Coverage - Fun Fun Fun Fest 2008
Words By: Callie Enlow
Photos By: Victor Yiu
Saturday
Deerhoof
Continuing the Fest’s experimental bent, San Francisco’s Deerhoof combined the charming stage presence of singer Satomi Matsuzaki with the precision musicianship of guitarists Ed Rodriguez and John Dietrich and drumming phenomenon Greg Saunier.
Attracting an audience that included members of The Octopus Project, the band set their tone immediately with Matsuzaki prancing across the stage with a pal wearing gigantic tiger and lion headdresses as the band played an angular instrumental intro.
Then, darling Matsuzaki picked up her bass to audience cheers and proceeded to completely rock out, all the while working her inhumanly-high vocal range.
Deerhoof’s music has settled into a jazzy, abrupt form of indie rock whose lean sound is accented by Matsuzaki’s child-like lyrics and delivery. The group hinges on founding member Saunier, a conservatory-trained musician whose percussion skills are simply unparalleled in his genre. Saunier does more with just a snare and a kick-drum than most do with sets twice that large.
Of course, Saunier’s bandmates all more than hold their own, even in the midst of technical problems. Part of Matsuzaki’s equipment seemed to be malfunctioning, requiring frequent attention from the band.
That did not dampen audience or band spirits as they launched from now-classic songs from 2003’s Apple O to recently-released Offend Maggie. Songs off the latter especially showcased newbie Rodriguez’s insane fretwork as he swaggered on “Tears of Music and Love” and “Offend Maggie.”
Tim Fite
I’m pretty convinced that this festival - at least this day - should change its name from "Fun Fun Fun" to "Weird Weirder Weirdest".
Tim Fite would fall into the "Weirdest" category. Not that it’s a bad thing, and not that he would be offended.
Fite is, in short, a chubby, baby-faced white dude from Jersey who sounds like an Carolina moonshiner who’s tasted a bit too much of the product.
Leave it at that and you’re thinking ‘young Unkle Kracker, whatever.’ But you would be so very wrong. The whole package Fite presents is like a bastard son of Tom Waits (for the storytelling) and David Lynch (for the multimedia) who was raised on a steady diet of backpack hip hop and spiritual revivals.
Like his music, Fite’s live show is disarmingly odd. His songs combine rapping and slide whistles and alt.country and hand claps and anger. His live show featured videos, cartoons, a maniacal keyboard accompanist, and Fite’s greatest creation, which would be the chubby-cheeked, wide-eyed singer himself.
Fite appeared on the stage with his D.J., Sexy Leroy, in matching seersucker pants and suspenders, like snake oil salesmen. His moves were carefully maintained to look alternately robotic and impassioned as he led the audience through songs off his latest album, Fair Ain’t Fair.
Fite’s visual backdrop, videos probably made by Ryan Foregger…oh, excuse me, I mean Sexy Leroy, present none other than three other Fites singing his back up. In between the songs are video presentations of cartoons made by “the Gentleman with Itchy Legs.” Like Fite, the cartoons appear sweet and innocent at first with their DIY marker-on-notebook-paper approach. But also like Fite, the sweetness quickly curdles into stories like “Jo Jo and Bobby Stab A Motherfucker,” all the while bringing a reluctant smile to the audience’s faces.
The same audience members that enjoy the cartoons probably participated in the “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” dance that Fite commanded. They also may have been, umm, “pooed” on by Sexy Leroy during an impromptu interpretive dance with a water bottle on top of a speaker.
While everybody loves a good show, and Fite undeniably puts on one hell of an interesting time, the catch is that his songs don’t really need the pomp and circumstance. Musically, he’s just as inventive and several times more accessible, and his lyrics seem to drive at a theme greater than just ‘how weird can I possibly be?’Trail of Dead
On Saturday evening I learned Austin’s …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead are still alive, they are still writing songs and they are still really fucking loud.
Trail of Dead released their last full length album, So Divided, in the Fall of 2006, which also marked their last full-blown U.S. tour. Apparently, Trail of Dead’s silence only intrigued their fans, as a horde of teens, hippies, old metal heads and random festival-goers pressed up against the mainstage during the six-piece’s performance.
Dressed all in black, the band didn’t resort to their old screaming and equipment-breaking habits to get their melodramatic, thinking-man’s hard rock across to the audience. Although slightly more controlled, singers Jason Reece and Conrad Keely still provided enough bravado and intensity to dispel any questions about the group’s 13-year longevity.
The group blasted into songs from their impending record, whose release date has been pushed from January 2009 to ‘unknown’, despite Keely’s assertion that everything but the artwork and the title are finished. The songs marked a return to the arty prog that catapulted 2002’s Sourcetags and Codes into top ten lists from Pitchfork Media to Rolling Stone.
With dual drums pounding, Keely’s coiled energy exploded on classics “Will You Smile Again?” from Worlds Apart and “Relative Ways” from Source Tags and Codes. As Keely howled, the sheer sound produced by both drum sets, three guitars and keyboard rattled the audience’s teeth.
On the Reece-penned songs, the sunglassed co-frontman and co-owner of Austin hipster-mart Beauty Bar displayed a more polished rock star swagger than the tortured Keely. It’s a special performer who can, at one moment, shake a yellow maraca into a mic and the next leap offstage to writhe on the ground in front of the audience.
The band looked ecstatic to be playing together, to a huge crowd of hometown fans. Their professionalism, from their gorgeous Epiphone guitars to their seamless guitar tech breaks, showed how far the group had come - but the crowd showed that no matter what Trail of Dead do next, they’ll always have a home in Austin.
Octopus Project
What better way to kick off the first evening of Fun Fun Fun Fest than with The Octopus Project, a band whose motto is “Music is Fun”?
A big crowd showed up at Austin’s Waterloo Park to hear the hometown noise scientists play their latest experiments at dusk.
The crowd was greeted by the elegant Yvonne Lambert in one of her trademark party dresses setting up her equally refined moog Theremin. Behind her, Josh Lambert, Toto Miranda and relatively new addition Ryan Figg on guitar appeared in their customary funeral director garb: black pants, white shirts, black ties.
Though Yvonne is the Theremin ace and Figg the guitar expert in the Project, one of the best reasons to see The Octopus Project live is to marvel in their multi-instrumental zeal with each member trading off an instrument at least once during the set.
Opening with “An Evening with Rthrtha” from their polished third LP Hello, Avalanche, Figg, the Lamberts and Miranda switched between drums, loops, synthesizers, glockenspiel, guitar and bass to create intergalactic lounge music from the future.
Though the crowd seemed mesmerized mainly by Yvonne’s Theremin skills, the heavy bass and rocking guitars anchored the Project from spinning into glitchy caucophony. Instead, what the band proved was that experimental doesn’t have to mean jarring, and instrumental doesn’t always mean boring.
All the musical layers preclude the need for vocals, so there’s few lyrics to explain the Project’s vision. A notable exception was their new song “Wet Gold,” on which Josh and Yvonne sang sweetly in tandem with the Theremin providing backup.
If the sheer wonder of their music didn’t captivate the audience, The Octopus Project’s stage show charmed them. Multiplying their traditional ghost speaker cabinet covers by three, six boxy green and white ghosts loomed behind the band. “We had to go out and kill just so there could be ghosts here,” said Josh.
As the ghosts magically toddled around the stage, The Octopus Project closed their experiment with “Truck”, a spastic drum and keyboard collision that defines the “Music is Fun” theory, with a triple influence on ‘fun.’
Dead Milkmen
Choosing between critically-acclaimed The National and funny punks the Dead Milkmen should have been hard. In reality, from the minute I first saw the Fest’s line-up I could hardly focus on anything else but those 25-year-old Milkmen.Why does it mean so much to me to see four over-the-hill dudes sing about bitchin’ Camaros, pyromania and Methodist coloring books? I won’t bore you with the answer, but I will say that I never questioned my choice, even after our photographer told me the National were by far the best act he saw all weekend.
The easy explanation for my obsession is to say that the Dead Milkmen, a band that broke up way before I could drive, made Fun Fun Fun Fest their second official show in the past ten years or so. According to an interview with Austinist, the festival promoter started contacting the band in January, and basically wore the group down. Though Dead Milkmen were tight with several Austin bands and recorded three of their albums in the city, drummer Dean Clean said the band hadn’t touched down in ATX in the last 12 years.
And then on Saturday night, there they were. Though their age was showing through gray hair, bald heads and inevitable paunch, the Dead Milkmen’s surfy-jokey-punk sound was perfectly preserved. So was their read on the audience. With no new album to speak of or B-sides to hawk, the Milkmen launched into their hit “Punk Rock Girl” with Joe Jack, Dean Clean, Rodney Anonymous and Low Budget's bass player Dan Steven loving every minute.
As Rodney Anonymous' now-hefty frame bounced up and down, the audience yelled along to early favorites “Tiny Town,” “Big Lizard” and “Beach Party Vietnam.” The stage patter that helped brand the Milkmen as “comedy punk” seemed absent at first, and when the band finally reached the shaggy dog song “Bitchin' Camaro,” I wondered how Rodney and Joe Jack would handle the set up. Camaros stopped being produced in 2002, and, I would argue, stopped being bitchin’ long before that.
Instead of reviving their old schpiel about Doors cover bands and parents, Rodney somehow turned the intro into a commentary about Barack Obama and the inspiration his presidency brings to us. In a very punk way of course. After telling the audience “you’re all gloating,” he reminded us “if the black guy with the Arab name can get elected, anything is possible for you.”
For the Dead Milkmen, infinite possibilities meant stage dives, throwing keyboards into the audience and two encores as they relished in “If You Love Somebody, Set Them On Fire” and “Methodist Coloring Book.”
When all was finally said and done, the Milkmen looked far from dead. Re-invigorated, Rodney Anonymous smiled at the audience and said “Thank you all so much, I don’t know why we stopped doing this shit.”
Sunday
Frightened Rabbit
Bless Glasgow quartet Frightened Rabbit. Just when you’ve had enough of skinny girls in skinny jeans and their boyfriend’s ironic facial hair, when you’re wondering if there’s some law that every new band has to list ‘new wave’ as an influence, when you’re starting to believe that an internet-based generator is responsible for the bulk of all lyrics written since 2002, Frightened Rabbit gently remind you that honest music still exists.
Not that plenty of other people don’t produce sincere songs and uncluttered melodies; Frightened Rabbit just happened to do it in the middle of the day on Sunday, at peak exhaustion hour. Somehow lead singer Scott Hutchison and brother Grant managed to turn their stage into a Scottish living room with the help of Billy Kennedy and Andy Monaghan taking turns on keys and guitars.
This is partly due to the collective’s ability to tune into Americana roots. Frightened Rabbit doesn’t display any sort of obvious country influence, but their lyrics, caught up in the moment, combine the intensity of a protest song with homespun melodies.
Sweetly disregarding the midday heat and dust bowl surroundings, the Hutchisons played through many of the songs off their sophomore effort, The Midnight Organ Fight, as if they were running competing in a marathon. Charmingly, they start off with anthemic “I Feel Better,” a song featuring the main lyric “this is the last song that I’ll do.”
From there, it’s all sweat and Grant’s intense drumming, with Scott’s pleading vocals singing songs of such emotional desperation you hope you’ll never be at a point where you relate to them. It’s actually refreshing to see them live, and witness Scott joking between songs instead of sobbing in a corner.
Annuals
Recently, Annuals confessed to a major Yes fixation on XM radio. Not so much confessed as celebrated, really, as they gleefully spun their favorite songs during a guest d.j. spot. During their set, the precocious North Carolina sextet’s love for the English prog rockers translated into wave after wave of orchestrated pop derived from the group’s two full-length albums.
While the albums are lovingly polished, how the group’s raw live performance maintains those gorgeous melodies with lead singer Adam Baker’s screamo vocals, double drumsets and two guitarists dedicated to shredding is a mystery. It probably has a lot to do with Anna Spence’s composed keyboard parts, and the Southern group’s openness to pedal steel and country riffs.
The group’s best songs rolled off of Kenny Florence’s surprisingly psychedelic guitars on “Sway” and “Confessor” and the dual percussions on “Complete Or Completing.” Florence also studiously caressed a lap steel on the new song “Always Do” from the latest album Such Fun.
The perfect ending for the band seemed not to cover a song by their beloved Yes, but to do their own take on Led Zepplin’s hoedown “Hot Dog.” True to Annuals form, they spiked the original’s hokey flavor with their own sweet, strange taste in pop.
Islands
Nick Diamonds appears to be mellowing. The Islands frontman first appeared in Austin as a member of cult favorites Unicorns five years ago for SXSW, where, if memory serves, he and his band called the industry audience “vultures” (correctly) and ended their set early (sadly). Nowadays with Islands, Diamond seems to genuinely appreciate the mass of adoring fans, and his superslick band pulled out all the stops to entertain crowds with their globetrotting pop.
Focusing on songs off the new album Arm's Way capitalized on the group’s best asset, the kinetic violinist Alex Chow, who almost literally bent over backward to get the crowd’s attention.
Chow, a classically-trained violinist (as opposed to, you know, all those rock-trained violinists out there), embodied the goofiness that makes Islands so attractive, hamming it up with sexy dance moves on “Creeper” and spazzing out on the frantic “J’aime vous voir quitter.”
The new songs trade in their namesake calypso shimmer for a more dramatic gypsy flair, but retain the “is that a bassoon?” eclecticism that make Islands one of the most unabashedly fun bands playing today. And audience members who miss the Unicorns-era snark can always show up early to catch rollicking “Kids Don’t Know Shit.”
St. Vincent
It’s always a surprise with St. Vincent, a.k.a. Annie Clark, multi-instrumentalist and former touring member of both Sufan Stevens and the Polyphonic Spree.
Live she is sometimes alone, sometimes with full band, sometimes acoustic, sometimes with all her musical toys. Today she was full band Annie with enough toys, jingle bells and electronics to make Santa Claus jealous.
Early in her solo career she constantly appeared amazed at the size of the audience and totally gracious for their time. Perhaps with her album Marry Me garnering top reviews and a PLUG award for Female Artist of the Year, she’s feeling a little more confident in her ability to draw a crowd. Maybe she’s not a festival person. Either way, while her set still rocked, it lacked the personal charm that characterized her early shows.
Some sound difficulties setting up some of Clark’s traveling pedal boards and samplers could have contributed to her distant mood. Even with four people in her back-up band, Clark still handles the majority of her songs via guitar, vocals, keys and effects.
Thankfully, the sounds problems worked out and Clark was free to, in her own words, “kick out the jams.”
The jams mainly came from Marry Me, which St. Vincent kicked up from quirky and sophisticated to intense and passionate. In this most recent edition of St. Vincent, her bubbly stage demeanor takes a backseat to her seriously sexy guitar skills.
Nowhere was this more evident than her sultry cover of the Beatles’ “Dig A Pony” and the killer closer rendition of “Your Lips Are Red” complete with a distortion break-down and mic stand throw-down.
Although she dropped her nice girl cover, the fallen St. Vincent might be even more attention-grabbing. Said to be recording a new album for Spring release, St. Vincent might surprise everyone once again.
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
It may have been almost two years since their last album hit shelves, but when Satan says dance, you best dance. Not that Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s unassuming lead singer Alec Ounsworth looked terribly devilish in a wrinkled jacket and thick glasses, but the audience seemed possessed by the blog darlings’ curious blend of harmonica, hand claps and ‘80s art-rock influence.
They opened the set with new material slated for a Spring release. At first, the band that set the indie rock world on fire with dance beats and David Byrne vocals with 2005’s self-titled debut seemed almost tepid. But as the group transitioned into the laser-like sythesizer of “Is This Love?” their peculiar brand of indie dance music began to take hold.
As keyboardist Robbie Guertin convulsed on stage right, Ounsworth merely bopped back and forth as he hammered away on the lead guitar. By the time the group played 2007’s hit “Satan Said Dance,” the audience had turned into a dance party propelled by CYHSY’s jarringly upbeat melodies and dramatic lyrics.
“Satan” was curiously the only song played from sophomore album Some Loud Thunder. Most songs came from the debut, with some bearing fragmentary titles like “Heroes” and “Trotsky’s Fence,” and “Man at the Bar,” representing new unreleased material.
By the end of the 14-song set, Ounsworth’s ragged voice and the slightly off-key synthesizers made for a delightfully creepy ending. The new songs diabolically slipped into the set are sure to keep listeners buzzing about CYHSY for many months to come.
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