ChinaShop

Jeff Tweedy once publicly wondered why anyone would ever attend a festival. On Sunday afternoon, even the most dedicated festival-goers had such flashes of doubtful thought sweep through their minds — the breeze from Lake Michigan was simply not enough to stop the heat from taking center stage. The musicians performing on Sunday faced a challenge — to convince each and every ticket holder they had made the right choice. Cold War Kids, the California-based band born in the shadow of the blogosphere, overcame the challenges of the day’s agenda by focusing on some very basic, very intimate human elements — passion, emotionalism and heavy drinking.

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Somewhere along the way at my first trip to Lollapalooza, I thought to myself, “why did I never make it out to this festival before?” In its fifth year of being held in my home of Chicago, this three-day festival continues to provide arguably the biggest and most wide-ranging showcase of music in North America. That old marketing cliché of, “there’s something for everyone” actually holds weight at Lolla. And of the hundred-plus acts that played the multiple stages, I only wish I could have seen more.

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From a photographic standpoint, shooting dance rock act Friendly Fires is an ideal way to kick off a long day at a music festival. Yeah, it was blazingly hot and humid by the time this trio of drummer Jack Savidge, guitarist Edd Gibson, and vocalist/keyboardist Ed Macfarlane bounced onto the Budweiser stage on day-three of Lollapalooza. And sure the crowd was thin and slow to show up for this opening act. But none of that could stop the super charged energy of Macfarlane and company, which is exactly what concert photographers hope for.

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Since the launch of ChinaShop, we’ve publicly worn a certain fascination with Lorin Ashton and the intense wall of bass he’s built brick-by-brick as Bassnectar. From our first encounter under the Austin sun during South By Southwest to our days spent in Detroit at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival and soaking up the Chicago sights with the California-based deejay at Lollapalooza, we’ve always sported our fan patch with pride. After catching up with Ashton’s manager and everything man, Elliott Dunwody (who informed us about the fantastic Playboy bunny brunch he enjoyed earlier than morning), we finally ran into the man himself. Within minutes, Ashton began dropping articulate bombs about his upcoming release, Cozza Frenzy, due in the first week of October on Amorphous Music.

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Of everyone I saw at Lollapalooza, Jane’s Addiction’s headlining Sunday performance was undoubtedly the most over-the-top. Who else would have a helicopter circle the concert grounds just prior to a performance to illuminate the fans and stage? Moves like this had front man Perry Farrell’s fingerprints all over them. And being the catalyst for this whole Lolla phenomenon, we shouldn’t expect anything less than the biggest and baddest display of rock possible from Farell and his Angelino brethren Dave Navarro, Eric Avery, and Stephen Perkins.

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As the sounds of Snoop Dogg laying down his hits like “That’s That” rumbled in the near background, I tried my best to have an audible conversation with the nomadic four-man band known as Portugal. The Man. Distractions or not, I was able to have a good talk with this group that derives from both Portland, Oregon and Alaska. Earlier in the day I was lucky enough to catch Portugal at the Lolla’s PlayStation stage. Here I experienced musicians with a strong influence from late-60s/early-70s rock, pop, and soul, but who are unafraid to step ahead. With a dual guitar, drums, multiple keyboard set-up and almost everyone on vocals, members John Gourley (vocals/guitars), Zach Carothers (bass/vocals), Jason Sechrist (drums), Ryan Neighbors (keys/vocals), and touring player Zoe Manville (keys/vocals) easily glide across a wave of old school-minded harmonic freshness. I spoke to Portugal. The Man about their sonic commonalities, touring, and how home is now a hard place to find.

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A very strange thing happened on Sunday afternoon happened when The Raveonettes took the stage. Not only did those gigantic dragonflies make a matinee appearance, swirling over the heads of sweat-drenched patrons and frightening the small ones, but also as the band began to perform, a surplus of sexuality spilled into the crowd. Perhaps it was the two-piece Raveonettes (consisting of Danish guitarists Sune Rose Wagne and Sharin Foo) transformed into a magnetic five-piece, complete with a minimalist drummer simply banging upon a stand-alone tom and snare. Perhaps it was the tension of a weekend spent watching gorgeous patrons, both vivaciously female and chiseled male, fondle and eye-fuck each other until someone went numb and blind.

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If Glitch Mob were a well-dressed boy band parading around a 20-feet-high stage, we would be the droves of screaming girls in the audience throwing our training bras on the stage in hopes of getting noticed among the flashing lights and pubescent mayhem. At Lollapalooza at Perry’s stage, as the sun burnt us to a crisp, we really couldn’t tell the difference between Glitch Mob members edIT (“The Crunkmaster Himself”), Boreta (“The Iceman”) and Ooah (“The Mob Boss”) and their boy band alter egos because we were … er … screaming like little girls from the sweaty, gyrating crowd. We’ve had the pleasure of becoming freaks in the night to Glitch Mob’s notoriously bass-heavy sets with the moon suspended in the air (along with covering the boys on ChinaShop when they performed on the Red Bull Music Academy Stage at this past year’s Detroit Electronic Music Festival), but in the middle of the afternoon with the Chicago skyline all around us, the vibe took on a different feeling and meaning — one that reminded us of those midday warehouse raves we used to frequent in our teens (which, you know, is a good thing). Perhaps it was the amount of ineffective glow sticks floating around in the crowd, or the rows of passed out humans creating a sort of flesh border around the dancing perimeter — we can’t quite put our finger on it. But when the electronic trio, who are noted as some of the more accessible deejays around considering their innovative performance set-up, dropped their initial nugget of drum-and-bass splintered jams, we knew we shouldn’t have taken the blue pill … or was it the red one?

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