NEW YORK (Top40 Charts) - There was no worse place to be an indecisive left-of-center music fan this weekend than on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, where
Sonic Youth hosted the first-ever American All Tomorrow's Parties festival
Thursday (March 14) through Sunday (March 17).
Where else would someone have to make a decision between Eddie Vedder and Bardo Pond? Sleater-Kinney and Papa M? Wilco and Aphex Twin? Stephen Malkmus and a psuedo-Stooges reunion featuring J. Mascis and Mike Watt jamming alongside Ron and Scott Asheton, two of the original members of the band?
Those kind of decisions (which faced concertgoers on Friday and Saturday night, when simultaneous performances were taking place in up to three separate, but close venues) are par for the course for the 2-year-old festival, which has previously taken place in Camber Sands, England, near London. Multiple stages and the ability to make compromises may work for the English, but some of the ticket holders at UCLA's ATP were disgruntled by the long lines that formed outside of the supposedly general admission venues before many of the more popular performers' sets.
Eddie Vedder |
Those who did make it into the rooms of their choice were treated to some very interesting, experimental music, even from the more mainstream artists on the festival's diverse bill. Vedder ?- the most commercial of the 50-plus artists that played ?- used his hour to try out mostly new, ukulele-based material on the crowd. He wasn't the only established artist to play new tunes, either ?-
Sleater-Kinney debuted a couple of dual-female-vocal power-punk songs, while Malkmus' headlining set on Friday was comprised almost entirely of new, charmingly lackadaisical tunes.
Wilco played through almost all of
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, due out April 23, during its magnificent set, and only played two tunes recognizable to those with slower-than-T1
Internet connections.
At least those bands all played, which was more than could be said about Richard D. James (a.k.a., Aphex Twin) during his packed-to-the-gills show late Saturday night. What started as the most anticipated performance of the weekend (the line to get in snaked all the way around the venue during Sleater-Kinney's set -? two full hours before Aphex Twin was scheduled to be onstage) fell flat when a masked man and two midgets danced to seemingly prerecorded music for the entirety of the set. Only after the house lights came up was James visible, perched with a Powerbook under the stage.
Sleater-Kinney |
Though much of the weekend was dedicated to instrumental noise rock (courtesy of the
Boredoms and
Merzbow, among others) and performance art (Aphex Twin,
Peaches,
Tony Conrad, etc.),
Sonic Youth used its festival-closing set Sunday in a much more mainstream way ?- by actually playing songs.
Sonic Youth's strength has always been that it uses the experimental as a jumping off point rather than a means to an end ?- every time Thurston Moore thrashes his guitar at his amplifier, conjuring up white-noise distortion, there?s no doubt that a melodic vocal line is about to gurgle out over the din, providing more than enough counterpoint to the music's dim opacity. That's exactly what happened during their triumphant set, on both old songs ("Bull in the Heather") and brand-new compositions (the career highlight "Radical Adult Lick God Head Style").
When Moore thanked everyone for coming before the band's encore, there was no longer a downside. Everyone with a ticket was able to get into Ackerman Hall, and, on Sunday, there was no better place to be a left-of-center music fan than at UCLA.
