Last Saturday the first Be the Riottt! festival took place here in SF at the Bill Graham Civic Center, bolstering a pretty amazing lineup to make up for its atrocious title. The more large scale "festival" type productions I attend, the more critical and also forgiving I become of them. Certain aspects of Be the Riottt really rubbed me the wrong way (read: Girl Talk below), and while I understand it takes a mind boggling amount of work to put on such a huge event, after attending such tightly produced events like Siren, Montreal Jazz Fest, or even Vegoose or Bonnaroo, you start to expect "givens" like no sound problems, accurate set times, etc. Anyway, music...
Stuck with a pretty early set time, I caught about the last half of the Toronto based four piece, Tokyo Police Club. They ripped through a bunch of short, high energy post-punkish garage rock songs and although they weren't exactly bringing anything fresh to the table, they did it superbly.
Tokyo Police Club - Shoulders & Arms
I was completely enamored with Asobi Seksu's latest LP, Citrus, over the summer so it was interesting to finally see their live gig. Some of the polished shoe gaze production(oxy moron?) was lost on stage, as was the perfection that is Yuki's voice, which in the end, made it one of those shows where you are merely hearing watered down versions of your favorite tunes. It just made me want to listen to the album on big headphones.
Asobi Seksu - Strings
Steve Aoki (Kid Millionaire, Dim Mak) and Blake Miller (Moving Units) brought some pure hot fire next with their DJ project Wierd Science. It seemed like Steve Aoki brought most of the magic to the decks (how did this guy become such a party icon?) and there was plenty of new electro house to go around with at least three Digitalism remixes thrown in.
Cut Copy - Going Nowhere (Digitalism Remix)
Sydney's The Presets fucking killed it - by far the best set of the festival. They made people do this...
Go see them as soon as you can. They are on tour supporting The Rapture and their electro dance rock craziness will make you jump up and down like you are at an eighth grade dance.
The Presets - I Go Hard, I Go Home
I was probably more excited about seeing Girl Talk
than any other act, so of course Metric went way over their allotted time with ridiculous, drunken stage antics that included chanting non-sensical free associations ("family is contagious! apathy is contagious!") which completely screwed Girl Talk. So Girl Talk comes on stage to a crowd going bonkers for him, says he only has half of an hour to play and jumps right in with his act (confetti, frantic dancing, stage diving, and mashups mashups mashups). Well any stupid promoter would know that Girl Talk always invites people on stage to dance, so that's what happened, and they cut him off after 15 minutes! 15 minutes is not a set. Then The Rapture of course take 45 minutes to come on stage - 45 minutes that Girl Talk could have been playing. It's not like his laptop was in the way of their soundcheck. Jesus. The whole thing left such a bad taste in my mouth that it was hard to even enjoy The Rapture's set. Bad way to end a good fest.
Girl Talk - Smash Your Head
The Rapture - Whoa!...Alright-yeah...uh Huh
All photos courtesy of Vaindeer. Check it.
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