He is certainly pre Beatles, and pre everything that would fit his age – he is not even 30 – but he makes you swing in his well-oiled time travelling machine as if it was 1964.
Yeah, they were really hard to pigeonhole, and they get all sort of comparisons, but they probably don’t want to be pigeonhole as Summers is famous for saying he draws his influences from all over the place, and quite unintentionally, since he was raised in a strict Christian household and was forbidden to listen to any secular music until his late teens!
Krell’s vocals are so eerie, so high falsetto and so emotional and violent at the same time, that he seems to bring all his guts in action.
Their performance was very dreamy, very slow at first, installing a very ethereal and aching ambiance, sometimes going to more beats, but staying on the dark side of an electronic dance.
Their joyous pop was a bit hirsute and I am not especially talking about the ZZ Top look of the banjo player, but it was a total success among the crowd. There were vocal harmonies, a lot of this classical violin, operatic croon and a desire to go bombastic at each second.
Their awesome vintage sound had enough of this 60’s surf-y-bluesy guitars, and frontman Vincent Davies was doing enough of that Chuck Berry walk, to make them instantaneously loveable.
She appears on stage like a gracious and thin statuesque figure, quite dignified and she sang with a soulful and velvet voice,… I read that she interestingly describes her music as ‘a cross between Mary Poppins and Coldplay’, whatever this means, but I didn’t get the Coldplay vibe nor the Mary Poppins side, and I don’t think she was making allusion to her full-clothing
The result was quite minimalist, Amelia’s vocals were always front, but everyone was cheering at each of her moves,… I was taking tons of pictures and they came up all great. ‘Wait! Small adjustment’, she said while they had to move their equipment away from the sun, visibly ‘not used to direct sunlight’ and ‘designed for pale people in a basement’ as Nick Sanborn notice.
First, they were playing their most nonchalant songs, which did not prevent people to start crowd surfing right away, then frontman John Paul Pitts said they were going up a notch, and suddenly they were playing much faster with people going crazy along the very good and sunny harmonies of ‘Miranda’
With crowd’s favorites like ‘Feed me Now’, ‘Honest Feedback’ and ‘Benny Goodman’, they set the tone for a feel-good summer-time, yes it was a beautiful day and the music was driving the crowd into a festive and playful mood… but I almost forgot, just before their set, a wedding proposal happened on stage
He was charming the crowd with his melodious soul-jazz songs like ‘Dwell in the dark’, ‘Plastic’ and you could almost hear the rain tapping on the window,…they sounded like soothing lullabies, and then he joked about his new video for his song ‘Man on the Moon’, saying he was barely using the internet, ‘so it has been a struggle
Their effervescent electro-pop was marvelously working on the crowd as the sextet had visibly a lot of fun in their hometown, and they managed to brighten the atmosphere already extremely sunny, with a set of 10 uplifting songs. Youngblood Hawke on stage is a really enjoyable spectacle, they constantly deploy a non-stop energy
It was a quiet lo-fi, almost intimate affair, with a delicate and soft drumming, a sweet acoustic guitar, some dance-y rhythms and often three-voice-male-female harmonies. They started with a minimalist instrumentation, and then, little by little brought more people and more instruments into play.
I cannot say I was very impressed by her Pitchfork-proclaimed-best-new-music title, but there were so many fans pushing, trying to climb over the barricades, so many people backstage obstructing the view, so many police officers trying to contain the crazy fans that it was hard to tell.
Cults’ music has this sweet retro sound, building at each song a catchy power-pop borrowed from the Supremes or some other 60s Phil Spector’s band, with Madeline Follin’s powerful and childish vocals and a few dance groves underneath the apparent ballad style of the songs.
I was walking back and forth along the sidewalk during the first half of their performance, as the police wouldn’t let me stand still, but I managed to find a spot close to the stage later on, squeezing my way through a sea of people packed like sardines.
