It’s Year 2 (for me) of the Coachella festival out in Indio, CA. While underwhelmed on several of the headliners, there are some great day shows that’ll make the trip worth it.  After all, when else do you get your pick of 2-3 great performances at any given moment? And to start the trip off right, we were next to Steve Tyler in a Maserati on the drive in!   On with the shows….

Cut Copy (on Modular People)

I heard from some coworkers whose taste I trust that Cut Copy put on several great, energetic shows at SXSW. Their neo-new wave would be a fun way to get the festival kicked off for me, right?  Mmmm, no.  Even though they were on my “Must See” list for Coachella, what I got was disappointing. 

Thoughts from the show: Nice music, but I don’t really consider standing on stage and playing instruments a performance. 

Múm (on Fat Cat Records)

I love Mum.  I love their last album, I loved their albums from before, I love Icelandic music.  These guys did NOT disappoint.  The instrumentation was out of this world and I’m still trying to figure out how they got a baby grand piano on stage.  At any given moment there were people playing guitars, violins, kazoos, harmonicas, synths, cellos, percussion, that little keyboard you blow into and play (GOD what’s it called?), recorders and more. 

Thoughts from the show: there are a couple “oh jesus” notes in the high stratosphere of the female vocal range that left you scrambling for earplugs.  BOTH the ladies had accomplished upper registers. Their music is a little reminiscent of Cirque de Soelil. The live performance of ‘The Ballad of a Broken Birdie Records = goosebumps. With enough of those air powered piano things, it sounds exactly like bagpipes. This is a band that actually knows how to use dynamics, loud and soft, to the correct effect.  These dynamics actually bring the audience along emotionally with the swells and diminishing of songs. Mum is the perfect mix of dissonance and sweet melody, sampling with live, music and sheer noise. Somehow they manage to tie it all together with a mini-cover of “I Can’t Get Enough of You Darlin”.  Final thought?  I never want to hear 4 kazoos playing at the same time on a sound system this large ever again. 

Download Dancing Behind My Eyelids from Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy, Mum’s last record (which coincidentally, I did some marketing for previously).

Goldfrapp (on MUTE)

If some people are genetically predisposed to love Goldfrapp, I was born without the gene.  After standing awkwardly and wedged into the tent for her show, we left after one song.  Sorry lady, it’s not you, it’s me. And frankly it sounds like it took you too long to get to your upbeat stuff.  Because with what I heard, Goldfrapp=Mirah.

The Raconteurs (on XL Records/Warner Bros)

Many, many, many yards and feet and a ways off from the actual main stage, you couldn’t help from getting the feeling that Jack White was going to be a musician who would grow only to become more and more legendary within our lifetime.  He’s already quite accomplished with 2 albums out now with The Raconteurs and even more with the White Stripes but he manages to bring to his performances a quality that many musicians don’t exhibit nowadays.  I only wished we had been closer and stayed around for more of the set, but the handful of songs that were enjoyed were fantastic.  

Thoughts from the show: This band is everything you need to have a great rock performance: loud, unpolished, raw, and most importantly cocky. Their enthusiasm for the music is displayed clearly in their lack of enthusiasm for the crowd.  It seems like they could be practicing in the garage and they could care less that we were there watching them.  It was ruckus nonetheless. 

ACK!  The thing about Coachella is that there are only so many hours in the day.  The rest of mine will be spent seeing more shows and not finishing this entry.  There are more reviews from Friday coming so stay tuned for Santogold, Datarock, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Spank Rock (or not) and Fatboy Slim.