On to Sunday......(For folks wondering what happened to Friday: I was watching the Broadway play Jersey Boys with my parents while Nick, Erika, and Adam were seeing Yo La Tengo and Built to Spill.)
The first full show we saw was M83, a French electronic band. These guys were great, but I don't think their YouTube videos do them justice. Here's one anyway.
Next, Grizzly Bear. I really like these guys but wasn't all that impressed with their live performance. Again, I think the venue sucked and maybe I was fed up by that point with bad audio.
Mew. Only caught a brief portion of this show, but here's a song that Erika loves and we missed.
The festival ended with The Flaming Lips. The show started a little strangely but was highly entertaining. There was a screen at the back of the stage. A naked woman walked across the screen, then layed on her back. Not sure the best way to describe it, but she then gave "birth" to the band following the simulation of an orgasm. Wayne Coyne emerged from a bubble that I believe was to represent the placenta? Once the placenta/bubble was completed infalated, he walked through the crowd--standard, I believe.
Hmmmmmm, look what I found. I actually was going to delete all of the above but was fairly proud of my description and decided to leave it.
After the birthing of the band, they then shot off confetti and dropped balloons on the crowd. Woo Hoo! In my opinion, things went downhill from there. Wayne Coyne talked for two minutes after EVERY song. He spent most of the time talking about "Write the Night" that was set up so that fans could request songs for them to play. He was obviously a little bitter about this and let the crowd know it. After four or five songs, he started sounding upset that the crowd wasn't "getting into it". Well, I'm not in a band, but if I were, I think I would understand that getting a crowd pumped up at the very beginning of a show and then following it with a lot of rambling and complaining about playing songs they want to hear, would do that to a crowd. Again, I don't know if speeches between songs is standard for The Flaming Lips, but if Coyne would just shut up and sing and worry more about the music than all the gimmicks, the band would probably have a descent live show. Sadly, they do not. Here's the band performing "Fight Test" at Pitchfork and provides proof of why I think this show sucked. You can apparently watch the entire concert on YouTube, but I wouldn't waste my time.
I always thought this song sounded like Cat Stevens "Father and Son", so I checked it out on Wikipedia-my source for somewhat factual information. And I quote....."The song "Fight Test" is musically very similar to Cat Stevens' 1970 song "Father and Son." Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, is receiving royalties following a relatively noncontentious settlement."
2 comments:
Oh man, that sucks about Flaming Lips set not being good. I've seen them 3 times before and every time it has been super fun and a good experience from the perspective of the extras they add and the music. You should really give them another shot. I had read an interview with Wayne where he talked about lots of the songs that people vote for being poor live choices because they aren't very interesting to play or don't translate well into live settings. Too bad he brought his baggage on stage.
Cat Stevens did tell them it was his song and they said "Whoops, you're right. Here's some money." Which seems to be Cat Steven's thing now-a-days. He said the same thing about a new Coldplay song, which Joe Satriani also said, but then Cat Stevens didn't ask for any money he just said "Yeah, I've done so many songs that I even copy myself." Joe Satriani is still pissed.
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