The third day of Sasquatch! is finished and Lori Paulson was able to capture some great photos, including this positively epic one above of Wild Flag. She covered a lot of ground at the Gorge, getting stunning photos of Zola Jesus, The War on Drugs, The Walkmen, Fly Moon Royalty, We Are Augustines, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. and a lot more. You can see more of her always-gorgeous photography on Flickr.

Wild Flag:

Zola Jesus:

Deer Tick:

Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.:

The War on Drugs:

Fly Moon Royalty:

Hospitality:

Gardens & Villa:

We Are Augustines:

The Walkmen:

Sunday at Sasquatch! 2012 was absolutely gorgeous.

The day started out with Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. on the main stage. I’d heard nothing but good things about these guys over the last couple of years, but this was my first time seeing them live. I think the appropriate word to define their set is WOW. This trio of guys from Detroit, Michigan really go all out. Scissor kicks, screams, extremely loud guitar wailing, the whole bit. Their cover of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” was the only song I recognized, but that didn’t matter. I will definitely be checking these guys out again.

Next up on the main stage were the folk / Americana outfit Trampled By Turtles. The quintet cover all the usual indie folk instrumentation, with a mandolin and fiddle filling in. This was another band I didn’t know much about before, but was pleasantly surprised by on stage. That’s what’s so great about a festival like Sasquatch!, giving you the ability to see bands you’ve not heard before, and walk away with some new loves. Trampled by Turtles had the best goddamn fiddle player I’ve ever seen play. And I’m the type of person to seek out good fiddle, so I’ve seen quite a bit. Hands down the best.

Moving over to the Bigfoot stage, Brooklyn indie-rockers Here We Go Magic were just going on. I was looking forward to this set, and I was only partially disappointed. Clashing music from competing stages is a mainstay at places like the somewhat tightly-packed Sasquatch!, but the problem has been exaggerated this year with the addition of the 5th, smallest “Maine” Stage. It’s a great spot for Seattle-based hiphop acts to get a small gathering of people, but with its speakers pointed directly at the face of the Bigfoot stage, the mashing of both bands into a cacophony of unpleasing sound is inevitable. For next year, I hope the Sasquatch! crew can schedule the “Maine” stage acts to play only in the 30-35 minutes between Bigfoot sets. It’s a perfect little window of time, and wouldn’t clash with any other acts, allowing both performers to sound better overall.

But I digress. Here We Go Magic were great. The foursome play Talking Heads-ish electronic-based indie rock, with a lot of long droning-beat interludes stringing multiple songs together. The wind was blowing strong from the South, causing the hair of bassist/keyboardist Jen Turner to blow straight out behind her as she did her Tina Weymouth thing on the bass and backing vocals. The band ended the set on the very catchy “How Do I Know,” with the whole audience bouncing up and down in a mad frenzy.

The War on Drugs, who followed HWGM on the Bigfoot stage, surprisingly fit very well with the previous band’s set. Both bands artfully string long droning psych-out instrumental stretches between songs, making it hard to distinguish where one song starts and another ends. But where HWGM sounded vaguely like Talking Heads, The War on Drugs feels more like a Fleetwood Mac clone, but only if they were led by Bob Dylan, as lead singer Adam Granduciel’s voice has the same affected lilt as the aging folk god.

I then caught a bit of M. Ward’s set on the main stage, but not enough to write a decent paragraph about. The man continues to do his thing well, I’m just not that big a fan of his thing.

Now it was time for a little dancy interlude. We headed over to the Banana Shack to catch most of Tycho’s set. Tycho is the electronic music persona of graphic designer Scott Hansen, also known as ISO50. I’d met Hansen years ago at a graphic design convention, bought a tee from him, and never thought I’d see him again, especially in such a change of venues. But the man, along with a live bassist and drummer on stage (and him on the occassional guitar) blends together fantastically poppy electronic soundscapes. The Banana Shack was overflowing with people happily getting their mid-afternoon dance on. It was beautiful.

And now back down to the main stage to catch Seattle’s newest big-stage rockers The Head & The Heart. THATH have the festival thing down. Their songs are well known and loved, with every one demanding some sort of audience singalong, and they still continue to play with excitement, two-plus years of performing essentially the same songs. The highlight were the four new songs the band played, proving that they will be able to continue in the same vein with songs that will be every bit as infectious as their previous works. The trip-hop version of “Cats and Dogs” was also fun to see.

One of the sets I’d been looking forward to the most was up next on the Bigfoot stage. The Walkmen are severely underrated in my book. The NYC/Philly based quintet know how to sell a song better than most, and lead-singer Hamilton Leithauser’s straining vocals are unlike anything you’ll hear in any other band. But yet, competing against The Head and the Heart and Beirut on the main stage ate away at the potential Walkmen following, meaning this was more of an intimate performance than should be expected on the 2nd-biggest stage at the venue in the prime sunset slot. They played a variety of songs from their five albums, as well as a handful of new ones from the forthcoming Heaven, due out next week.

Some day I’ll be able to catch these guys headlining their own tour again, but for now, these festival and opening-slot interludes will have to suffice.

The final two bands of the night for me were on the main stage, but my heart feels that neither band should have been given the timeslots they were. Don’t get me wrong, I love Beirut and Bon Iver probably more than the next guy, but they’re sound is just a bit too delicate to survive the acoustic clashes that happen at Sasquatch. Hearing Beirut mix with the overtones of Zola Jesus wafting in from the Yeti stage, and then later trying to parse the quieter sounds of Bon Iver amidst the din of beats coming from the turntables of James Murphy from the Banana Shack proved difficult. Additionally, the music of Beirut and Bon Iver is lost on most of the youth at Sasquatch!. The loud conversation happening all around us during the bands’ sets forced us into moving twice on the hill, to no avail. The youth of today will not be silenced! I’ll just have to catch these guys on their own tours next time through town.

I hate to end it on a slightly-sour note, so I will say that Sasquatch! Sunday 2012 was the best day so far, and will probably stand out as the highlight of the entire festival. Too many good performances jammed together, and with the hazy sun beating down for most of the day, it was the kind of perfection that can only be had at the Gorge.

{Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. photo by Lori Paulson.}

The second day of Sasquatch! is in the books and Lori Paulson took some extraordinary photos of the day, including great photos of St. Vincent, Dum Dum Girls, tUnE-yArDs, Helio Sequence, Pickwick, Charles Bradley, Alabama Shakes and THEESatisfaction. Enjoy her photos below and even more on her Flickr page.

St. Vincent:

tUnE-yArDs:

THEESatisfaction:

Alabama Shakes:

Dum Dum Girls:

Charles Bradley and His Extraordinaires:

Pickwick:

Helio Sequence:

Saturday

Cloudcover, discovery and neon clown attire. That sums up Saturday at Sasquatch! 2012 nicely. If you want to hear about the music, too, then read below.

Day 2 started off right, with Seattle’s homegrown new soul outfit Pickwick playing the main stage in their first-ever Sasquatch appearance. Having seen Pickwick at the Neptune not too long ago, and coming away from that show worried about their big-stage prospects, I was pleasantly surprised to see them absolutely kill on the main stage at the Gorge. Galen Disston and crew were enjoying the hell out of their opening slot, and they absolutely nailed it.

The first pleasant discovery of the day was STRFKR. Goes to show you shouldn’t let a band’s name deter you from checking them out. I hadn’t given them any credit due to their poor choice in moniker, but they won me over with their dancey, synth-driven bounce pop. The crowd at the Bigfoot stage was absolutely thrilled at the opportunity to shake all the sleep loose from the night before. Their cover of Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” was great.

We decided to take in some comedy after the STRFKR excitement, which meant catching Twitter-comedian Rob Delaney in the Banana Shack. I honestly don’t know what else Delaney is famous for, but on Twitter he is truly one of the funniest people you would ever read. It’s difficult to sum up his hour-long set, but I’ll leave you with this revelation: Rob Delaney is “the Lorax for buttholes.”

Next up on the Bigfoot stage was one of my SXSW2012 favorites, Alabama Shakes. From Athens (Alabama, not Georgia), Alabama Shakes’ name is exactly the opposite of STRFKR’s — it’s spot on. Lead singer and guitarist Brittany Howard’s contorted-face southern rock styling, along with the usual lead guitar, bassist and drums, put together a set that burned deep down. It had the full crowd cheering and going absolutely nuts.

After that I was left wandering the grounds in search of something interesting. It took a while to find something worth spending any time on, so I’ll sum up what I saw over the next couple hours thusly:

Portlandia — please go back to TV

Civil Wars — it’s amazing how wrong the Grammys can be

THEESatisfaction — Seattle hip hop has taken a fork in the road that doesn’t have a lane for me

Kurt Vile and the Violators — guitar rock still alive, barely

After that mess of stuff, I settled in for my first band at the smaller Yeti stage, London’s Dry the River. I have my reservations about this band — they’ve got the shtick, they know how to rock (do all English bands go through a “playing for large crowds” primer? Because they all seem to do it exactly right), and every song on their debut LP is full of extreme lows and soaring highs. But I predicted that they would slay on stage, and I couldn’t have been more right. Dry the River on stage are represented by three guitars (sometimes a bass guitar), a violin (fuzzed out and filling in for the missing horns) and drums, along with harmonized falsetto vocals.

Dry the River were the first band I heard to comment on the beauty of the Gorge — something that every new band to Sasquatch! says at one time or another. “We’re not used to this, being from the land of Morrissey and bad weather.”

Am I the only one who can’t see Troy Barnes from “Community” doing hardcore hip hop? I get that Donald Glover is trying to affect his treacly image as the rakish Childish Gambino, but it’s just not working for me.

I was happy to see old favorites The Helio Sequence on this year’s Sasquatch! lineup, even though they haven’t had an album out since 2008’s Keep Your Eyes Ahead. The duo from Beaverton, Oregon did not disappoint, playing the more popular songs from their past albums, as well as 3 new tracks that will appear on their forthcoming Sub Pop full-length, slated for release this fall. Benjamin Weikel’s drumming is still full of spazzed-out exactitude, and Brandon Summers’ guitar and vocals were still spot on. A little older, a little less hair, but these guys are still doing it well. Summers left the stage by saying “Next up is Tune-Yards, who are adorable.”

Merrill Garbus, aka tUnE-yArDs, is indeed adorable. But her unconventional setup of multiple mics and various percussion instruments, a bassist and two horns proved more difficult to set up than your typical indie rock band, so she got started later than expected. This was unfortunate, as it meant I could only take in the first four songs before having to move to the main stage to catch The Shins. She did absolutely nail those first few songs, and while most of the crowd had no idea what they were in for, she blew them all away with her amazing yodeling / gutteral-sound and drum-looping skills on stage.

Moving back over to the main stage, I arrived just in time to watch James Mercer and his new backing band, still called The Shins, put together a surprisingly good set. I say surprising, because in my experience, the Shins have always had trouble carrying a festival crowd. The 8:00pm slot at Sasquatch! is the prime slot, so I was a bit dubious. The new band that Mercer has assembled, amazingly enough, are better than the original Shins lineup — more dynamic, more electric, more big-stage worthy. They cycled through all the hits you’d expect to hear, along with a good number of songs from their most recent album Port of Morrow.

The capper for the night was zombie Robert Smith, aka Jack White. (At what point do you think Jack looked in the mirror and thought, “you know what? Zombie Robert Smith is the look for me”?) Looks aside, the man can shred. Through White Stripes songs, through at least one Raconteurs song, and through many songs from his new solo album Blunderbuss. (He may have thrown in a Dead Weather song, but I missed out on the Dead Weather-era Jack White.) With a full band behind him, Jack’s amazing guitar skills really shined on the main stage. He led the crowd in singing on a song, and played to the audience like a true living rock legend should.

Now one-and-a-half days are in the hopper, with 2 more full days to go. Caffeinate up and slather on that sunscreen, I can already tell it’s going to be a scorcher on the hill.

{Pickwick photo by Lori Paulson.}

Pink Ribbons, Inc. finds itself in a difficult position because it was released after, but created before the news broke that the Susan G. Komen Foundation was going to stop giving money to Planned Parenthood. Fortunately, that decision was reversed, and, for better or worse, the Komen Foundation has yet to be able to undo the damage to its reputation after that poorly-conceived decision.

What the documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc. explores is the problematic nature of the breast cancer awareness culture. Corporations pour millions of dollars into ineffective breast cancer research with little accountability, while, as the film persuasively notes, companies like Revlon and Avon use materials that have been linked to causing cancer in their cosmetics. Director Léa Pool does a great job examining the evidence that a lot of money has gone into the cause, but hasn’t put anyone any closer to finding a cure, the supposed purpose of the ubiquitous walks the Komen Foundation puts on annually.

Also compelling are the interviews with members of a stage four breast cancer support group. These ladies note that they don’t feel particularly welcome in the breast cancer group because the disease will likely take their lives (“there’s no stage five,” one notes) and it conflicts with the optimistic tone that is being sold to the public at large.

The most surreal moment of the film occurs when Komen CEO Nancy Brinker defends the Komen Foundation’s unusual partnership with Kentucky Fried Chicken, which allowed the fast food chain to tie itself to the cause for the cure.

The film doesn’t note that KFC’s “pink washing” efforts came at the same time as KFC unveiled their “Double Down” sandwich, a heart attack waiting to happen. It also feels a little out of date because it didn’t capture the Planned Parenthood controversy, but it’s a strong argument against corporate pink washing, laid out convincingly with plenty of evidence to support why this is problematic. It comes at a time when more and more people are aware of the problem. It’ll enrage viewers in the way it needs to, and you’ll leave the theater understanding why eating yogurt won’t put anyone any closer to finding a cure.

{Pink Ribbons, Inc. plays at SIFF on Monday, May 28 at 3:30pm at the Harvard Exit.}

Last week, singer-songwriter, and ARS favorite, Rachel Platten played her first headlining show in Seattle at the Triple Door. We were fortunate for star photographer Kirk Stauffer to be willing to share his gorgeous photos of the lovely artist with us. You can see much more of Kirk’s always-excellent photography on his Flickr page.

Opening day at a festival is always a crap shoot. You pack up your gear and hit the road at a decent time, high with expectation. Sasquatch! is no different, and the road to Sasquatch! 2012 was especially long. At three different spots along the I-90 superhighway, three lanes of heavy long-weekend traffic were compressed down to two, causing backups of crawling or stopped cars for miles. And if that weren’t frustrating enough, once you’ve exited the highway, you’re greeted with a line nearly as long as the 5-mile entry road into the Gorge.

The problem here turned out to be the damn campers. (This won’t be the last time I curse the campers). With Sasquatch! 2012 going from a pick-a-day event to a 4-days-or-nothing event, everybody who’d signed up for camping was showing up at the event in the relatively small 2-hour window prior to the music starting. The staff at the Gorge did their best to manage the onslaught, but it wasn’t enough. Another Rainy Saturday photographer Lori Paulson got into the Gorge line at 3:15pm and didn’t enter the grounds until 7:15pm. If only the non-campers had been given their own lane of entry, we would have been able to make it into the festival in time for the first and second bands to hit the stage.

Consequently, I was only able to catch two sets Friday night. But that turned out to be plenty. It was rave night on the big stage at Sasquatch!, with Girl Talk going on at 8:30pm, followed by Pretty Lights at 10:15pm. You couldn’t miss the start of Girl Talk’s set, thanks to the small fireworks show (a first for Sasquatch?) that opened DJ Gregg Gillis’s set. As you no doubt have heard, Gillis is not your typical techno DJ. He is the master of cutting up riffs from popular songs both old and new, layering them in the constant beat of current and old-school hip hop and rap vocals.

You will never see a Girl Talk set that you don’t recognize at least half of the samples within. To my ear, this is a boon as well as a bane, as you’ll hear the great opening to an amazing song, only to find out that the song never resolves — you never get to the chorus. It makes sense in the grand scheme of the ongoing beat, but to the lizard brain this is akin to having the rug pulled out from underneath you. But Gillis had the crowd with him, giving a top-of-his-range shout out to the packed bowl, yelling the requisite “Sasquatch! Make some noise!” at every possible moment.

Gillis makes up for his non-analog music making equipment (a lone computer, smack dab in the middle of the stage) by constantly bouncing and dancing throughout his set. A pre-determined number of fans were on stage with him, dancing happily along for the full 1 hour 15 minute set. A large number of screens showed random graphics as eye candy. Stage hands futily lauched balloons, toilet paper cannons, and confetti, all immediately caught by the strong southerly wind, never to be touched by a festival-goer again. During both Girl Talk’s and Pretty Lights’ sets, a seemingly never-ending supply of glowsticks was thrown upon the crowd, ensuring everyone wore the appropriate rave fashion.

Where Gillis plays samples everyone knew, Derek Smith, aka Pretty Lights, bases his set on more obscure samples and sources, making for a more original-sounding set. He still concentrates on 2 dual laptops, but the large video displays made up for his diminutive stature.

A DJ has a much tougher time demonstrating that they’re making music, when they’re doing nothing more than pushing buttons on a laptop during the set. A DJ’s technical prowess is based on beat matching ability, crowd control, and fury induction. Both Gillis and Smith were perfect in execution, playing to the crowd and keeping everybody dancing. If I did have to pick whose set I preferred, I’d have to go with Pretty Lights, if only because his set has more of the ups and downs that I prefer in my dance music. Girl Talk put together a strong set, but where his set is a constant, droning beat, Pretty Lights’ set has the constant crescendos that get you up out of your seat to shake your tired ass.

As I was leaving the Gorge Friday night, I overheard a girl say to her friend “Oh this was such a great first day!” Traffic issues aside, and even though I was only able to take in two acts, I am in full agreement. Year after year, any issues we encounter pale in comparison to what Sasquatch! delivers in beauty and music. And Day 1 of 2012 was no different.

{Photo by Lori Paulson.}

Last night the largest spectacle I’ve ever witnessed — and I’ve seen quite a bit — came through the Key Arena. Roger Waters’ The Wall Live is not your ordinary rock show. This was a full-on Broadway production, with arena-spanning video, pyrotechnics, gargantuan puppets and a flying pig blimp, all led by the 68 year-old former lead singer / bassist of Pink Floyd.

The Wall, Pink Floyd’s multi-platinum selling double album from 1979, was written almost entirely by Waters himself before the band had ever heard the songs. So it’s fitting that Waters — who left Pink Floyd in 1985 due to a well-documented ego-contest between him, David Gilmour, and the other members of the band — has been touring for the past 2 years, playing the album in its entirety, note for note, without a single other member of Pink Floyd in his band.

The album, subsequent movie, and now the live production are all losely autobigraphical for Waters, based on the loss of his dad at an early age in World War II, Waters’ (and former Pink Floyd lead singer Syd Barrett’s) rise to stardom with Pink Floyd, and the excesses that come from being a star in one of — if not the — best selling bands of all time. At it’s heart, the rock opera is an anti-war opus. War robs people of their wellbeing, destroys families and towns, and never produces any good. Waters has updated the imagery over the years, so that a lot of the video he shows in the current production is from Afghanistan and Iraq, in addition to the fantastic Gerald Scarfe animation sequences from the 1981 movie.

The band Waters has assembled for the live show features 11 highly talented musicians who’ve mastered every part of the album and movie soundtrack. There were only a few moments throughout the show where the musicians took any liberty with the material. Every Gilmour guitar solo was reproduced perfectly by Dave Kilminster, Snowy White and Jon Carin. Robbie Wyckoff sang all of Gilmour’s vocal parts to a tee. And ever wonder what happened to G.E. Smith (of Hall & Oates and Saturday Night Live Band (1985-1995) fame)? I found him! He’s up there on stage with Waters, too.

The production value of the show is outrageous. The design team has to restructure the physical wall to fit the particular setup for each venue. The base for the wall stretches from the lower lip of the upper deck, across the stage, up to the other side, spanning the entire width of the venue. It has super-bright video broadcast on it throughout the entire show, and as the stagehands build the wall throughout the first half of the show (there’s an intermission), the video expands as well, brick by ginormous brick. The wall appears to be about 6 stories tall upon completion, and the emotional weight of it is felt in your bones as it gets torn down at the end of the 2nd act.

There’s a six-story tall “teacher” puppet that comes out during “Another Brick in the Wall,” and a childrens choir assembled of local kids (children of the biggest fans? I don’t know where they came from) sings, claps and points in unison at the puppet.

Waters does a lot of acting throughout the show, dressing up as the leader of the fake, nazi-like army in a long trench coat, arm band and black aviators. He often pantomimes along to building-sized video of himself shown on the wall behind him on stage, shouting into a loudspeaker and “firing” a kalishnakov into the audience. One of the best, and admittedly narcissistic, moments of the show had Waters singing along to his 1980 self during “Mother.” A fuzzy black & white image of Waters with his acoustic guitar from 1980, larger than life behind Waters of today, standing on stage with his acoustic guitar, singing in unison. A nearly-touching-the-ceiling inflatable animatronic puppet Mother appears behind the wall during the motherly parts of the song and shame the young Waters into submission.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this production turned into a Broadway musical after Waters himself decides he’s had enough. It feels like a Broadway production. And with Waters himself playing the foil to his own recorded visage, there’s really no need for him to even be there. It will feel different, but the album is already 30 years old. Another five or 10 and the audience’s connection to the album will be one generation removed, without any real memory of who Waters is. Only Pink will remain.

I never thought I’d get the chance to see Pink Floyd in person. And while I still really haven’t, this was somehow better than that. It’s an amazing spectacle, I highly recommend it. If you’re even remotely familiar with the album, you will enjoy this production. There’s always something to see on stage, and it’s well worth the rather steep ticket prices. It’s truly one of a kind.