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April 29, 2008
Coachella: Sifting through the goods
[Pssst]
Checking in from the late hours from a dark and sleepy California night. There was no live music to see today. Just the task of gathering ourselves and heading back into the real world. Which is maybe why the weekend is catching up to me as hard as it is, forcing a slow down.
Here are some really quick highlights to add some protein to the sprinkling of notes sent from Coachella via our Twitter outpost.
Friday:
The National was amazing. The Raconteurs not only sound more put together as a band than ever before, they are looking and sounding terrifyingly great together. Datarock came out of nowhere (for me anyway) and beat you into acceptance. Their rousing numbers were super sized dosages of pep. Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings gave by far the most energetic performance by any artist and one of the best overall of the weekend. I'll say it again, this woman is the female James Brown. Spank Rock didn't show due to "being sick" and his replacements sounded like sissy white rappers. That's because there were a couple of white female rappers substituting. Not sure everyone who missed the announcement realized this in the tent. Now you know. Black Lips were pretty good, but it's hard to get past the caricatures on stage.
Saturday
To me Bonde do Role were more noisy kids screwing around with records and microphones than brilliant innovators of emerging mashed up styles. St. Vincent was cute and awkward in her stage banter. Stephan Malkmus looked like grandpa beekeeper, was vocally proud fronting the Jicks, and the noodling music was extraordinarily loud. Hot Chip brought the house down. Not three notes were played before the dance tent turned into insta-rave. The desert should cease rattling from the sensational performance of "Over & Over" any day now. Islands got started late, seemed to have a problem setting something up, dealing with it in a "temporary, but not quite pleased with solution" type of way only to have whatever it was arise as an issue during the set. It was weird and ate into their momentum, but no plagues of locust to report. I literally sprinted around the fields to see some Kraftwerk before sneaking in to a over capacity dance tent for M.I.A. Disappointing, but not terribly. M.I.A. fell into the pitfalls of every bad hip hop show I've ever been to. Too much MCing, too much crowd baiting, not enough actual performances to back up the build up. Somehow managed to catch a whiff of Animal Collective, but it was just too short to have an opinion. Portishead sounded crisp, clean and pretty great. I'll defer to my Portishead obsessed friends for direct quotes, forthcoming. Prince played forever and left no doubt in anyone's mind on his abilities and talents as a performer.
Sunday
It seemed like we had nothing going on for a good part of this day. The Field didn't show for their scheduled midday set due to allegedly being denied access into the country by the US government. Looking back though, we saw Duffy, Gogol Bordello, My Morning Jacket, a babbling Sean Penn saying nothing noteworthy (though I'll report on it later anyway), Sons & Daughters, Roger Waters, and Justice.
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Coming soon...details, tons and tons of photos, and furthering of mostly everything mentioned above.
Posted by Merry Swankster at April 29, 2008 03:56 AM
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