ANSWERED: should you go to Pitchfork this summer?
ICYMI: last time, I made Spotify and YouTube playlists for the artists performing at Pitchfork this July to decide if the festival is worth attending.
Hi all,
Hopefully this letter finds you in something resembling good health.
Since our last correspondence, SXSW was cancelled, American universities are banning on-campus classes for the rest of the semester, and Joakim Noah signed with the Clippers.
...also the entire world is working from home, what feels like every gathering of people has been postponed, and the Chipotle in my hometown closed for good.
"But other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
Well, I'll likely discard the deep dive I was planning on doing for the upcoming comedy festival in Melbourne, as that was cancelled, too, but our question from last time still has some merit.
Because in spite of all this – and in truly on-brand, non-conformist spirit – Pitchfork's music festival in July soldiers on! Here's an excerpt from an email they sent out Friday afternoon:
3/13 Statement on Coronavirus from Pitchfork Music Festival Chicago
"Pitchfork takes the health and safety of all our attendees and colleagues very seriously, and we have been closely monitoring the developments of COVID-19 ... with the festival four months away, we are still planning on throwing a great festival for you all July 17-19, 2020 in Chicago. We will continue to monitor as the industry, city, and health officials update large-event procedures, and we will implement and communicate those procedures to ticket-holders..."
So in these trying times, it might be nice to take your mind off the whole, "impending end of modern civilization" thing by cracking open an Emergen-C packet, slapping on some Purell, and unwinding with a long-winded article that ultimately decides if this year's Pitchfork festival is worth attending. In the interest of making this somewhat digestible, I'll just cover Friday's lineup this go-around:
To recap:
Below is this year's Pitchfork lineup
HERE is a Spotify playlist of everyone on the bill
HERE is a YouTube playlist containing live sets of many of the acts:
Let's go artist by artist, and see what we discovered.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
For many of you, I suspect the Yeah Yeah Yeahs to fall into your "Known Unknown". You probably recognize their song Heads Will Roll, which was popularized in Todd Phillips' 2012 film Project X, and by Prom Night party buses throughout the nation. You also may recall their song Maps having an exhaustingly-present bass drum on Rock Band.
The case for wanting to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs live starts and ends with their song Sacrilege. Any band capable of providing the build that occurs from 2:26 until the song's end is something I definitely want to experience in person.
If my 5,200 word analysis of Jesus Is Born was not indicative enough, I'm a sucker for a gospel breakdown. The one from 3:38 onward is no exception (and how about that killer high note at 3:51 to take us home?!)
I'd be more thrilled to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as the 5th or 6th name on a lineup, rather than as a headliner, but there's no doubt they'll fit the bill, and put on a show.
Angel Olsen
As NPR's Bob Boilen puts it in the YouTube bio of her 2014 Tiny Desk Concert:
"Watch her and you'll see calm in her eyes; listen to her and you'll sense torment in her heart"
By the thirty second mark, it's easy to see what he means. Her aching flips from head to chest voice and minimalist, downstroke-heavy strumming creates a comforting dissonance, and results in the type of song endings that take the audience a moment to come back to reality, and remember to applaud.
Stand-Out Track: Shut Up Kiss Me
The Fiery Furnaces
30 seconds of Googling tells me this is a locally-born sibling band who split up in May 2011 to pursue solo careers. Since then, Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger have released a combined eight solo albums, and this appearance is their first time playing together in nearly a decade. So uhh, no pressure.
I tried listening to their past stuff, and really could not get into it. Their recordings have that intentionally DIY feel, but on songs like Tropical Iceland, it tends to be more irritating than endearing.
Jehnny Beth
Not much of her solo work is publicly available, but gauging from her music videos on YouTube and limited discography on Spotify, I'd describe her solo work as a mix of chaos, rock, and performance art. I still can't figure out the time signature of this song, which always bothers me.
But she's French, was the frontwoman of Savages, and knows how to command a stage, so seeing her live might be worth taking a chance on.
Deafheaven
There are three main buckets the human voice is typically evaluated by in the context of music: its function as a melodic instrument, its function as a rhythmic/percussive instrument (most notably in hip-hop), and its ability to serve as a conduit for meaning. Most of the music I like checks all three boxes.
But if you watched more than 30 seconds of this Deafheaven performance, and earnestly commented, "How do some people not like the singing??! It's like listening to an angel in pain it's so beautiful", you are fundamentally weighing those three buckets vastly different than I am.
Oddly enough, those are the exact words I would use to describe my affinity for Angel Olsen's vocal performance in her aforementioned Tiny Desk concert.
Maybe they're called Deafheaven because if you listen to enough of their music, you'll eventually become deaf, and feel like you're in heaven, because you won't have to listen to their convulsing vocalist anymore.
Look - I'm not here to bash death metal, or "second wave ambient black-gaze", or the dozen other things Deafheaven is labeled as in the YouTube comment section of their previous Pitchfork appearance. I can appreciate the emotional catharsis that death metal and its adjacent subgenres provides for avid listeners.
I'm not even going to pretend their lyrics lack depth - they're simply inaccessible to the average listener.
The artistic choice of making an element of your music deliberately difficult to understand as some sort of gatekeeping tactic just seems self-serving and pointless. If set to pitch, people could actually make out these words, and probably enhance their listening experience.
Still, I'll chalk them up as something worth experiencing in the context of a multi-day festival. Presumably, most of Deafheaven's angsty fans have only ever blasted these songs in their Skullcandy headphones, and this is their first time being around so many other people who similarly know all the grunts to their favorite songs. In turn, it'd be a little entertaining to observe the crowd decide when it's appropriate to somberly mosh together.
Their tone is also so drastically different from the cavalcade of "wispy-voiced female vocalists with an acoustic guitar" on this lineup, that it might be a refreshing change of pace.
Speaking of "wispy-voiced female vocalists with an acoustic guitar"...
Waxahatchee
Watch her Tiny Desk Concert HERE:
Stand-out Track: Bathtub
No, Waxahatchee is not that one sleepaway camp that allows peanut butter, she's a person. This is the exact type of act I associate with Pitchfork: a lo-fi, vaguely nostalgic series of soothing chord progressions combined with melancholy lyricism. Not quite as soul-crushing as Angel Olsen, nor as energetic as Hop Along.
Tim Hecker & The Konoyo Ensemble
I assume The Konoyo Ensemble is the additional sound engineers and recording artists involved with creating Tim Hecker's 2018 album Konoyo.
If so, Tim Hecker & the Konoyo Ensemble is the odds-on favorite on this lineup to make boring people feel compelled to fill the deliberate gaps in time during their set by saying things like, "DuDeEe iMaGiNe WhAt KiNd oF DrUGs ThEy WeRe oN wHeN tHeY mAdE tHiS!?".
This feels more like the score to a Planet Earth episode than an album you'd pay to experience live and with other people. P4k is putting a lot of faith in their venue's sound team to ensure this album sounds even close to as sonically complete as it does in a pair of nice headphones. Kudos to the curators for including something different, it's just not for me.
SOPHIE
Live DJ sets, with their erratic lights and hard beat drops, generally feel repetitive to me after a few minutes. A set like this would be a lot more enjoyable if there was a camera directly over SOPHIE's hands that projected what she was doing onto the venue's massive screens. Then there could be an opportunity for technical appreciation, and also confirm she actually is doing something during these performances, instead of just pressing play.
Fennesz
Basically the same critique as the previous two acts, although Fennesz feels slightly more entertaining to watch for 40 minutes than SOPHIE or Tim Hecker because all his sounds are made with a guitar. Still, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Hop Along
Again, I'll defer to Bob Boilen's description from their Tiny Desk Concert bio:
Let's talk about Frances Quinlan's voice for a moment... she whispers with a rasp that feels small, yet embodies the fears we try not to name; then, she throws her head back to ask, 'Who is gonna talk trash long after I'm gone?' That gut-punching howl shatters like a plate on a concrete floor... Quinlan's singular voice is the focus, but not what ultimately completes Hop Along, a guitar-based rock band that messes with the soft-loud dynamic in busy and urgent arrangements...
Their Tiny Desk goes from good to great at the 7:30 minute mark of their second song, "Well-Dressed". They could probably do that four-chord, "doo" section for a full set, and nobody would mind.
Yeah, they rock.
Dehd
Most recent album release - Water (2019)
Stand out track: Lucky
Generally in agreement with their bio on Spotify, in that "...[Dehd's] music is hazy and reverb-drenched, a scuzzy and hyped up take on surf rock".
Admittedly, after reading that description, I spent most of my first listen to Water by checking if there already exists a band called Scuzzy, because it sounds like the name of an awesome jam band.
Unfortunately, the only Scuzzy on Spotify hasn't released any new music since 2012, and their "song" Sexy Lisa is... certainly a combination of notes.
While Scuzzy might have been a disappointment, I did discover an artist called Scuzz Twittly. No, that's not a rejected Key & Peele East/West Bowl name, he's a self-described "one-man wrecking machine", whose album "Call Me Scuzz" is something I was fully unprepared for.
...I've since listened to an embarrassing amount of Scuzz Twittly's discography and I have to say, never before has an artist so consistently compelled me to want to shower after listening to their music.
Though I can't in good conscience recommend you listen to Scuzz Twittly, here are some titles of other songs on Call Me Scuzz. Any auditory decisions you make after knowing these in advance is fully on you:
Five Pound Sack
I Like Boobs
In Love With Yer Giner
The Snatches of Natchez
If nothing else, Dehd's Water serves as some pleasant ear bleach after, "The Snatches of Natchez"...
SPELLING
Shoutout to Pitchfork for putting on a band whose most played song on Spotify has fewer than 5,000 plays.
It doesn't give me any rabbit holes to go down while listening, but I appreciate the simplicity of their bio, "Spelling is a band of dear friends from Boston, Massachusetts".
It seems obvious to compare their sound to Nirvana or Alice in Chains, and inevitable to use the word "grunge" to describe the type of rock exhibited here, but I definitely dig their sound.
Check out the dramatic tempo shift at 1:03 on Hair of the Dog.
They cycle back and forth between those two tones throughout the song. This is the type of arrangement that lends itself to exciting live performances, as any type of dramatic modification to the dynamics is going to pique the attention of anyone half-listening in the vicinity.
It also distracts from the shoddy lyricism, "I'm chasing the dog, he's got rabies, I'm changing my mind, it's all maybe's"....
KAINA
Stand Out Track: La Luna
Her Audiotree session is a fairly good barometer of what to expect in terms of song choices (predominantly her 2019 release, Next to the Sun), and her voice feels like a hug. The production is reminiscent of Save Money, complete with slightly cacophonic self-harmonies, and trumpets galore.
Femdot
Stand Out Track: 94 Camry Music
He's Chicago-based, and has a Smino feature on his recent album, which is cool I guess. The lyrics are decent, but something feels lacking. Worth seeing live just in case he opens his set with someone saying BRING IN THE FEMDOT!!!!
Overall, not exactly blown away by this lineup so far. Friday feels more like an assembly of sonic landscapes, rather than a curation conducive to lively, entertaining shows.
I would probably only pay to see three of the 14 acts on this day (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Angel Olsen, Hop Along), and would need to talk myself into any of the rest.
3/14 is hardly astounding. If the lineup thus far were a three-point shooting percentage, it would rank 400th in the NBA, which is somehow slightly above Wendell Carter Jr.'s season average this year!
I appreciate the curation leaning local for the lesser-known acts, but so far, P4k 2k20 is a pass.
But who knows? That could all change as I unpack the catalogs of those performing Saturday and Sunday. At first glance, Saturday seems like the clear best day, so hopefully that review has a bit more oomph to it.
To close, I thought I'd share an excerpt from C.S. Lewis' “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948):
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
...so hopefully that did something for you.
If you're in need of a laugh, Australian comedian Sam Campbell just put out this full-length recording of a live show he recently did in LA which made me laugh really hard.
If you're in need of listening to pleasant music that has the subtext of "everything is going to be okay", here's my personal go-to playlist for that.
And of course, if you're in need of music that will, if nothing else, remind you to wash your hands, there's always our good friend Scuzz Twittly.
Until next time,