Festival Preview: ULTRA

Voted Best Music Event by the International Dance Music Awards for the past three years, ULTRA Music Festival in Miami, Florida reigns as the world’s ultimate Electronic Dance Music Festival. Created in 1999, ULTRA was originally an EDM-exclusive affair held on the sands of South Beach, but has over the years expanded both its dimensions and its focus. While remaining true to its musical core and its Miami location, today ULTRA is held in the city’s massive Bicentennial Park, and features all kinds of EDM subgenres (“house, trance, electro, indie-rock, dance rock, techno, drum & bass, breakbeat, alternative, minimal, big beat, jamtronica and more,” according to their website) as well as many other crossover acts on its 16 stages.

This year, the lineup is a portrait of focused multiplicity. While starring a slew of internationally renowned DJs, including Tiësto, David Guetta, Deadmau5 and Armin Van Buuren, ULTRA 2010 also makes way for older acts such as Infected Mushroom and Groove Armada as well as more up-and-coming crossovers like Little Boots, Ghostland Observatory, and Passion Pit. Genres extend from jam bands (or rather, jamtronica) like the Disco Biscuits to reggae/rap/hip-hop acts such as Damian Marley & Nas (performing together!) and the Black-Eyed Peas’ Will.i.am.

As an EDM fanatic, I have already seen and loved a great many of these acts (Tiësto, Guetta, Van Buuren, Ghostland, Passion Pit, Above & Beyond, Paul Oakenfold and more) but with the exception of Passion Pit, most have performed individually, usually at clubs, so I’m interested to see how they’ll play out in a festival setting. Not to mention the fact that ULTRA will be a combination of my two favorite things in the world: electronic dance music and festivals.

So do a no-rain dance and join me, dear readers, or live vicariously through me as I head to Miami and embark on what will surely be a very exciting weekend!

By Hilary Cadigan

Full Review Coming Soon!

YACHT (The Drunken Unicorn, Atlanta 3/16/10)

The brainchild of musician and multimedia performance artist Jona Bechtolt, YACHT prevails more as an experience than a band.  In fact, as their website’s official mission statement declares, YACHT is “a Band, a Belief System and a Business.”  In concert, it quickly becomes clear that performance, for YACHT, derives from art, but not in the annoying, pretentious, or esoteric sense. Think Banksy, light on the politics. While there remains something obviously tongue-in-cheek about the whole endeavor, Bechtolt clearly feels very passionate about what he has created, and wants nothing more than to share it. 

Backed by two-man opening act Bobby Birdman on bass and drums, YACHT’s performance struck gold with a combination of serious eccentricities, quirky exuberance, and faithful interpretation of 2009’s critically acclaimed See Mystery Lights, the first album to feature Claire Evans as an official band member.

As the other half of Team YACHT, Evans truly nails her role as Bechtolt’s female counterpart. Imagine if Karen O and Siouxsie Sioux somehow conceived a child that came out looking like Annie Lennox from Eurythmics.  With a blonde bob, ruby red lips, and skintight black dress, the heron-like Evans is a gothified diva who bounced around the stage like a curious puppy, tapping on everyone else’s instruments, tipping over microphone stands and tangling herself up in wires. 

Compared to their studio work, nearly everything YACHT played sounded better live, from the jaunty, rattling anthem “The Afterlife” to the T-Pain-spoofing  auto-tune of “I’m In Love with a Ripper.”  Evans breathed unprecedented life into “It’s Boring/You Can Live Anywhere You Want,” a double-track that felt a little, well, boring in its 9-minute studio cut.  In addition, Bechtolt led a rollicking, electrified cover of L.A. band X’s garage-punk oldie “Nausea.”

Then there was near-flawless feel-good masterpiece “Psychic City,” the buoyant and bubbling little gem that proffers the delightful idea of a “voodoo city/where every little thing has its own secret life.” I must mention that this is one of my personal favorite songs—which is probably the only reason I noticed that Evans messed up the lyrics of the first verse—but other than that I was very pleased with the performance. They got all the “HUH!”s just right.

Never even needing to look at each other, the chemistry between Bechtolt and Evans thrives on the power of minimalism.  The two are clearly on the same wavelength, shining in small moments of almost familial synchronicity, such as their pokerfaced Macarena entrance, performed to the twittering pulsations of “Ring the Bell,” which provocatively chants “Will we go to heaven/Or will we go to hell/It’s my understanding/That neither are real” before dissolving into Three 6 Mafia-esque stutter effects. With Bechtolt in a white suit and white sneakers and Evans in head-to-toe black, a kind of yin/yang duality comes into play: together, they form a perfectly balanced whole and prove that on YACHT’s stage, there is room for two divas.

Unafraid to ham it up or break into spastic little dances, Bechtolt kept the energy high throughout the performance, basking in various forms of audience interaction.  There was a Q&A session, introduced with the promise, “We’ll answer anything!” (Q: “Why are you awesome?” A: “Why am I a mirror reflecting your awesomeness?”), and even a “guided meditation” in which he came down into the crowd on bended knee; “the world may end in my lifetime but my energy will continue,” Bechtolt intoned, “I will love. I will not attack.”

As the band’s website proclaims, “All people are welcome to become members of YACHT.  Accordingly YACHT is and always will be what YACHT is when YACHT is standing before you.”  So what is YACHT when YACHT is standing before you?  To put it simply: a damn good time.

Review by Hilary Cadigan 

Vetiver & The Clientele (The Earl, Atlanta 2/25/10)

In a gray fedora, button-down shirt, and jeans, Vetiver frontman Andy Cabic stands as a portrait of classic cool, but he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would brag about it. Vetiver, a band often characterized by their association with Devendra Banhart and the rather contentious “freak folk” label, surpasses pigeonholing with a unique style that is simpler, yet more nuanced than any one particular genre. In concert, however, the band outdid even their own skillful recordings, extending delicate melodic structures into rollicking jam sessions without batting an eye. Much to the delight of an affably bearded crowd, Vetiver at times came across as a scaled-down reincarnation of the Grateful Dead, except with less hair and more synthesizers.

To remove any doubt (and effectively supersede my comparison), the band ended their performance with a nimbly-rendered cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Don’t Ease Me In.” But don’t write them off as just another bunch of Deadheads. Even their most Garcia-tinged tracks, such as the countrified B-side “Wishing Well,” were inculcated with small yet defining details—an electric organ opener, a mournful harmonica solo, the gentle caress of synthesized piano—setting them apart from their predecessors. Tracks like the infectious “Another Reason to Go,” a classic drifter’s anthem, featured an unexpected combination of rocksteady beats and blistering synth-horns that illustrated the band’s dexterity.

Vetiver provided their successors, The Clientele, with a very tough act to follow. Both bands began with correspondingly mellow vibes, but Vetiver’s performance set up expectations of escalation, starting off slow and spiraling into full-on rock-out, while The Clientele proved unable to fulfill these expectations.

The Clientele’s new album Bonfires on the Heath constructs a painstakingly maintained atmosphere of slow-motion reverie. Exemplified with the cooing undulations and smoothly enhanced xylophone of their title track and the tender vocal repetitions of the swooning, wedding-ready serenade “Never Anyone But You;” the power of the album lies in its ability to sustain this atmosphere, cradling listeners within it like a room full of pillows.

Somehow, this power did not translate into the live show. Despite the lovably British temperament of frontman Alasdair MacLean and the Alice in Wonderland languor of gorgeous keyboardist/violinist/percussionist Mel Draisey, The Clientele’s portion of the concert fell curiously flat, sounding like what Bob Dylan might resort to if influenced by Coldplay and consigned to adult contemporary. Plagued by technical difficulties, including a squealing mic that kept disrupting what should have been a dream-like flow, the band seemed somewhat deflated from the get-go. This deflation escalated into a sense of mutual boredom for the band and the audience, transforming hypnotic ambience into the monotonous chore of trying to stay on one’s feet.

I probably would have enjoyed this music a whole lot more if I was sitting down, maybe in a grassy field on a sunny afternoon, maybe in a room full of pillows, maybe tripping on acid, but the Earl just didn’t feel like the right venue to fully appreciate what the band has to offer. Moreover, perhaps because of the contradictory crowd-pleasers they had to follow, it seemed like The Clientele had grown too disenchanted with their own work, or at least this particular presentation of it, to garner the confidence they needed to pull it off, setting themselves up for what can only be described as a self-fulfilling prophecy of mediocrity.

Review & Photos by Hilary Cadigan