I have survived the first day of the FYF fest and it was super intense! I landed on the field before 2 pm and got home after 1 am after seeing too many bands and walked too many miles to go to the four stages. The problem was the distance between the Miranda stage and the Carrie stage, I did alternate between the two quite often to see as many bands as possible and there were the most distant ones! I didn’t want to leave Thee Oh Sees, who were playing till 9:30 on the Miranda stage, to go to see TV on the Radio at 9:15 on the Carrie stage! Then I went back to the Miranda stage to see Black Flag at 9:55 and run again to the Carrie stage for Yeah Yeah Yeahs at 10:45! I was going crazy, I missed a bit of each band’s set, but I managed to see most of the acts I wanted to see.
The ambiance was far less punk, less hardcore than last year, and beside the amazing METZ (I stayed for their entire set, too bad for Mikal Cronin), and the almighty old guys of Flag, the tone was poppier, funkier than the previous years. Not too many clouds of dust raising from the moshing crowd at 3 pm, although there was plenty of crowd surfing during Joyce Manor, Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, and of course Flag’s respective sets… I totally skipped Death Grips so I don’t know what happened there.
The highlights of the night were certainly TV on the Radio and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on the Carrie Stage, they had drawn a huge crowd and I anticipate an even larger crowd for My Bloody Valentine tonight, since nobody is playing on the Miranda stage at the same time. But Joyce Manor, METZ, and Thee Oh Sees were fantastic, and I thought that Flag (the Morris-Dukowski-Stevenson team) played a much better set than Black Flag (the Ginn-Reyes team) last month at the Vex. Karen O was a fury, Charles Bradley is a star in the Otis Redding-James Brown sense of the term, there’s no doubt about it and the Deerhunter guys were weird, in a good way… but a guy wearing dress, oh we have seen this before!
I can’t feel my feet this morning with all that standing but I had brought a small foldable stool with me, which allowed me to grow a few inches taller in order to take pictures, because sadly I didn’t have a photo pass. Everybody was looking at me and a few people told me it was the best idea of the afternoon… I wouldn’t go that far, it was pretty basic stuff, a bonobo would have thought about it!
The heat was bearable and the night was not too cold, the dust was still there but it’s part of the FYF fest’s charm, the best weekend of the summer in Los Angeles, as they say.
