The best act of the day Saturday was easily Gang Gang Dance,
an experimental outfit from NYC that fuse gothic vocals (courtesy of
witchy singer Liz Bougatsos), noisy psychedelic murk, and unstoppable,
internationally accented percussive grooves. Their set built from
tinkling, otherworldly space jam to gently Balearic quasi
tropicalia—all glassy synths, steel-drum sounds, slow steady
rhythmic thump giving way to hard-pounded jungle beats, and Bougatsos’s
Kate Bush–lite vocals and the keyboardist’s moaning delayed
and stretched and smeared and looped all over the place. One song
sounded like an airplane taking off ever higher and higher. For their
finale, the band busted out a fucking fantastic Liquid
Liquid–style percussive jam, a tight-circling marimba melody
bouncing around on a bed of interlocking and then counter-rhythmic
drumming. The crowd that hadn’t been scared off earlier was now dancing
in ecstatic little pockets (an improvement from GGD’s last Seattle set
at the Triple Door: This time you could actually dance along
with the Gang).
Sunday belonged to Holy Fuck. If you’re going to give
yourself a profane exclamation for a band name, you better live up to
it, and Holy Fuck totally do—hell, they could add a few
exclamation points and still be in very good shape. If you were
diligent and lucky, you could see the band three times that day; for
their proper evening performance at the Broad Street Stage, the
Canadian instrumental quartet—consisting of an impressively
locked-in drummer and bassist and a couple guys on cheapo keyboards and
analog effects—had the crowd eating it up, dancing and clapping
along and even crowd-surfing to their weird, robot-voiced future
funk and muscular motorik grooves. It was great to see such an
audience for one of the fest’s more outré acts, although there’s
nothing particularly hard to grasp about the band’s visceral rhythms
and booming low end, even if it’s all flecked with weird bursts of
crackling noise or smeared with delayed falsetto or walkie-talkie-grade
vocoder vocals. The set built to one elevated crescendo after another,
reaching a seriously ecstatic climax in the soaring strings of “Lovely
Allen”—it felt like the Space Needle towering above the stage was
about to lift off. Stellar.
Best of the whole weekend, though, was Modest Mouse‘s
festival-closing Monday night set on the Main Stage. Their set was
nicely balanced between new and old material, from “Dramamine” to
“Satellite Skin,” with an emphasis on The Moon & Antarctica,
and the expanded (seven piece?) band sounded great, perfectly loud and
clear from dubby bass to cleanly cutting treble, their arrangements
alternately spare and booming as the songs deserved. Highlights: the
extended jamming and Isaac Brock’s freestyle almost-rapping on
“Dramamine” and “Tiny Cities Made of Ashes” (both were everything I
always loved about Modest Mouse’s old sloppy and feral and
combustible sets, translated without a hitch to the arena); the
unexpected inclusion of The Lonesome Crowded West‘s thrash
freak-out “Shit Luck” and its forlorn B-side ballad “Baby Blue Sedan”;
The Moon & Antarctica‘s stunning, heartbreaking
opener “3rd Planet”; and the inevitable but still totally irresistible
sing-along of “Float On.” 