MFNW, Day Four Summary

Day Four of MFNW was certainly less ambitious than yesterday, but in many ways no less satisfying.  Tired from the day before, I almost slept in and blew off the first performance of the day, but at the last minute remembered that I hadn't come all this way to lounge about hotel rooms but to hear music, so I rallied and got my fat ass over to The Doug Fir for the first KEXP performance of the day, a set by a band called The Shivas.  

Photo by KEXP

I hadn't heard of The Shivas either, but was glad that I had gotten up to see their 10:30 am set - they play a sort of post-surf garage rock reminiscent of Austin's The Strange Boys.

The next set was at noon and by Georgia's own Washed Out, who we saw just last weekend at Bumbershoot.

Another act we caught at Bumbershoot, Seattle's Beat Connection, played at 2:30.  Bumbershoot was the first time we'd seen Beat Connection, but today their songs already sounded familiar just from that one performance.

I didn't go to the MFNW outdoors set at Pioneer Courthouse Square yesterday 1) because of the rain, and 2) since they were serving free beer with the music and shelter from the rain over at the Marmoset party. So today was my first show this year at the Square, and it started off at 6:00 pm with a band I had not heard of before called Haerts.

Haerts' rather serious and sober-sounding set was followed by the sheer lunacy of Baltimore's Dan Deacon at 7:00.  The expressions on the girls' faces in the upper right of the picture below pretty much capture the spirit of the set.  Deacon himself was somewhere beneath that sea of hands (he played his entire set off the stage and in and among the audience).

If that doesn't explain it well enough for you, then here's one of my 30-second video summaries:

Animal Collective took the stage at 8:30 and played a 90-plus minute set of their psychedelic electronic rock.  Frankly, it wasn't the best AC performance I've seen (I've seen them twice before), but it still was an Animal Collective concert and therefore a singular experience in and of itself, and starting with the song Monkey Shines at around the 60-minute mark, they did finally rise to the level of transcendence I've come to expect from AC.

After Animal Collective, I left Pioneer Courthouse Square and, after waiting 20 minutes, caught a No. 19 bus across the Willamette and walked the rest of the way to Branx, a dimly-lit but hot and sweaty club in the warehouse district down by the river.  I had been hoping to see the 10:00 pm performance by the band Wooden Indian Burial Ground, but by he time I finally got to the club, I managed to hear only about the last 30 seconds of their performance, basically a little guitar feedback followed by "Thank you, good night."  

Oh, well.  The main reason I had crossed the river was to see Unknown Mortal Orchestra, who started playing right at 11:00.  Guitarist Ruban Nielson of UMO made a major statement this evening about his place in the guitar-god pantheon.  He played like a man possessed, and there were times during his extended, psychedelic guitar explorations where if you closed your eyes, you would have sworn you were at the Fillmore West circa 1969.  He hadn't played like this the previous times I've seem him, and you won't hear it on their recordings, but playing to a home-town audience who was probably already familiar with all of his songs, he used the song structures merely as launching pads to find where his guitar could take him, just as jazz musicians use familiar melodies as points of departure for their improvisations.  It was an amazing performance, the kind that you go to festivals hoping to catch, the kind that become the stuff of legends. September 6, 2013 - the day Ruban joined the ranks of Jimi and Eric and Stevie Ray.  I am not exaggerating.  It was that good and the real thing.

  

So that was pretty much it, or so I thought as I walked back home across the Willamette on the Burnside Bridge.  But when I got back on the western side, I saw that Ty Segall was still playing his set at Dante's, so I went in and caught the end of his set.

So that, in summary, was Day Four.  I heard two new bands, revisited two other bands from Bumbershoot, watched Dan Deacon's lunacy, and ended the evening with the triple whammy of Animal Collective, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, and Ty Segall.  But far and away the highlight of the day was UMO's set and Ruban's statement on guitar.  Damn, that man can play.