INTO THE INTONATION

I ended my two-year running tradition of attending Siren Festival on Coney Island every summer last weekend. It was sad but unavoidable (no money). Instead, I went to my hometown of Chicago to experience Pitchfork's foray into the festival business, the Intonation Music Festival. The result was a weekend full of heat as hot as any desert, dehydration, more hipsters than you could shake an arular at, band interviews and interactions, and some of the best music I've heard in a long, long time. This is my first post recapping the indie wonder that was Intonation.

SATURDAY

1:00 pm - Head of Femur
1:30 pm - Pelican

I missed these bands for two reasons: 1) nobody I was with wanted to see them; 2) they do not exist. These are bands made up by music elitists in an effort to out-hip each other. I mean, honestly, do you know anyone who listens to a band named Head of Femur? Or Pelican? "Hey man, that new Head of Femur single is wicked..." No, you don't.

2:00 pm The M’s

I have seen the M's play live twice opening for bands at the Metro, and I saw them once at a weird loft party. They're an alright Chicago garage/glam rock band, with a catch: every song is a stomp. Full-on stomper, every song. We heard them while waiting in line, and I got to hear my favorite song (and their best), "Big Baby Bottoms", which comes off as sort of a "Bohemian Rhapsody"-ish mash-up of M's songs.

2:45 pm AC Newman

My friend Blake had us arrive in time to catch AC Newman, leader of pop-unstoppables the New Pornographers. Lame. No Neko Case. Very lame. I will take Josh Homme over this guy as my favorite red-headed rocker any day.

3:30 pm Magnolia Electric Company

Blake also wanted to see this band. Lamer.

4:30 pm Four Tet

I enjoy Kieran Hebden's recordings as Four Tet, so I figured I would like him better than the two acts we had seen so far. Wrong. Apparently Hebden's idea of a "live performance" is loading his CDs onto two powerbooks, pressing play on each one, and violently cross-fading between the two. Ow.

5:30 pm Broken Social Scene

By this time, after disappointing performances and a decent lunch, I had forgotten that we had come to this festival specifically for music. Broken Social Scene quickly snapped me back to reality, and excitement flooded through me as the 55 memers of this band took the stage. I have an up-and-down relationship with their record You Forgot It In People, and had missed them in concert more than once, so I was eager to see how they played live.

BROKEN SOCIAL SCENE PHOTOS

I'm not exactly sure what it was, but for the hour they played, Broken Social Scene was my new favorite band. Mostly, it was the sound: whoever was mixing the band was doing a superb job, and even with four guitars, the sound was full and clear. Seriously, four guitars. What do you even play if you have the fourth guitar part? Whatever it was it sounded good. Also contributing to the great show was Stars' Amy Millan filling in for Metric's Emily Haines and others on the female vocal parts. She had a fantastic voice and a kind of drunken, unstoppable stage prescenese, and her perfomance has led me to return to the Stars record with better listening results than before. I left the show overwhelmed by BSS's huge sound on my favorite songs "Almost Crimes" and "Cause=Time", and a number of good new songs, and went to wait for an interview with Death From Above 1979.

The interview with DFA1979, one of my favorite bands, was a definite highlight of the festival. This was my second time talking with bassist Jesse F. Keeler, and he's a great guy. I asked him about the band's incredible remixes, and his own remixes as MSTRKRFT, and he showed me his cell phone book (and talked about getting calls from French house mastermind Alan Braxe. Also... DFA1979/Foo Fighters collab? Who knows...). We went on to talk about fashion, the music biz, money and art, and a few other things. The interview will hopefully air on Radio K at some point.

That was the first half of the first day. Expect more to come (as I finish up editing my photos).