Coachella 2014 has been streaming in my house since approximately 3 pm. I had a lot of work to do for school, and generally I don’t listen to music when I work, it just slows down my pace, but this time I decided to give it a try, just because it’s Coachella weekend. Everybody in LA is out there in the desert while I am stuck correcting piles of bad papers. I couldn’t watch anything yesterday because I was working, and so far I haven’t been blown away by any of the bands proposed on the three channels at https://www.youtube.com/user/coachella.
Sorry for Foxygen, White Lies, Chvrches, City and Colour, The Head and the Heart , Cage the Elephant, Washed out, Future Islands (the guy has the most raucous voice ever), Temples, Bombay Bicycle Club, Capital Cities, GTA, but for now they were just background music, music to do your homework with, literally! Could not be happier to be comfortably sitting, totally hydrated with my tea instead of roasting and sweating among these people. Sure there was Ty Segall and his crazy guitar work that woke me up, but I have seen him many times, even in intimate clubs, and now that he has moved to LA, I will have plenty of occasions. I have been surfing the three channels, and if they can’t cover the whole festival, they make a selection…no Julian Casablancas, no Sleigh Bells? Instead the awful (to me) EDM of GTA… Does this reflect the level of hotness of a band? Probably. Lorde is good, intriguing and even scary for some reasons but I don’t care much for her music, plus she is speaking too much.
A great advantage of this Coachella-in-your-living-room is the ability to switch from one stage to another at the click of the mouse, the stream is not even buffering and only for this it’s worth it, as they have greatly improved the technology,… still I am not finding greatness,… am I worn out? Has my regimen of too-many-concerts-per-week weakened my ability to appreciate a band behind a computer? I need the feeling of excitement in the air, the smell of the crowd, the vibrations in my legs, and there’s nothing like this right now. I change again and Warpaint are having a very Radiohead moment, then they bring something else on the plate, I can’t decide if I really love them or if they bore me, but Lorde is now wearing a pure gold cape, the freezing wind of the desert must have started and she looks like an apparition.
Foster the People are so big now, remember when they were playing free shows at the tiny Echo in LA just 4 years ago? Crazy, they are now on the main stage of Coachella at 9 pm! Still I haven’t been convinced of their star appeal, this is just vague disco dance music, I switch to the Pixies, and I remember when all the fuzz was about their reunion at Coachella in 2004, now they have toured and toured, got rid of an army of bassists, so the excitement is not the same. Still they are playing all their old hits and I am not complaining, yeah I am having fun for the first time of the night. The big news on Twitter is that Beyoncé jumped on Stage with Solange at the same moment, but YouTube Coachella doesn’t bothers for Solange’s set and equally I don’t care when Black Francis is singing ‘Where is my mind’!! And the fun continues with Queens of the Stone Age which are always amazing live and I have seen them twice last year. When are they headlining this Coachella thing? They should, Josh Homme would kick Matt Bellamy’s butt faster than he can say ‘Supermassive Black Hole’. ‘Nicotine, valium, vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy and alcohol’,… slow down, no need to remind these kids Josh, … Still I would have loved to see a bit of Mogwai (not offered), instead we have MGMT and their sugary-trippy melodies, I don’t dislike them, I saw them at the FYF fest, but right now, they just sound like kids on ecstasy planting daisies when the Queens on amphetamine annihilated the place. There is now Pharrell Williams and his Canadian/Arbys hat, and it’s getting old, plus I had no idea he had such a falsetto. He sounds like a raspy imitation of Michael Jackson (he has problems with his voice) minus the moonwalk. I heard Beck wants to record something with him, probably to do Midnight Vultures #2 following his Sea Change #2 he put out this year? But back to Pharrell, he is cute but a bit boring, is he really playing in front of a Coachella crowd, or is this low-energy? Then he brings all the guests rappers, Nelly, Busta Rhymes, Diddy, Tyler the creator, Snoop Doggy, Diplo, Gwen Stefani (he called her the queen and everyone was expecting Beyonce, I am so confused)… and this saved the show and his voice…. could he stop apologizing for his voice for a minute? Yes there is dust and wind at Coachella, didn’t he know that? He just has to let the crowd do the singing, there is no way he’ll be able to finish this ‘Happy’ song… I waited a bit but Muse never came… Coachella 2014 day 2, the day when Pharrell invited the whole music business on stage and lost his voice, I can’t tell if Bellamy managed to beat the wind and the sand because YouTube Coachella decided to not broadcast Muse? How come? they were the headliners!! I was ready to go for the whole stadium-rock again, but instead we got diminutive Skrillex and his super annoying noise… I am so ready for sleep! Checking channel 2 one more time before and Nas is on stage with… guest Jay Z of course, another good reason to go to bed.