Complex's Pitchfork Music Festival 2011 Recap

Last weekend Pitchfork Media, the popular music news and criticism website, hosted its sixth annual music festival in Chicago. For three days, 45 acts had Union Park choked with sweating fans. Unlike Bonnaroo or Coachella, which have no explicit guiding philosophy behind who gets booked, or Soundset or All Good, which book based on genre, Pitchfork books the groups they review well. They curate. That means you get Curren$y performing within clouds of weed smoke on the Blue Stage while Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore does his sleepy solo thing on the Red Stage. If your taste jives with Pitchfork’s, the festival is a godsend.

The festival began at 3 p.m. on Friday, July 15. With most of the older patrons still at work, the early moments on Friday were baby time. Soft faced boys in tank tops and jean shorts buzzed among girls in loose shirts modified so that the sides of their bras showed. (Side bra is in full effect this summer—not sure why.) I worked my way through the giddy crowd as Gatekeeper finished their horror movie soundtrack meets four-on-the-floor beats set...

Merrill Garbus is a beast. Recording under the name tUnE-yArDs, she released her second album, w h o k i l l, to roaring acclaim in mid-April and has been touring since. Like Dirty Projectors, tUnE-yArDs explores the possibilities of interlocking and ecstatic vocals through the polyrhythmic prism of East African music. Live, Garbus’ voice and talent shines even brighter. Deftly building layered vocal loops, Garbus accompanies herself, all the while playing percussion. Impressive isn’t the right word; there may not be a right word. You only have to see it.

Strange and numerous dudes with towels, lousy breath control, flubbed lyrics—Curren$y avoided all of the typical live hip-hop disappointments during his late-afternoon, post-Garbus set. (It was a festival highlight to turn away from her set to find a sea of people in Jets’ green descending on the Blue Stage.) Aside from being late, Spitta put on one of the best displays of live rap at Pitchfork.

Practically alone up there, he couldn’t have appeared happier. Great puffs of smoke from the crowd filled the line of sight from the back row as the New Orleans emcee prowled the stage in a Jordan jersey, performing greats like “Audio Dope” and “Michael Knight.” He bantered with the audience and frequently performed a capella. Few are working harder right now.

The Blue Stage showcased most of the festival’s rap and electronic acts. Odd Future were the only rap group to earn a spot on the larger, better positioned Red Stage, reflecting the fact that, though Pitchfork has happily embraced hip-hop, it still takes a backseat to more stereotypical indie rock fare. But maybe next year Das Racist can step into a larger spotlight. They deserve it. And with a proper (read: you must pay cash for) release slated to drop in September, they’re ready to find more ears, or at least more listeners that are willing to hear them as something other than the guys that recorded “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” In case you haven’t been paying attention, these guys are smart.

Performing live, DR’s hype man Dapwell did his best to capture the loose energy of Flava Flav while the lead emcees—Heems and Kool A.D.—worked through the hilarious and—not but—intelligent lyrics. The photo of Heems swaying his arms airplane style with a Heineken gripped in one hand is a nice visual metaphor for the set, if your imagination needs prodding. They rapped to each of us, and now none of us can say that DR never did anything for us. Because everyone left entertained and ready for Relax. Swate.

With the vocals of country siren Neko Case bleeding through, the problem of transporting James Blake’s show to an outdoor stage couldn’t have been more obvious. Of course, I had the additional disadvantage of having seen James Blake earlier in the week, at New York’s Webster Hall, giving me a fresh experience to compare it to.

The pockets of silence that are so crucial to his sound were impossible at Pitchfork. Still, the show was not without brilliant moments. The live version of “CMYK” destroyed, and offered a counterpoint to the detractors who call Blake sleepy and weak. Incorporating samples from both Kelis and Aaliyah, “CMYK” is a track for hip-hop heads. The audience danced with hands and shoulders to confirm this. The hands in the air, snapping at the wrists, might’ve been missing from Webster Hall, but they were in abundance on the Blue Stage Friday evening.

More than many of Pitchfork’s other acts, there’s an important costuming element to Cold Cave’s shtick. Their goth posturing benefitted greatly from the black leather jackets and black pants the crew wore for their Saturday afternoon show. It was nearly 90 degrees out, but we all know that the perpetually bummed can’t feel heat. Cold Cave did their pounding 80s synth-dirge thing for a good 45 minutes. If you’re into feeling bad with bass pressing into your guts, you’d have loved it.

As a clever tweet put it, Gang Gang Dance was the only act at Pitchfork that had a professional incense man. The trance version of a weed carrier, the dancing incense man did what, exactly? Not sure, but he looked great doing it, brandishing a flag made out of what must’ve been trash. Even outdoors, the NY-based electro outfit laid the rhythms down so loud that your brain shut down from the repetition. Locked into a groove, you stop thinking. Try it sometime; it might become your new music drug of choice.

Ariel Pink heralded the return of yacht rock; Dan Bejar’s Destroyer project sailed the rest of the way, smooth jazz sax in hand. His new album Kaputt is a difficult thing. It’s not a parody, but it’s too weary to be a carefree celebration of the Steely Dan sound. Like Bejar himself, who has a kind of negative charisma on stage, the album, with its cloying flute ‘n sax arrangements and hyper-literary lyrics, is too dense with neuroses to be easily classified. Those looking to unlock the album would have found no such key during his Pitchfork performance. Clad in all white and alternating between Heinie (the only supplier of booze on site) and a plastic bottle of what was probably whiskey, Bejar felt out of the audience’s reach, just like the music.

They’re so inoffensive you might take offense, but you might just want to sing along to the pretty vocal arrangements while you imagine hiking through the Pacific Northwest. Of course, the next day, you’ll just end up strolling through your farmer’s market, but Fleet Foxes music posits that their might not be a real difference.

Let’s pretend all that racist PBR&B talk never happened and just be excited about the state of contemporary r&b. Simultaneously looking forward and back, from overlooked ‘90s gems to today’s bright future, Tom Krell’s How to Dress Well project is beautiful on wax but still finding its legs live. Krell is nervous. From where I stood, I watched his hands shaking. The timidity and thinness of his vocals mesh perfectly with the fuzzy, topping and bottoming out sounds on his debut LP, but live it feels amateurish. This is headphone music. Hopefully he’ll make the transition to moving live performer soon. The string arrangements certainly helped. What to add next? (No brass or reeds, please.)

The moment we’d all been prepared to wait for. By the time Odd Future took the stage Sunday afternoon, it was clear that all the talk about organizations protesting the performance had amounted to little more than a booth speaking out against sexual violence and light-blue paper fans that read “COOL IT! DON'T BE A FAN OF VIOLENCE.” The kids of OF chipped in to the pre-festival hype by playing the Black Eyed Peas’ “Where is the Love” before they spewed vitriol into their mics (they do it so well). It’s a shame that Tyler was in a cast for Sunday’s performance—it hurt the energy level, and it must have really hurt whoever’s face it smashed into when Tyler dove into the fans to crowd surf.

After the Odd Future show, I made my way to the Blue Stage for Shabazz Palaces. Lined up with a group of photographers, I found myself mired in a stupid conversation. A guy approached me, saying, “Pitchfork—on one stage you get a group that’s setting black culture back twenty years, and on the other you have a really, really progressive group.” Don’t kid yourself, asshole. Nothing is that simple.

Okay, I lied. One thing is that simple, and that’s that Shabazz Palaces have put out one of the best albums of 2011. Black Up is a roiling masterpiece of paranoid beats and memorable lines that pushes the envelope on hip-hop’s recent mainstream flirtations with electro. Shabazz Palaces, the new project from Ishmael Butler of Digable Planets, probably won’t get the attention it deserves, and that’s a damn shame. Then again, they’re running up ahead while we’re only catching up.

Underneath the Pine, the latest album from Toro Y Moi came in at #5 on our list of the 25 Best Albums of 2011 (So Far) and live Chaz Bundick and company demonstrated that they excel off wax too. Touring has turned this live band into a tight company. Bundick’s vocals still sound weak in places, but the rhythms are on point, and for funk music, that’s most important.

There is no live act right now better than TV on the Radio. Their rejiggered renditions take a few seconds for even the most well-versed listener to recognize, infused as they are with new, rollicking energy. A track like “The Wrong Way” goes from a chug-chugging slow-burner to a sprinting funk monster live.

Their set at Pitchfork, the festival’s last, didn’t lean too heavily on any one of their albums. It was the sort of set you’d expect from a band with a large catalog of great songs. Any lingering pseudo-folk aftertaste left over from the previous night’s Fleet Foxes performance was ground out by the opening number “Halfway Home,” a fuzzy rocker that nods to the Ramones.

Near the set’s end they brought Shabazz Palaces, among others, on stage for “A Method.” Past, present, and future, all on stage at the same time. The set could’ve been twice as long and everyone would’ve been more than happy to continute sweating it out.

Pitchfork’s curatorial approach to festival scheduling is correct. As All Tomorrow’s Parties consistently proves, taste is important, and Pitchfork’s increasingly catholic one makes for an exciting three days of music.

A number of Chicago natives complained that Lollapalooza had grown too big, that it no longer did right by the city. Pitchfork seems just right by comparison.