With the sun quietly resting its head behind an adjacent chapel, Beirut's wunderkind Zach Condon graciously remarked over his gentle strumming, This might be the biggest crowd this ukulele has ever played for.""
Pitchfork Media's fifth installment of the Pitchfork Music Festival once again featured three days of indie rock's most hyped and glorified bands, jam-packed with both massive crowds and impressive music.
The weekend flew by in a violent storm of sweat and mud. Friday's ""Write the Night"" campaign proved undeniably fruitful as the perennially awesome Yo La Tengo and Built to Spill plowed through impressively youthful sets. Saturday started and ended with a bang, offering everything from Fucked Up's unapologetic brashness to The Pains of Being Pure at Heart's adorable if excusably sloppy and timid swagger to the Black Lips' blizzard of hysteria and sombreros.
On Sunday afternoon, a few thousand people watched Pharoahe Monch and his cast of soul singers teeter around hip-hop perfection, while later M83 played one of the most manic sets of the weekend, pushing the limits of both the stage and their lungs. Japandroids fit in as many rambunctious jams as they could in their abbreviated time, flailing wildly with the kind of energetic passion that bleeds from their debut LP, Post-Nothing.
The festival did have a few hiccups, though. Doom's set was disappointingly uninspired, and a handful of bands struggled through roughshod sound engineering. The Thermals downright crashed and burned because of an underwhelming guitar sound. The National were a questionable choice to headline a night, especially considering both Beirut and Grizzly Bear were waiting in the wings in set-up roles.
Annoying scheduling conflicts come with the territory at festivals, but Saturday night's opposing sets from Beirut and Matt and Kim followed by contending shows from the Black Lips and the National seemed excessively inconvenient, leaving festivalgoers to ponder which band was actually headlining.
Overall, though, the sonic onslaught was relentless, each group dropping their inhibitions at the coat check and taking turns playing over their heads, winning over a whole slew of new listeners at every turn. Ultimately, Pitchfork succeeded brilliantly in concocting a potent mixture of passion and energy, but what proved most integral in hindsight was their insistence on placing the focus on the music, whether by choice or necessity.
Although temperatures were the most comfortable in the festival's short history, Pitchfork seemed to be feeling the heat of the nation's recession. Most of the sponsors' tents were noticeably scaled down, and they stopped providing printouts of the festival's schedule at the gate.
However, even with the apparent shortage of funds, festival organizers kept their wits about them and dug deep, bringing in younger, though still consistent acts. There was very little to distract from the goings-on on the stages, and without the plethora of bands with crossover appeal that have torn through Union Park in the past, Pitchfork pulled out their wild card in one of the music world's most surefire hits: the Flaming Lips.
Pitchfork has become the definitive voice on indie music, seemingly creating success with their reviews instead of just reporting on it. It's gone from the Internet's best-kept secret to a household name, attracting undivided devotion from snobbish music savants worldwide.
As disconcerting as the explosion in readership might be for casual long-time readers, there's more than enough room on the Internet for everyone. And while the popularity of the site's festival can seem overwhelming, there's definite comfort in knowing that so many people share your affinity for Built to Spill's ""Carry the Zero"" and the National's ""Mistaken For Strangers.""
There's something compelling about this overflowing presence, too. There's an invisible inner circle inside Pitchfork. Sets at Lollapalooza and Coachella are great for bands to network, bump their resume or vindicate their hard work, but a set at Pitchfork has legs, and a successful stint can be as good as a ""Best New Music"" label, single-handedly driving a band from dive bars to superstardom in the ever-blossoming indie community. Grizzly Bear played a mid-afternoon set just two summers ago, and since then has grown to be a featured name just behind the Flaming Lips. Likewise, Spoon, Yo La Tengo, the National and the Walkmen, among others, have returned to the festival in larger roles, carrying with them more fans and more accomplished resumes.
The bubble surrounding this burgeoning presence is flush with the oversaturation of music, squeezing in bands far beyond capacity; and paired with a struggling economy, it seems this bubble is reaching a bursting point.
The most anticipated set of the weekend was undoubtedly that of world-rompers the Flaming Lips. The band entered the festival's Aluminum Stage by climbing through a video projection of a woman's pulsating ""no-no zone"" and Wayne Coyne rolling atop the masses in a blow-up gerbil exercise ball. But the more time Coyne spent between songs expressing his adoration of Chicago, the more the weekend came crashing down around him. Devoting abundant time to lauding his own band's merits, Coyne and Co. might have given the festival the ending it needed, but not the one it deserved.
Armed to the teeth with confetti guns and massive balloons, the Flaming Lips attracted somewhere around twice the audience present at any other set of the weekend. They were the event's clear breadwinner, likely giving Pitchfork the economic stimulus it needed to outlast and promptly laugh at any recession. However, when paired with the rest of the festival's itinerary (by this hour unmistakably coated in blood and sweat, scoffing in the face of failure), Coyne and his band's on-stage antics seemed more like gimmickry, pleas for attention or, at worst, acts of desperation. They were the kind of commercialized approach that serves as the antithesis to the festival's ruthlessly DIY underbelly.
This is excessively harsh criticism of one of modern rock's most alluring stage shows, but it serves as an intriguing narrative for how Pitchfork fits into the modern music world. Nowadays people are looking for any sort of edge to get noticed, but no flamboyant headdress or pyrotechnic backdrop is going to earn the respect of the indie-rock faithful on its own. At a time when music is consumed in gigabytes and music zines are shuffled through like playing cards, Pitchfork has proven to have a keen understanding of the one thing that will keep rock 'n' roll forever appealing and keep the website perpetually relevant. By lining the festival with the sort of quality-above-quantity DIY rockers who take time off of music only to wipe their own brows, they've ensured that, though media's bubble might burst, the deserving debris will land where they belong: comfortably strumming their ukuleles in front of the sun's accommodating rays and the contented smiles of their adoring fans.
