Treasure Island Music Festival – San Francisco, CA
Live Review: 10/17 – 10/18/09
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Treasure Island, not only a book by Robert Louis Stevenson, is a bizarre little spit of fill in between San Francisco and Oakland, next to the anchor point for the Bay Bridge. A former naval base built out of soil dragged out of the Bay, it’s the legacy of an overfunded Army Corps of Engineers, who, if they had their way, would probably filled in the entire San Francisco Bay. Now students and government workers mostly live in the post-war tract housing that used to house Navy officers. It’s a little slice of suburban wilderness in the middle of a bay of commuters.

Treasure Island Music Festival is located in a small park on the west side of the island. It’s compact compared with the other festivals I’ve known in California. The two days it spans feel manageable compared with the three days in Coachella’s heat or even the more local Outside Lands. It’s also more self-contained: you can’t run down the street and catch cheap food because the nearest restaurant is across 3 miles of water. There are only two stages at the festival, not terribly far away from each other, and you can catch every single band that plays over the weekend if you want to do a lot of running back and forth and don’t particularly care about being in the front row. The fact that it takes place in mid-October adds a little gravitas to the affair: a chill and some bay winds are guaranteed once the sun sets behind the San Francisco skyline each night.

DAY 1

Photo by Epioles

The first day of the music festival had a primarily electronic bill, and the first thing you wonder about that is, why? San Francisco already has more clearly defined electronic festivals (Lovefest being one of them) and surely they aren’t trying to compete? Well, for whatever reason, the acts were pretty cleanly split, genre-wise, between the two days, and it had me a little worried about how the music would translate on this first day.

Photo by Hello Vegetables

Dan Deacon was a good way to start putting those fears to rest. He has a pretty unique onstage persona: he’s the rare artist that directs attention away from himself when singing, being far more interested in getting his crowds to participate in things like mass interpretive dance. Last I saw him play, he worked by himself and most of his music was pre-recorded, but somehow in 2 years his touring band had swollen to 14 members, including three drummers, and one guy who spent a good amount of time jumping around on and off stage dressed like Cool Spot. Despite all of this, there was no bloat in the music. It was played concisely and to the point.

Despite all of these people he actually managed to play at a faster pace than most of the other bands at the festival, easily having the highest tempos of the day. “Padding Ghost” especially kicked the entire audience into high gear. Before his second to last song, Dan left the stage to explain what we were supposed to do and shepherd people around. As “Get Older” kicked off, we formed a human tunnel and grew it, until eventually it sprawled across most of the park and I lost sight of where it ended. I ran through it myself and ended up by a food stand somewhere, thoroughly satisfied.

Luckily for me, The Streets were just about to kick off on the main stage, which ended up not being too far away from where the human tunnel ended. I was skeptical of how Mike Skinner’s dense, narrative rap would work in a large-scale environment. At first, it seemed like it wasn’t going to work very well. “Fit But You Know It” was fun thin live, and “Let’s Push Things Forward” was a bit muddled, ironically enough for a song about having better beats than you. But as soon as “Turn the Page” kicked off, his detached attitude becomes a sincere intensity, his sentences form one spiraling wall of text and you knew things were working, because you start getting chills.

In fact, it was his darker, denser songs that worked the best live: “Too Late” hit all the right notes and “Dry Your Eyes” was the sing along, not any of his peppier cuts. Unexpectedly he closed with “Blinded By The Lights”, his ode to the highs and lows of drug trip and being lost in a rave crowd. It’s not his most well known, but its one of his most textured, and considering the electronica-focused lineup, probably appropriate for the venue. Odd that a song he treats as a genre exercise outclassed most of the other bands that day.

The songs Mike spun were almost exclusively from his first two critically acclaimed albums, Original Pirate Material and A Grand Don’t Come For Free, leaving out his third album The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, where he tried to reconcile himself to his newfound fame in sound and in lyrics. That album wasn’t as well received as his previous two. I wonder if he’s been reading too much about himself, or if he’s just trying to maintain the persona that got him so far. In any case, it seems to be working for him.

Photo by David Mongan

Brazilian Girls hit the main stage next. They’ve been making smooth, hard-to-pin-down music for around 4 years now. I had doubts about their ability to make a compelling live show: how can you filter all that eclecticism into a single live band lineup?

They played their singles, mostly, and played them long. “Good Time” was indeed a good time, despite the fact that the sing-along aspect of the song didn’t really work. Most of the vocal talents of lead singer Sabina Sciubba that make Brazilian Girls compelling in the first place didn’t translate very well to a big venue. They’re clearly a good band, they play very tight live, and the sound was definitely there but most of the time it was wasted on extended keyboard solos. They closed with a song off their first album “Pussy” and the last ten minutes of their show were mostly passing the mike around to people to have them sing the hook (“pussy pussy pussy marijuana”) over and over again. Ultimately, Brazilian Girls were trying to be a crowd-pleasing band but reached too far. I’d love to hear them DJ sometime.
DAY 2

The second day of Treasure Island had a much more enticing lineup, for me, but stepping off the bus was discouraging. It was already windy and chilly in the early afternoon. Here the classifying of the two days according to type of music made a little sense. There was definitely a different audience there, or at least far fewer kids wearing neon and butterfly wings (I’m assuming they were the MGMT fans). I couldn’t decide if it was the weather or the lineup, but everyone seemed a touch more serious as well.

Photo by Marli Diestel

On record, Grizzly Bear aren’t a very immediate band: I didn’t like either of their two records until I’d spent a significant amount of time with them. But live, even in the restrictive environment of a festival set, they are a force to be reckoned with. On record their songs threaten to slip into atmospherics, but their songs are much more guitar driven and just plain bigger live than on record. Live, you get a much better sense of the dynamics between the different vocalists in the band, which is tougher to pick out on record. They’re incredibly normal looking people as well, which adds something to the impressive highs of their set.

“Cheerleader” was an innocuous enough starting song, and “Two Weeks” wasn’t quite the sing-along that most people know it as, but they soon gave way to songs that showcased a deeper and even scarier force. “Knife” off their first album Yellow House was a sublime  “I Live With You” was one of the most powerful songs, at turns soft and insistent. Near the end of that song the sun came out from behind the clouds and everything rose off the ground a few feet. And they weren’t even finished with their set, which in the end really downplayed their pop aspects but showcased their vocal versatility and impressive power. It’s rare to hear a band navigate a big crowd with as much subtly and force as Grizzly Bear did.

Beirut lend an amazing atmosphere to any place they go, even if you sort of wish you were at a picnic somewhere warm when you hear their songs, instead of in an increasingly chilly and windy island in the middle of a huge bay. Their records, from Gulag Orkestar to March of the Zapotec are talked about in reference to the journey he took to make them, across Eastern Europe and Mexico respectively. Its all about appropriation, but no more so than rock for the blues. Beirut just wear their influences on their sleeves.

The music, of course, is incredible. Seven people onstage and not a guitar in sight. The trumpet harmonies were one of the better musical moments of the night. The solos his band went off on were actually quite good, and didn’t seem like distractions; their tubist even put one down. “Elephant Gun” and “Postcards From Italy” showcased their ability to transcend their references and come up with something new.

Photo by Llamatofu

Zach Condon, singer, trumpeter and general band leader has a stylized French Horn tattooed on the inside of his right wrist that you could only see, appropriately enough, when he raised his trumpet to play. A friend remarked that he’s one of the few people who could wear it without raising any eyebrows. It’s true: Zach’s committed to musicianship but also to the image and attitudes of the places he draws inspiration from, and it makes for a good show.

I haven’t listened to The Decembrists since I was about 16: nothing against them, but they belong to a very specific period in my life. Since then they’ve become something of a mainstay in indie rock culture, a point of reference that everyone seems to know and enjoy. So I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from them live.

I certainly wasn’t expecting a rock opera, with a storyline and recurring musical themes, but that’s what we got. The songs they played were overwhelmingly from their new pseudo-prog-rock concept album The Hazards of Love. Colin Meloy’s voice is as distinctive as ever, and still most comfortable in the storytelling mode. The best songs were those where the folk-pop tendencies of their past records shined through. While impressive musically, prog doesn’t fit them too well.

Photo by David Mongan

The Flaming Lips have a live presence that’s endlessly written and talked about, and having never seen them live, the expectations were definitely on my mind. Before they even start playing the atmosphere is distinctive: their sound check is a disembodied German-accented voice proclaiming how many decibels come out of each speaker, and their roadies were all in uniform. Luckily they play up to all of this atmosphere in some way.

A lot of the texture that shows up on their records is lost in the massive crowds that were there at that point in the festival, and probably in the simple fact of playing them live. But a lot of their songs make more sense live too, especially those from the 2006 album At War With the Mystics, who’s critical reaction was somewhat tepid. “The Yeah Yeah Yeah” song and “The W.A.N.D.” hit pretty hard live.
If anything, they have some of the most impressive visuals for a live show, even taking the giant hamster ball out of the equation. The band walked out on stage out of a glowing vagina (giving “Flaming Lips” a meaning I hadn’t previously considered) and spliced in shots of space and bathtubs in between. Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots was the great sing-along record, and Wayne Cohen directed them into actual sing-alongs, with pregnant pauses for audience participation and everything. It felt gimmicky but the songs were good enough for it to work. Wayne’s voice was never quite warmed up, but he sang with grit and obvious enthusiasm. Everything seemed flawed in some way, but it somehow came together perfectly.

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For more info on TI Fest, visit: http://treasureislandfestival.com/