Preview: With Festival Season Simmering, Summer Turns to High*

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By Andy Smith, Editor
2007.6

Next week, UK native Raiph Mellor will attend his first Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee (http://www.bonnaroo.com/). Besides working as a volunteer, he can’t wait to see Tool, The Police, The Flaming Lips, and many more.

Although not a festival aficionado like some of his traveling companions, when hearing of the potential mudbath if Manchester gets too much rain, he vividly recalls his first rock festival—the Longest Day festival at Milton Keynes Bowl in 1985. Although seeing U2, REM, the Ramones, and Billy Bragg, he remembers most the mudslide that fans created to enjoy the mess in proper sloppy style.

Building from our coverage of the Langerado Festival this past March, the staff at Interference.com hopes to cover live music even more than before with as much on-site reporting as we can muster from as many outdoor gigs as we can find writers to attend.

Editor Kimberly Egolf will soon post her report from a recent rock and roll street party in Boston. Photographer Jonathan Marx is currently in Kansas covering Wakarusa (http://www.wakarusa.com/). In just a few days, members of the Interference staff and their closest friends—writers, editors, and photographers in one way or another—will descend on Bonnaroo, an amazing rock and roll animal emerging from its jammie roots to be the most eclectic and extensive of all the major music festivals, a sort of World’s Fair of Rock.

“Reality is a condition caused by the absence of Bonnaroo”—Photo from Bonnaroo 2006 by Andy Smith

And of course, while Bonnaroo may be the biggie, it’s still one among many. According to Ray Waddell writing for melodytrip.com, “The festival market is arguably the healthiest part of the U.S. concert business, a trend that has held forth in Europe for years.”

For 2007, Coachella, the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and Sasquatch have all past. After the ‘roo, fans will have to wait for the next big ones to arrive in August and September: Lollapalooza (August 3-5, Chicago http://www.lollapalooza.com ), Virgin Festival (Baltimore, MD August 4-5, 2007 http://www.virginfestival.com ), and Austin City Limits (September 14-17 http://www.aclfestival.com ).

But for the die-hard fans, an entire summer tour could be built around attending the best music festivals. Some of the smaller but more interesting up-and-coming events in July include: High Sierra Music Festival inQuincy, CA July 5-8, 2007 http://www.highsierramusic.com/; All Good Music Festival & Camp Out in Masontown, WV July 13-15, 2007 http://www.allgoodfestival.com/; and 10,000 Lakes Festival in Detroit Lakes, MN July 18-21, 2007 http://www.10klf.com

As we pack the sun-block, sandals, and drinking water, we will try to post previews. While at the ‘roo and other festivals, we will post pictures and stories as often as possible. Please stay tuned as summer turns to high!

Review: Arcade Fire Preaches to Its North American Choir for the Last Time This Tour*

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By Luke Pimentel
2007.06

The word amongst the faithful these days is that Arcade Fire have saved rock. While there is ample evidence of this in their critically-lauded studio recordings, much of the hyperbole surrounding their importance stems from their amazing live shows, which are quite unlike anything else on the planet.

Naysayers – those sour folk who would dismiss the band as bombastic and overly-romanticized – were clearly not in attendance at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre on June 2nd, where the band put to rest their triumphant North American tour with a thunderous 17-song set.

For Arcade Fire, “going out with a bang” meant an impromptu forty-foot climb up a scaffolding tower by bassist-percussionist Will Butler, the kind of stunt that would make a Cirque du Soleil performer nauseous.

Apparently, Arcade Fire are so big right now, even the venues they perform in cannot contain them.

The set – delivered under a chilly shroud of East Bay Area fog – zigzagged between moments of delicate melancholia (the gorgeous “In the Backseat”) and manic-prophet energy (“Antichrist Television Blues”). A sense of final-show urgency helped lend additional edge, with the band pulling out all the stops on their drum-throwing, cymbal-crashing exuberance, and the crowd lapping up the runoff like Dom Perignon.

Longtime fans were sent into delirium by the inclusion of “Headlights Look like Diamonds”, a song off the band’s debut E.P. that had not been performed live for several years. Earlier in the day, lead singer Win Butler had nearly been arrested by local police over an argument involving half-court basketball, and he recalled the incident midway through the set, wearing a sheepish grin.

“If we can’t stop the war,” he joked, “let’s at least boycott Berkeley athletic facilities.”

Watching Arcade Fire perform, it’s rather shocking how willing they are to take risks and give all for the crowd. Their stage show is live in the truest sense; the performers create an intoxicating environment of unpredictability, both in terms of their stage antics and their musical performance.

They encourage audience participation at all turns, and the Berkeley crowd did not disappoint, fervently singing and clapping along to almost every song. Even an encore break didn’t stop the crowd from momentarily transforming into the world’s largest choir, as they continued to sing the climactic melody of main set closer “Rebellion (Lies),” long after the song had ended and the band had left the stage.

When the band returned to find the crowd still singing away, they started up an impromptu marching beat to accommodate the enthusiasm. This sort of intimate give-and-take between performer and audience – especially an audience of thousands – is rare, and it’s exhilarating to see a group so engaging to an audience that they can make the audience take on a life of its own.

Wandering around on the street after the show, I noted that every person had a goofy grin on his or her face, like they had just gotten laid for the first time. I suspect that other shows in other cities have inspired similar reactions. If so, then Arcade Fire haven’t just done something as pedestrian as “saving”rock. They’ve managed to wring an emotional catharsis out of our shared feelings of paranoia and doubt. That, more than anything else, makes them the most exciting band of their time.

For more information on Arcade Fire, please visit arcadefire.com. Neon Bible was released March 6, 2007 on Merge Records.

Review: It’s their show: Kings of Leon rock Asheville*

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By Andy Smith, Editor and Jonathan Marx, Phographer
2007.05

Like prodigal renegades armed with loud guitars, gifted voices, and gritty lyrics, they emerged from the back of a barn and rambled into the weeds of a music industry in perpetual identity crisis.

The ferocious Followill brothers are worth following, a fast rising flame that has blazed a straight shot from the backwoods of Tennessee to front and center, on tour and on the stage of sold-out clubs in America, and by the end of the year, their first arena tour of the UK. On the first Saturday in June, the tour in support of the best-selling “Because of the Times” found its way to Asheville, North Carolina.

As the opening song of their current set proves, the Kings Of Leon are “an ornery curse” of modern roots rock. “Black Thumbnail” begins it brutally with a cold-hearted confirmation of the front-man’s mojo. The song’s a boot-kick in the balls of fake beauty; at the show, it commences an 80-minute testimonial that this band’s early detractors simply got it wrong. There’s no denying Caleb’s raunchy growl, “Don’t leave no smell on me.”

The mess of folk up front started in on some sweet and sloppy ritual, something not unlike dancing and not quite moshing and full of fists in the air, screams to the sky, and beautiful women speaking in tongues.

Not to disappoint the die-hards who’d been drowning themselves in beer through two opening bands (including fellow Tenneseeans, the impressive, up-and-coming Features), the brothers kept things blessedly bad and nasty with a tight “Taper Jean Girl.”

For some, the show surely peaked early when Caleb grabbed the acoustic guitar for the Kings at their most mellow and eternally anthemic. Without a doubt, evidence of the band’s tingly and intoxicating maturity, “Fans” will fill halls with fans. It’s self-loving litany for those of us who do this rock thing as a religion, who get healed by each riff and are always hungry for more as soon as the show ends.

(Photo credit: jonathanmarxprophoto.com)

But as the sound gets grander, the Leons’ lyrics can still keep things dirty and down low. By dipping their sticky fingers into the back catalog fairly early in the set, these dirty mouthed boys of the new south reminded us that hip-hop has not cornered the market on postmodern pornographic quatrains. Here, the Kings kept things below the belt as they pleased the crowd with so many lines unforgettable and irrepressible, ripping their own drunken impotence on “Soft” and simply praising the pussy by describing what it does to a man’s “pistol” and how a girl can bring him to his knees on “Molly’s Chambers.”

Such a soft and juicy center of the set might have made the rest of the night a little anti-climatic, but not for this band of brothers. Building their power from a basic rock formula and feeling it feed the crowd whose energy in turn feeds them, the show continued to roar and breeze through more songs to please, including the always addictive “Bucket” and the on-the-money “On Call.”

(Photo credit: jonathanmarxprophoto.com)

Having been mentored over the last couple of years when touring with the likes of Pearl Jam, U2, and Bob Dylan, the Kings do not shy away from acknowledging how much such an apprenticeship has now made them the masters of the rock craft.

Towards the night’s end, the influence of these big names with their even bigger sounds and ideas bore its fruit on “McFearless,” where Matthew wears the Edge influence so vividly while Caleb almost begs the world to back off the bullshit to hear him howl, “It’s my role/It’s my soul/It’s my show.” Sadly, it’s a show that inevitably had to end with Caleb’s gratitude expressed succinctly and with a smile.

(Photo credit: jonathanmarxprophoto.com)

While in Asheville, they played for hundreds in a packed Orange Peel. But in less than two weeks, the band will return to the region for a main stage set at Bonnaroo where they’ll greet the thousands of their budding fan base.

And here’s how the Kings of Leon keep growing: as much as the stripped-down live show offers evidence of their archetypal bad boy aesthetic, there’s something else going on as well, the baring of a sweet soul and impure purity that keeps them passionate about their music, their fans, and their future.

For more information on Kings of Leon, visit
http://www.kingsofleon.com. "Because of the Times" was released by by RCA on April 3, 2007.

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