write the Night.” Fans were asked to vote on setlists, and the bands accordingly played the most popular requests (although Jayson & I think there was some vote-rigging on Built to Spill, but I’ll leave that to him). I am apparently in the vast minority on 17 Dots, but just seeing the Jesus Lizard on stage was enough for me — they could play whatever the hell they wanted.

Needless to say, they did not disappoint. David Yow launched himself into the crowd within the opening seconds of the set. He spent the rest of it stalking around the stage, alternately goading and rousing the crowd. “We’re going to be playing the Metro around Thanksgiving,” he said at one point. “So if you’d like to see us there, in a more intimate environment, you should feel free to demand a full refund on your way out tonight.” The songs were tense and angry as ever, losing none of their feirce snap and howl. It was a thrill to hear large throngs of people bellowing back the words to “Mouth Breather” (it even appeared to please Yow himself), and their set seemed to get more threatening as it progressed — great swipes of guitar and Yow’s awesome, ungodly yelp.

He also told a joke about the hygeine habits of dogs that I won’t print here.

I’ll leave Built to Spill to Jayson but, suffice it to say, this year’s festival is off to a roaring start.

For those of you who can’t make it — they’re streaming select performances live here. It will be well worth tuning in.

So tomorrow AM, Joe and I are leaving for Chicago for the three-day incredible-live-music binge that is the Pitchfork Festival. It’s my first time there, and I am pretty amped. We put together a nice little primer hub on this year’s festival, which you should check out here, to get a flavor of these year’s lineup. Skews a little more Big Indie Acts than obscure favorites this year, and there is less rap than I remember seeing in previous years, but there are nonetheless a ton of things to look forward to.

Some of those things for me include: 1) The National, whom I have never seen live before, somehow, despite them playing every other weekend in Brooklyn and NYC around the time of Boxer‘s release; 2)the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, for, well, obvious reasons; 3) Doom, inexplicably, even though it’s just as likely that it will be a Wayans cousin or something behind the mask; 4) Built to Spill, even though I’ve seen them live many times and they tend to be either revelatory or excruciatingly dull, depending on how into it Doug Martsch is feeling that particular night. I’ve also never seen Grizzly Bear perform (didn’t go to SXSW this year, so I didn’t see their eMusic showcase, tho I remember it pretty much sold Yancey on that band completely even tho he had previously been lukewarm.) The Flaming Lips are NEVER a dull live show, so that will undoubtedly be fun.

Who else is going? What are you excited about?

We’ll be doing a few updates from the festival, just to talk about what’s going on, what’s good, what’s fun/silly/ridiculous/terrible. Hope to see some of you there!

In a couple of hours I will be hopping on a plane to Chicago for the Pitchfork Music Festival, my third trip to what has quickly become the only summer fest I genuinely enjoy. A whole bunch of 17 Dots folks will be making the trek, including Joe, Amishi and some behind-the-scenesers as well. We’ll be giving wall-to-wall coverage starting Friday of the whole thing (once Joe and I get out of seeing The Dark Knight Friday afternoon).

Flamgirlant started a thread on the eMusic message boards suggesting we figure out a way for all of us to meet up while we are out there. Sounds like a great idea to me. Let’s do our best to use 17 Dots to coordinate, and hopefully we’ll all get the chance to be really awkward in person! Who’s in?

I know a few of you have been inquiring about a feature that has gone dormant — “Ask Amishi.” There are many reasons for this, most of them having to do with Amishi’s unwillingness/inability to be honest when we ask her about music. I’m happy to say, though, that “Ask Amishi” is returning, and in a huge way: Amishi will be traveling with us to the Pitchfork Festival this year, and we’re going to be asking over the course of the weekend to tell us about the best things she’s seen. We’re also going to drag her to some things we suspect she might not enjoy, just to watch her reaction. As it turns out, Amishi had a surprise for us, too. This morning, she presented us with a contract and touring rider, outlining the things she’d need in order to participate in our little interview. I’ve seen a few touring riders before, but this one takes the cake: 72 bottles of water, a 25-person guest list, 1 package of fresh naan from Mumbai and — my personal favorite — 1 small Yorkie Terrier. I’m going to have my lawyer look this over before I do anything rash.

Amishi’s contract and touring rider

[EDIT: Amishi just made me change the image associated with this post, as she did not like the original picture. I do not see any mention of this in the contract. I'll let it slide this time.]