Words by Brandon Goei
Originally published at fnewsmagazine.com on July 11, 2012
Lower Dens
Photo by Shawn Brackbill
There are two sides to the band called Lower Dens. The first lays down a stiff motorik beat and cranks the reverb to “deep space,” expanding headspace into layers of endless gray vistas. The second takes all that cosmic flotsam and crams it into an area ten times too small — where every technical twiddle jerks the ear into even tighter quarters, like cattle being wrangled. We’re not talking about “Side A vs. Side B” differences here: each change seems to happen without warning — sometimes multiple times in a song — making for an absorbing expand-and-contract kind of listen.
The band’s set at 3:30 p.m. on Friday will likely be both a nice intro to the festival and a grand exploration of the open air stage, but I’m banking on the festering introspection that will no doubt happen at their Empty Bottle aftershow on the same night. On that venue’s small stage, surrounded by blacked out walls, someone’s sense of space is going to get skullfucked.
Ty Segall
Photo by Annabel Mehran
Ty Segall’s career has taken off since his days with the Epsilons. In those short years, he’s built a raucous live set on a keen infatuation with the fat fuzz of 1970s hard rock, but never fails to update the sound a bit with each release, starting with the boot-stomping blitz ofMelted and continuing with the Zeppelin-plays-Alex-Chilton sludge-folk of Goodbye Bread. The albums, along with all of Segall’s experiments in between, have been invariably gratifying not just by virtue of their songwriting (which is excellent) or their crunch (also excellent) but also because of the way Segall stays true to the vintage grime while modernizing it. Slaughterhouse, the freshest pack of paeans to exploding heads and distortion pedals, contains his take on the wild Motor City sound of the proto-punk days, which is encapsulated perfectly by two inclusions on the tracklist: first, a disintegrating Bo Diddley cover; and second, the ten-minute “instrumental” closer titled “Fuzz War.”
You’ll find Ty Segall blasting through the midday sun at 3:20 p.m. on Sunday, so if you’re looking for a nice breeze to cut through the mid-July humidity the shockwaves coming from the stage’s speakers ought to do nicely. Ty is also playing an Empty Bottle aftershow on Saturday night — which, of course, is entirely sold out already — so if you’re lucky enough to be holding a ticket, you’re in for a good old fashioned small-venue face-melting to round off your Pitchfork Festival experience.
King Krule
Photo courtesy of Windish Agency
A funny thing happened late last year. After a long time of suffering through the youth and hubris of endless “soon-to-be” rockstars, I was finally convinced by one. Archy Marshall, the kid behind the Krule, doesn’t show his age in his music. The blues in his bones drawl out in a thickly accented baritone that constantly forsakes his years. After coming to terms with the mismatch of voice and body, what’s left is a brilliant sense of musicality backed by a guitar vocabulary spiked with sparkling jazz chords.
Teenage hopefuls seem to fall into two categories: those who embrace their youth and those who defy it. The former tend to live out their careers with Peter Pan syndrome, sapping their salad days dry and burning out as martyrs to the party. The latter often gain an ego too big to be healthy and end up overwhelmed and out of place. Marshall seems to have found a nice medium between the two extremes, never forgetting his attachment to London’s younger generation but also using his music to earnestly voice the disillusionment of that faction.
King Krule’s set at 6:45 p.m. on Sunday will hit right as the heat starts to fade and the festival’s final day begins to wind down, which is fitting.
Oneohtrix Point Never
Photo courtesy of Windish Agency
Sometimes it seems that Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin sees the world through a kaleidoscopic electron microscope, always finding a way to spotlight the tiniest sliver of refracted light and let it shine. The synthetic vision Lopatin puts forth on all his work, especially OPN’s latest full-length Replicas, executes that idea by taking half-uttered samples, clipping them arbitrarily and repeating them until they force themselves into a pattern. It’s an equation that does nothing less than bring out a majesty in everything it touches, turning tiny blips into glacial groans and overwhelming stages with cascades of sound both unnervingly engulfing and impeccably controlled.
Hearing the set boosted through the sound system of an outdoor stage is likely to also boost the circuit-fried aura that hovers around OPN’s tracks, which is another added treat for those crammed in the pit at 5:45 p.m. on Sunday.