Bumbershoot: Day Two Retrospective

On paper, at least, Day Two of Bumbershoot looked like the least rewarding.  Not a bad day by any means, but not as promising as Days One and Three.  Sundays are like that sometimes.  For starters, I "only" had passes to one Music Lounge performance, but it was a noontime set by Portland's inimitable Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside, a great way to get a day started.   

We've seen Sallie Ford before, once back at MFNW 2011 when she played her native Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square, and again last spring at Smith's Olde Bar in Atlanta, when she opened for Thao & The Get Down Stay Down.  Her main Bumbershoot set this year was Saturday night (Day One), but winning the passes to her Music Lounge set on Sunday freed me up to go see Washed Out instead that night.

In any event, her rockabilly-influenced set was a very pleasant way to kick off the day.

Outside and in the sunshine, I caught a set by L.A.'s The Mowgli's at the Fisher Pavilion.

The Mowgli's are an indie folk-rock band, somewhat similar to, say, Milo Greene and Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, but without all the acoustic instrumentation. If you like the sing-alongs and hand clapping of folk-rock bands but have heard enough banjos, mandolins, glockenspiels, and xylophones to last a lifetime, The Mowgli's might be the band for you.  There's got to be a niche for that, amiright?  

In any event, The Mowgli's were fun and refreshing, and continued the feel-good vibe started by Sallie Ford, but brought it out to the sunny outdoors.

Portland's Ramona Falls promised to be one of the highlights of my day, and lived up to that promise.  I was able to get right up in front of the Fountain Lawn stage for their performance, leaning against the security rail that marks the no-man's-land between the stage and the audience.

We saw Ramona Falls earlier this year at the godforsaken Masquerade in Atlanta, and we looked forward to hearing what they could do with the fine Bumbershoot sound system.  

Ramona Falls is lead by singer and composer Brent Knopf, formerly of the band Menomena.  Now, it would be totally sexist of me to have made snide comments yesterday about Thao wearing the same dress at Bumbershoot that she had worn at Smith's Olde Bar without also pointing out that Knopf wore the same t-shirt at Bumbershoot that he had worn at the godforsaken Masquerade earlier this year.

The drummer's t-shirt was new to me, though.

Ramona Fall's music is cerebral and somewhat angular without being inaccessible or "difficult."  The songs often change style and tempo as they proceed, often leaving the listener wondering just how they got to where they are now.  Knopf explained a little of his creative process in a TEDx lecture earlier this year.

He may be the only performer I've seen all week who's given a TED talk (David Byrne and Andrew Bird have also given TED talks, but unfortunately were not on the schedule this week).

So that was fun and all.  After Ramona Falls, I ventured over to the Fisher Pavilion to catch the punk band FIDLAR ("Fuck it, dog, life's a risk").  There was very little risk that anybody in FIDLAR had given a TED lecture recently. Their music was loud and obnoxious in the fine tradition of punk, and their songs were all about beer, drinking, getting wasted, and, um, drinking.  I stayed a good way back from the security rail for this one, as a pretty vigorous mosh pit had developed in front of the stage.  Several young men rushed past me at various points during the performance to dive into the melee, never to be seen again.  

Speaking of t-shirts (as we were earlier), FIDLAR frontman Zac Carper's had the words “straight edge” handwritten in sharpie across the front with a giant X through it.  He claimed that a phone number written on an amp belonged to Taylor Swift.  Nobody believed him, but several guys wrote it down anyway. You can see the number on the amp behind him in the picture above; try it if you like and tell Taylor I said "Hi."

Carper introduced one song saying, “This song’s about rehab and how much it sucks.”  Helpfully, he also pointed out that "It gets better the more you drink.”  I wasn't sure if he was talking about rehab or his set.

“This is by far the longest set we’ve ever played,” Carper pointed out. “Our sets are usually 20 minutes. This is brutal.”

This is probably a band I would never go to see live back home, as their target audience is obviously teens, but that's a part of the appeal of a festival like this - you can stick your toe in the water of various performances and get a little taste, without the commitment of total immersion in the experience. So, yes, now I can check hearing a snotty, California skate-punk band off my bucket list. 

After FIDLAR, I did a lot of wandering around before I settled down.  This, apparently, is Midday Veil, a goth, drone-metal band from Seattle, playing at the Plaza Stage.

I kind of liked them, but the Plaza Stage was smack in the middle of the sun, so I wandered over to the Fisher Pavilion and caught a little of Seattle's Katie Kate, filling in for Charlie XCX. 

Hey, look!  It's 1960's icon Eric Burden with his newly re-formed The Animals, playing at The Starbucks Stage.  I have no idea why he was wearing the gray hoodie in the sun and the heat.

I finally settled down at the Fountain Lawn and watched Mates of State, a husband-and-wife keyboards-and-drums duo.  This is probably what Matt & Kim will look like in 10 years. 

At this point in the day, I finally got something to eat and even took a 10-minute power nap.  Revived and re-fueled, I re-claimed the rail position at the front of the Fountain Lawn stage for the fine New Zealand dream-pop band Tamaryn.

The band seemed so committed to their dream-pop sound, they often appeared to actually be sleeping at various times during their set, as if they were playing in some sort of lucid dream state.  Still, the set was far from drowsy but instead was a sensual, languid performance.

The singer, Tamaryn, produced a dozen red roses during one song, waved them around some, and then tossed petals out toward the audience.  I don't think any made it past the security no-man's-land, and I saw petals still on the ground the next day.

It was now near sunset and after Tamaryn's performance, I headed over to the Plaza Stage to hear the Oklahoma garage-punk band Broncho.

"Which New Punk Band is More Punk? Broncho vs FIDLAR," asked an article in Seattle's weekly The Stranger.  For my money, I'd say Broncho is scruffier, less obsessed with partying, and truer to the original punk ethos, but FIDLAR still won the newspaper's poll.  For what it's worth (and the band probably won't appreciate this endorsement coming form someone my age), I'd be much more likely to see Broncho at The Earl someday than FIDLAR at the godforsaken Masquerade.

It was getting close to headliner time and there was no way I was going to wait in the long lines to get into Key Arena to see Death Cab For Cutie, so I instead opted to go back to the Fountain Lawn to see the EDM band Beats Antique.

It was more of a show than I expected.

Apparently, much of Beats Antique's gear, including their software and samples, got misplaced while traveling, so the band had to improvise their entire set.  I'm not that familiar with their work, so I don't know what was missing, but their dancer more than made up for whatever was absent.

The show involved frequent costume changes.

A bevy of dancers stormed the stage for the band's grand finale.

The encore included the bevy of dancers, now wearing animal masks for some reason, as well as a large inflatable squid, because why not?

The crowd went wild.  As my sister commented on my Facebook page, it looks like I fell really deep into the rabbit hole with this set.

That, I thought, was the conclusion of Day Two, and the Beats Antique set would have been a fitting finale. But just as soon as the band left the stage, the festival promoters began projecting the Death Cab For Cutie set, still going on live just a couple hundred yards away, on the video screen behind the stage, so that those of us who didn't wait on line - or who waited and didn't get in - could still see their set.

The first half of Death Cab's set consisted of them playing their album Transatlanticism, arguably their best album, through in its entirety. Some sat on the grass and watched the set, some stood, and some went home. I did all three (you can only watch a video for so long after havng watched live performances all day).

And that, I thought, was the end of the day.  But no, as I walked once again past the Plaza Stage on my way out, there was the fine indie singer-songwriter Matt Pond and his band still performing.  I stayed and listened to three or four songs until the conclusion of their set.

That really was the end of Day Two, a much better day as it turned out, than I had expected.  It was only a couple yards from the Plaza Stage and Matt Pond to the exit, and I managed to make it off the festival grounds without falling into any other rabbit holes or performances.