After winning first-come, first-served tickets on Monday for Thao & The Get Down Stay Down at the KEXP Music Lounge during Bumbershoot, I've managed to snag tickets to several more KEXP shows, including Sallie Ford & The Sound Outside, Superchunk, ZZ Ward, and Charles Bradley, "the Screaming Eagle of Soul." I literally can't go near my computer without tickets to shows falling in my lap (okay, literally, I can, but you know what I mean).
This is a good thing, of course, but it's causing me to have to rearrange my festival schedule. F'rinstance, since I'll be seeing Sallie Ford at 12 noon on Sunday, I can skip her Saturday-night set at the Plaza Stage and instead go see Washed Out at the Fountain Lawn. Fortunately, none of the shows I've gotten into are scheduled during any "must-see" sets, although I'll be cutting it pretty close post-Superchunk to see alt-J.
But anyway, there are no longer any "dead zones" in my Bumbershoot schedule, or times where I'm forced to choose between several bands of whom I've never heard. I won't even be seeing The Flavr Blue, even though I posted a video of them here to get myself better acquainted.
The schedule for MFNW is even stronger, and there's only a handful of bands on that schedule that I don't know. One such band is Portland's Wooden Indian Burial Ground, who'll be opening for Unknown Mortal Orchestra at Branx following Animal Collective's set at the lovely Pioneer Courthouse Square (Portland's Living Room). But based on this video for Heliocopter, I'm pretty impressed - they may be the only band in the world that could hold their own after a set by Animal Collective.
