FanBoy: October 9, 2008
All the cool kids were there, but so were the jerks
By Nathan Solis
After a week of summer heat, the sun ducked away long enough for the L.A. Weekly Detour Music Fest Saturday. The wet asphalt and overcast sky were enough to fill the area around Temple, Main and First, but when you factor in some damn good music, well, that’s what’s called a perfect storm. My friends and I made our way from Union Station to Temple, greeted by bulldogs, mohawks, too-tight jeans and a lingering smell of hot dogs wrapped in bacon. “Anarchy,” you say? Not really.
Any city street sporting Gogol Bordello’s Eugene Hutz, with his moustache and shirtless acrobatics making him look like a devil capering in a silent movie, wasn’t going to offer a normal night. The crowd was washed in a red light, giving the illusion of panel three from “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” That was later in the night, so we shall backtrack to the overcast day.
The event wasn’t a total fit of happy hysteria and bacon. Compared to other years, the stages were a bit smaller and some of the carnival-like attractions were absent. But a visit to the beer garden (on the lawn of City Hall) was enough to make us forget all about our money problems and lose weekday-us in bands like Shiny Toy Guns. These L.A. natives sent ripples through the crowd with the very Peaches “Le Disko.” Synth hooks and super -thick bass lines might have been more at home in the DJ area, but there are those faux-1980s bits, like “Rainy Days,” which inspire those comparisons to Depeche Mode.
Cut Copy have got that electro-dance sound that filters through keyboards and reverbs in Technicolor, taking us all back a few years, perhaps to a simpler time – well, whatever time capsule the Black Lips came from. Studio albums don’t do these Lips proper justice. In person they’re every non-rehearsing garage band you’ve ever heard, like the pre-Warhol Velvet Underground of legend, such was the intensity of their set and the intentional over-distorted sound.
Speaking of distortion, jamming out an overall astounding set, there was the Mars Volta. Some kind of proggy magnet pulled our collective bodies toward the stage. No two Mars Volta shows are the same, what with Cedric Bixler-Zavala flailing his mic like a bullwhip across our peripheral vision. He climbed all over the stage and whirling around on the other side was Omar Rodriguez-Lopez’s backwards guitar-playing creating all sorts of elation. The opener, “Drunkship of Lanterns,” caught us all red-faced and tired at about 9:30, but “The Widow” and “Viscera Eyes” came like a jolt of caffeine. An epic presentation to say the least – though the exhaustion of the day, coupled with a fistfight, didn’t help. There was a mosh pit, so even though Mars Volta fans aren’t really the type to angrily bump into each other, a few girls came out of the crowd crying, and naturally a few boyfriends began swinging. It was like a Volta music video, but with more security guards.
Published: 10/08/2008
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