The Ting Tings 12:45 @ AT&T Stage Review by Derek Wright & photo by Randy Cremean
 When a local radio personality walked onto Lollapalooza’s AT&T stage Saturday to introduce The Ting Tings, the responding cheers weren’t from a crowd that loved the British duo’s danceable rock ‘n’ roll. Instead, the roar was from a couple thousand people hoping to enjoy the much buzzed-about 12:45 p.m. gig … and it was from a crowd that certainly soon would.
There was a degree of “have you seen them?” anticipation during the afternoon set. The Manchester duo was one of the most talked-about acts at this year’s South By Southwest festival. Almost five months’ worth of press since that breakout festival had built a groundswell of expectations. Normally, having to wait months for validation would be a bit unnecessary in the instant age of iTunes and YouTube, but the bulk of those glowing reviews made notable distinctions between the group’s quaint pop record, We Started Nothing, and the riotous live performances.
Every year at SXSW, bands arrive with a trailer full of promises but deliver on only a half-empty guitar case’s worth. By the first week of August, a band’s shimmer from that spring fest either has worn off or conversely been polished to a blinding shine. There was a sense among the crowd that this Lollapalooza set was going to determine which way The Ting Tings’ hype was going to go.
But it only took drummer Jules De Martino kicking out the booming beat of opener “We Walk” while simultaneously strumming a guitar to blast away any remaining dusty uncertainty about pair. And before vocalist Katie White could step out from behind the keys and strap a guitar low on her hip for the second song, “Great DJ,” the cheers switched to those from a crowd that now was utterly sold on the band.
With her red guitar matching both De Martino’s bright sunglasses and her own tights, while her lime green skirt complimented her nail polish, the blonde-haired White struck rock star pose after powerful pose straight from Carrie Brownstein or Chrissie Hynde’s book of ass-kicking front woman etiquette. Whether it was the chomping “Be the One” or sassy “That’s Not My Name,” White and De Martino pummeled through an eight-song set with maturely seasoned chops well beyond the 2-year-old band’s age might suggest.
So when White stepped back during the closer, “Shut Up and Let Me Go,” to pound a marching band’s bass drum in between shouts of “I ain’t freakin’/ I ain’t fakin’ this” the crowd believed her every word. Yet during the same song when she repeatedly pleaded, “Shut up and let me go, Hey!” the enthralled masses seemed a bit torn to hang on her ever move, acknowledging that the duo had only a few moments left.
At least, at Lollapalooza this year. But they’ll be back. The afternoon performance verified that.
Foals
2:15 @ Citi StageReview by Elliot Cole & photo by Randy Cremean
 Foals should have been entirely buried by its overseas hyperbole, another band drowning in the overly hyper hype machine. Too many bands garner an amazing amount of buzz, only to fall flat in their live set; it’s a phenomenon that we almost need to anticipate for the more unpolished, younger groups. One of the more pleasant themes of Lollapalooza, however, was that these bands were actually meeting (if not surpassing) those expectations. Foals, like The Ting Tings, displayed a surprisingly organized and tight set that shone on the band’s strength: noodling post-rock guitars and yelping dance-infused vocal lines.
After an introduction of something resembling whale sounds, the group segued into a solid set featuring the danceable (the Q and Not U-like “Cassius”) and the climactic (“Heavy Water”). Whereas their debut album, Antidotes, was slightly mechanical and dehumanized, the group’s live set unraveled a rawness that Foals needs to be successful. There is such a thing as being overly polished on an album, but seeing Foals live reminds us that they are, after all, still just a bunch of English dudes on guitars, delay pedals, and drums.
Playing with his guitar tight to his chest, frontman Yannis Philippakis and company proved to be fully capable of a festival performance. The only downside of the set was that the band’s positioning – in which Philippakis faces sideways instead of towards the crowd – didn’t exactly allow for intimacy. If it weren’t for the occasional audience interaction, the set could easily be misconstrued as a band practice with a few thousand people hanging around watching. Unique? Sure. Good for engaging a crowd? Not really.
“Two Steps, Twice” featured a Yannis that was more embracing of the crowd, as he hopped off the stage during the track. The more energetic songs (also including “Electric Bloom”) were also the most entertaining, while the delay pedal-soaked math rock tracks were mostly forgettable and flat. Nonetheless, as the band left the stage in a weave of distortion, it was apparent that they know how to put on a show, putting any fears of being over-hyped to rest...at least until the next backlash.
Booka Shade3:30 @ Citi Stage Review by Ryan FfrenchWhat happens when you bring darkly textured European minimal house music out into the sweltering heat and exhausting maximalism of an American outdoor festival? Does it melt and die? Does it become merely attention seeking background music? Or does it fake a technical difficulty and reserve the party for sometime safely after 2 a.m. the following morning? Well, as it turns out, if you’re Booka Shade you just morph into rock stars and proceed to bring the fucking house down.
Berlin’s Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier flew all the way to the States just for this hour-long, middle-of-the-day set (they’re already in Norway)—and, with oil prices as they are, they weren’t about to leave without making it something to write home about. Of course, the odds were stacked against them: a way-too-early slot in the lineup, a sound system not at all designed for dance music, the summer sun in their faces, and, let’s face it, a crowd (and country?) that, for the most part, has an interest in house music that rarely goes beyond hip-hop artists sampling Daft Punk.
No matter. From the opening blasts of Movements’ haunting “Night Falls”, it was clear that Herr Kammermeier came to put on a proper summer festival performance, exaggeratedly attacking his electronic drum kit and pumping fists into the air as if he were Ace Frehley or even Slash himself (who apparently showed up in a guest slot on the Kidz stage the very next day). It is my estimation that, in the hour that followed, the crowd grew by about 500%, as Kammermeier and Merziger stopped passers-by in their tracks with their engaging combination of hooky melodies, thumpy bass lines and charismatic stage-presence. And when it wasn’t the silky smooth adoption of Ahmurikan rock star personas, it was the crescendo-fixated intensity of album highlights like “Body Language” and “Mandarine Girl” that kept the now-huge crowd hanging on every beat.
But if Booka Shade’s take on the innovative house music scene (electrohouse, micro-house, k-house—whatever) works in settings as diverse as drug-addled Berlin basements and corporate-dominated U.S. music festivals, it’s only because their artfully crafted songs have but one function: to make people dance. And, without doubt, they did it better than anyone else this weekend. Jamie Lidell 5:30 @ MySpace Stage Review by Derek Wright & photo by Nathan Lanthrum  When Jamie Lidell sent members of his backing band into the crowd during his Saturday evening Lollapalooza set, he couldn’t have known that it would serve as a metaphor for his 55 minutes on stage. If he did, and he still allowed his mates to leave him solo on the MySpace stage for almost half an hour, the 34-year-old soul singer is more self-destructive than even his scatterbrained interviews and occasionally absurd concert getups let on.
Flanked by a geisha-clad saxophone player on his left and a bassist sporting a Super Dave Osborne and Evil Knievel-style jumpsuit on his right, Lidell took the stage to the first few notes of “Another Day,” the same track that opens his stellar 2008 release, Jim. Donning black slippers, stretched-tight navy blue slacks, and only a black tuxedo jacket, the British vocalist strutted his way through “Green Light” and “Figured Me Out” from that same album, before launching into the funky – and prophetic – “Out of My System.”
But by the time that Lidell’s smooth vocals belted out the tune’s repetitive chorus, “Gotta get this outta my system,” the thousands who skipped Okkervil River’s set at the festival’s opposite end were left wondering whether he was singing about his recent R&B material. And it wasn’t until after that fourth song did the irony of its opening lyric, “My doctor told me that I was not a machine,” take shape. After pitch-perfect renditions from his recent 1970s soul revival, the quirky performer reached in to his experimental roots’ bag of tricks and pulled out a half-hour beat box solo.
Sending his costume-wearing ensemble to join the gyrating masses, Lidell assumed a familiar position alone between a pair of laptop computers and a massive mixing board. By cupping the microphone in one hand and twisting knobs at a mad scientist’s rate with the other, his Stevie Wonder-like voice was manipulated into a fuzzy mess of special effects.
Yet, the actions of his now ground-level band mates mirrored Lidell’s gig. Although they were literally kicking up dust from the softball diamonds in Chicago’s Grant Park during their in-crowd dance routines, the band’s antics lost momentum quickly. After almost 10 minutes of wiggling their hips and shimmying through the crowd, they stopped and made a beeline for the backstage gate to resume their positions alongside Lidell. However, security was tight at Lollapalooza, and the staff member hadn’t noticed the musicians on stage and mistook them for just a couple of extravagant concertgoers. The two weren’t allowed to re-enter through the VIP gate and were forced to take the long route by way of another guard who had watched the events transpire.
The now off-track set seemed almost certain to stay derailed, especially since the crowd who had lost interest in Lidell’s vocal alterations was left with only his on-stage entertainment. By the time the full band returned to again riffle through songs, more than 30 minutes had passed.
With just enough time for a few more Jim cuts – “Where’d You Go?” and the coincidentally titled “Wait For Me” – Lidell and his exhausted supporting cast convened for a half-a cappella version of the title track to 2005’s Multiply.
The ode to the good ol’ days took on a slightly different twist for those who remained around long enough to see Lidell get back to doing what he does best ¬¬– singing. As the group moved from sharing a mic and standing arm-in-arm near the front of the stage, and went back to their regular positions at their instruments, the crowd’s cheers were at the loudest of the performance.
Unfortunately, the cheers might have been out of relief that Lidell wasn’t going to encore alone.
Okkervil River5:30 @ PlayStation 3 StageReview by Elliot Cole & photo by Randy Cremean
 Singer Will Sheff donned a nondescript suit complete with a skinny blue tie as Okkervil River took the stage. Their sound, however, was anything from nondescript: it was an emotive immersion into dynamic chamber-pop, indie rock, and alt-country. Sheff and company wailed, crooned, and swooned through an eclectic set that was muddled only by the PlayStation 3 Stage’s weekend-long sound problems.
“I don’t know what notes you want to hear,” sang Sheff, whose band dabbled in new material off of their upcoming album The Stand-Ins. His self-reflective lyrics were quickly disproved: Sheff knew exactly what we wanted to hear, and pleased the crowd with an eclectic mix of songs from 2007’s critically-lauded The Stage Names as well as the biting Black Sheep Boy. “Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe” and “Unless It’s Kicks” created a sense of urgency that made the set uplifting and interactive, featuring clap-a-longs and an actively engaging band. Okkervil did well not just to replicate their songs: each track had a life of its own, redone in the live setting.
The slower tracks were just as notable; impressive for a festival set that generally needs to be up-tempo to keep a crowd’s attention. “Pretend that it’s the night sky and there’s lighters in the air, not iPhones,” Sheff asked of the crowd. The ploy worked: tracks like “A Girl in Port” and crowd pleasers “For Real” and “Westfall” that had fans singing every word.
During the course of the performance, Sheff would eventually lose his tie and jacket, revealing a set of suspenders. It was a fitting sight, because Okkervil itself seems to be hanging on by a thread at times, capable of falling apart entirely into itself in the best possible way. Sheff’s voice cracked and the p.a. system struggled, but it was all for the best; Okkervil River is served well on the brink of chaos, held together only by suspenders and the dedication and charisma of the group, all the while proving that Okkervil is a rock band at heart.
Billed as Austin’s best indie rock export since Spoon, Okkervil did little to disprove the title on Saturday afternoon. Sheff had unfurled a balance of introspective lyricism and extroverted stage mannerisms that is certainly difficult to pull off, and, more importantly, an element that makes you feel involved in the performance. Sheff echoed the sentiment, exclaiming, in an impromptu moment, “We’re all here, we’re all singing this song!”
Broken Social Scene 7:30 @ Bud Light Stage Review by Elliot Cole & photo by Randy Cremean With Okkervil River’s vigorous set ending right before them, Broken Social Scene came out a little flat when the collective (it almost doesn’t seem fair calling an in-flux group with up to 19 members a “band”) began their set. With shades and a white fedora, the stylish Kevin Drew and unstylish, bearded Brendan Canning eventually found their groove once they introduced Stars’ Amy Millan four songs in for “7/4 (Shoreline)”.
The wobbling horns and impressive chemistry for the band ultimately won out, and a set that began dryly would sweep through moments lush, ethereal, poppy, and epic alike. The set was just as noted for its Obama praise. “You’re gonna vote for Obama. You’re gonna change the world,” Drew pronounced. “You can change it for everybody. You’re voting for every country.” While not the most original political spiel, it did earn the appreciation from the crowd. (The entire festival seemed like an Obama rally, from T-shirts to information pamphlets to rumors of him introducing Kanye West).
Political motivations aside, the band sounded terrific. “Farewell to the Pressure Kids” and Canning's new solo offering “Hit the Wall” were only a couple of highlights from a set that featured the culmination of an array of musicianship that is, somehow, in ridiculous precision.
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