Fun Fun Fun Fest Recap

So this weekend was Fun Fun Fun Fest, the newer, smaller, more indie-focused music festival in Austin. It's a very different environment than that of ACL for a number of reasons. First of all, the November weather is much more conducive to a day in the park than the September hear. Also, FFFFest brilliantly got rid of the hour-long wait between acts at most festivals by splitting each stage so that one band could set up while the other band played, making it a maximum of ten minutes between shows. Most importantly, however, FFFFest is far stinkier than ACL. As I touched on earlier, FFFFest is only indie bands, metal bands and DJs, who all have incredibly stinky fans. The entire place reeked of vintage elitism. Regardless, it was a fun time...

Day 1

I started my day at Okkervil River, who most recent album has been in constant rotation on my iPod. Singer Will Sheff, clad in a nice three-piece suit, occasionally let his emotions get the best of him, with his voice occasionally cracking and quavering due to his on-stage freakouts. Regardless, standouts such as "For Real" and "Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe" sounded great as the band had a much meatier sound than they have on their records.

Immediately after Okkervil on the same stage was Of Montreal, who are always impossibly fun live. They didn't play anything older than Satanic Panic in the Attic, but their mostly-drum machine based set certainly had the crowd in a frenzy. I didn't take any pictures, but the costumes were obviously over the top and hilarious. With about fifteen minutes left in their
set, the lights went out and Kevin Barnes thought that he was being kicked off the stage so he threw a fit and ended early. However, they sorted everything out and came back out for a "totally unironic" cover of "Purple Rain. I never thought I'd say this about anyone, but Barnes might just be a bit too effeminate to carry The Purple One's classic.

The New Pornographers followed, with a set leaning heavily on their recent Challengers disc. Fortunately, all three core members are on this tour, with Carl Newman and Neko Case singing the whole time and Dan Bejar occasionally putting down his beer and coming onstage to sing. As much as I love their records, the New Pornographers really aren't a terribly exciting live band. Perhaps it was because I just noticed that Carl Newman has a lisp or maybe it was that they focused on material which was a bit boring, but nobody other than Bejar seemed to have any kind of stage presence. In spite of that, "Mass Romantic", "Jackie Dressed in Cobras" and "Myriad Harbour" were all beautiful and fun to see live.

After this I went to the hip-hop stage to see Girl Talk which was the disappointment of the festival. I'd been pretty into Night Ripper for a few months, so I was pretty pumped to go to a big dance party and watch Greg Gillis spin. He certainly had a lot of energy, as he invited everyone onstage to dance around to his set. The problem was that A) I had a bunch of stinky indie kids touching me from all over the place and B) the set was pretty terrible. While Girl Talk's albums are fluid and focused on recognizable parts of popular songs, the live set was pretty meandering and annoying. Disappointed, I made my way to Explosions in the Sky, who were pretty incredible. All of the songs they played were intertwined, and they alternated between beautiful energy lows to bone-crunching highs. Their songs moved so fluidly that they would start shredding and pounding on the drums and you wouldn't even notice until your ears started to hurt.

Day 2:

The Day 2 lineup was not quite as rich, but the two bands that I wanted to see were both very intriguing. The first was Ted Leo and his Pharmacists, who I had seen the year before at ACL. Ted Leo is one of my very favorite musicians working today, because he delivers on absolutely every level. He's a guitar hero, and excellent lyricist, and most importantly he's a showman. The energy level onstage was amazing, with everyone from Leo to his Will Oldham-looking drummer seemed hellbent on making everyone in the audience certain that they were at a punk rock show. There were notable omissions from the setlist such as "The High Party" and "La Costa Brava", but "Biomusicology" was a nice surprise, as was their super-fun cover of Daft Punk's "One More Time".

The last band I saw at the festival was Battles, who were far and away the most bizarre show of the weekend. The instrumental math rock group with the super groovability was very technically proficient, with two members playing piano with one hand and guitar with the other. All four members played at incredible speed and showed a great knack for combining sounds in
interesting ways, but it was apparent that these people were not normal people. It seemed like they were trying to do "rock moves", but it all ended up looking like a bunch of muscle spasms. It was a bit disconcerting how much they relied on pedals and computers, making it hard to tell when they were actually playing and when they were playing a loop or a recording, but they were nonetheless very impressive with their mastery of their instruments.

So that was Fun Fun Fun Fest in a nutshell. Cat Power is playing as I'm writing this, but I skipped her to come home and watch Curb Your Enthusiasm. I figure if I missed the LSU, Texas, and Colts games this weekend, I at least owed myself some Larry David.