The Northside Festival is an idea whose time has come. Despite housing 1% of the U.S. population and probably something like 75% of its musicians, Brooklyn has never had its own major music festival. Sure, venues in Williamsburg and Park Slope play host to select CMJ Music Marathon showcases, but that event has always been too proper, industry-serving and -- what's the word? -- soulless to encompass what is really going on in the borough. Northside, the brainchild of Brooklyn-based mini-mag The L (which, full disclosure, I have written for), does a far better job of capturing both the sound and the mood of the local scene. Featuring shows at established venues and DIY spaces alike, the festival casts a wide net across Williamsburg and Greenpoint, inviting blogs such as Gothamist and Brooklyn Vegan to curate showcases of their favorite bands from the borough and beyond.
All in all, although generalized fatigue and several ancillary responsibilites that I won't bore you with here prevented me from fully enjoying Northside, I think the event was a success. Unlike CMJ, the lines were short, the badges (at $45) affordable, and the atmosphere relaxed. Friendly staff and a community focus made Northside a pleasure to attend. Especially in this time of recession, those of us who couldn't afford to travel to Bonnaroo and watch big-name acts serenade a legion of trust-fund hippies appreciated the effort to remind all of us that there really is no place like Brooklyn.
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- Day 1: No Coverage
Sorry, kids, but this reporter had already committed to a non-Northside event before receiving her press credentials. Thus, you get no Thursday recap.
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- Day 2: Acoustic Guitar World
Friday's Brooklyn Vegan-curated Music Hall of Williamsburg lineup was decidedly less edgy than most Northside fare. All three of the openers were solo, acoustic guitar-wielding folk singer/songwriters, but each brought a different set of influences and inflections to the same basic set-up.
New Yorker Dave Deporis kicked off the evening, his vivid hand gestures and throaty voice filling the mostly-empty room. Although he started off with some fairly traditional-sounding folk songs, he gradually progressed to a louder, more urgent idiom that showed off his vocal range. He called these songs "punk," and while I wouldn't argue, it bears pointing out that they seemed to riff on the scruffier elements of the blues, too. Next to take the stage was Ólöf Arnalds, best known as a touring member of Múm. Fairly well known in her native Iceland, Arnalds recently made headlines opening for Björk and Dirty Projectors at their already-legendary Housing Works show last month. With a pixie face and a high, clear voice, she sang gentle folk songs, many of them written for friends or family, in both Icelandic and English. Before her set was through, Arnalds even worked in covers from a few American greats, Bruce Springsteen and Nina Simone.
The buzziest performer of the night was The Tallest Man on Earth, a.k.a. Kristian Mattson, who has spent the past few months burning up the blogs. (In case you're wondering, as I was, he is not exceptionally tall. He is, in fact, somewhat short. This may be the Scandinavian sense of humor at work.) It's easy to see Mattson's appeal: He traffics in a strummy, gravelly brand of folk, with a voice remarkably similar to Bob Dylan's. (I thought the Dylan cover, "Boots of Spanish Leather," belabored this point a bit.) But his songs are grittier, twangier, more emotionally raw, more personal, and less political. It was endearing to see a performer so captivated by and appreciative of his audience. In fact, Mattson is so intense and sincere his stage presence sometimes crosses over into awkwardness.
Acoustic folk isn't generally my genre of choice, and while others may rightly have felt differently, I must admit that this lineup tested my patience. I enjoyed each performer a bit more than the last (although I don't think I was quite as excited about The Tallest Man on Earth as the vast majority of the audience) but was relieved to see the evening's headliner, John Vanderslice, take the stage with a full band. A good portion of the crowd exited with Mattson (perhaps because another -- deservedly -- buzzy band, New Jersey's Screaming Females was on deck at Public Assembly, next door), and it was clear that the folks who stuck around were, like me, true Vanderslice believers. We sang along to raucous renditions of tracks from the fantastic Romanian Names (Dead Oceans) -- "Fetal Horses" and my favorite, "D.I.A.L.O." (which, by the way, stands for "Defense Intelligence Agency Liaison Office") were particular highlights. He also played "Lucifer Rising," a fun, pulpy cut from his and John Darnielle's (self-explanatory) concept EP, Moon Colony Bloodbath (4AD), which came out earlier this year. But, as a performer who has always been generous to his fans, Vanderslice also included a larger-than-usual selection of back catalog favorites, from Pixel Revolt's "Trance Manual" and "Angela" to Cellar Door's "They Won't Let Me Run" and Emerald City's "Tablespoon of Codeine." It wasn't my favorite JV set -- I felt like he was rushing through a number of songs that deserved slower, more meticulous treatments -- but an off day for John Vanderslice still beats most musicians' most in-the-zone performance by a long shot.
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- Day 3: DIY Suffocation
While the Music Hall of Williamsburg is among Brooklyn's most formal venues, The Shank is one of many informal, semi-legal DIY spaces. If you live in a major city, you know the deal: Admission is by "suggested donation" that everyone pretty much has to pay; someone stands outside warning you to go around the block if you want to hang out, so as not to attract police attention; smoking and BYOB drinking is all but encouraged inside. I have a lot of respect for people who run these types of all-ages shows and convert their own living space into a place where underground acts can perform on their own terms. That said, The Shank made it awfully difficult to enjoy the evening's lineup. Although, unlike other DIY venues, it boasts a bar, some built-in seating, and a few real bathrooms, it also suffers from a major ventilation problem. It couldn't have been more than 65 degrees outside, but The Shank was a suffocating sauna, its atmosphere exacerbated by enough cigarette smoke to kill a small animal.
Like Friday's lineup, Saturday's bands offered variation on a theme. But instead of acoustic guitar, it was all about New York noise. After some fairly epic delays, Brooklyn's own Pygmy Shrews opened the show. What they're doing skews towards hardcore, with palpably punky, lo-fi melodies that come out slightly more abstract than what traditionalists might come up with. (Does this, too, have a genre descriptor? Do we call it "noise-core" now?) Singer-bassist Tia Vincent eschews the trappings of indie-chick cute, her Magik Markers-in-2006-style vocal rants resonating more than anything the band does musically. While they may not totally have their aesthetic down yet, Pygmy Shrews definitely shows signs of promise.
Up next was Woods, a psych-noise band that many people seem to like but that I just can't get into. Their songs don't stick with me once they're over. I like the long, instrumental interludes but can't stomach the falsetto vocals (which one TMT writer in attendance aptly described as Matt Valentine's Neil Young impression, sung several octaves higher than necessary). The performance was miles from bad, but it wasn't memorable, either. By the time Woods' set ended, I needed a long, outdoor break to replace the smoke in my veins with some oxygen. So I ended up missing Grooms but returned in time for Blues Control (pictured). That band's increasing popularity can perhaps be chalked up to the ease of describing what it is they do: The dude-and-lady duo mixes tape loops and noise jams with heavy-handed classic guitar riffs. The concept can become tiresome, but in general, this is good stuff, venturing into pop-culture territory that most self-respecting avant-noise practitioners wouldn't deign to dirty their hands with.
As for the end of the evening, well, it came a bit earlier than I had expected. The Shank was already running about an hour late, and we began to notice that the evening's headliner, Kurt Vile & the Violators, seemed to be taking its time setting up. Then came the announcement: two of the band members, who I later heard were playing at Union Pool with The War on Drugs, were not present at the venue. They finally made it, but with disassembled drum kit in tow. I had really been looking forward to seeing Vile, whose recorded music I've been enjoying for a few months, but it wasn't to be. It was late; I had a headache; I felt dehydrated (to add insult to injury, no one had thought to stock The Shank's bar with water); I am growing old; whatever. It was time to leave. I do hope to see The Violators some day... but not, I pray, at The Shank.
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- Day 4: Healing
I had big plans for Sunday night: I was going to trek out to Studio B in Greenpoint to see two of my favorite Baltimore bands, Ponytail and Thank You, at a show curated by the former. But, for a variety of reasons -- I was feeling too crappy to jump around; I've written about Ponytail so many times that I may no longer have anything new to add; Studio B is located at the ass-end of nowhere -- I ended up back at the Music Hall of Williamsburg to see Sir Richard Bishop & His Freak of Araby Ensemble and Bill Callahan (pictured). As it turns out, that decision was the best one I made all weekend.
Although I was a fan of Bishop's enormous Sun City Girls back catalog, I never got to see that band perform and hadn't done much digging into his new, solo material. While his new group isn't as wildly noisy and free as SCG, the music they make is undeniably beautiful, drawing on many of the same influences. Bishop's guitar is the central focus, spinning hearty webs of Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and South Asian music into songs that synthesize but never rip off more traditional "world musics." I have to admit, my mind drifted a few times during the set, but that had more to do with Bishop and co.'s transportive instrumentals than my own exhaustion.
It was Bill Callahan who finished off Northside for me, with a ridiculously generous hour-and-40-minute set. I am not particularly well-versed in the Callahan/Smog songbook (in fact, the only song I recognized all night was "Cold Blooded Old Times"), but I've always been curious about it. And what's news to me probably isn't to most of you (as it certainly wasn't to the capacity crowd that packed the venue to the gills, shouting out requests and joking with Callahan): He is a softspoken tour de force. In jeans and a denim shirt, he looked the part of a weathered cowboy and related long, languid, almost Southern Gothic narratives in his signature, inexplicably captivating monotone. A small string section, comprised of a violin and electric cello, gave the band a subtly rootsy flavor. It's easy to see why Callahan has attracted such a cultish following. Considering the shape in which I arrived in Williamsburg Sunday night, it certainly says something that I left feeling great about Callahan, Bishop, and Northside in general.
[Photos: Sean Ruch]
