Lollapalooza: The Bands
July 30th, 2005I’ve posted my best Lollapalooza photos to my Flickr account. I’ve also typed in a few impresssions of the bands to support the photos. For the blow-by-blow, go check out the photos. Here, I’m going to get to a quick summary of the bands:
The Good:
The Redwalls were fun, The Warlocks were great, and time spent watching Ambulance Ltd. is always time well spent. The Bravery are great live, even better than their enjoyable self-titled debut album. Billy Idol was surprisingly good considering I don’t like that kind of music. The Black Keys were great as always, playing their densely noisy blues.
The Pixies never disappoint, and maintain their well-earned title as the band I’ve seen more times in one year than anyone. Kasabian is better live than on CD, Louis XIV is a fun live act, and I may never tire of seeing The Arcade Fire live. The Dandy Warhols put on a pretty tight set of songs from their last three (excellent) albums, and Death Cab for Cutie played great to finish off the weekend.
The Bad:
The International Noise Conspiracy’s time would be better spent rocking than lectured kids who spent $135 on a concert about the evils of capitalism. Trail of Dead just sound like noise live – and this is coming from someone who like John Zorn CDs. Liz Phair was underwhelming at best, but she played stuff off her first three albums, which is all anyone really wanted to hear. When she played new stuff I split out to go check out The Kaiser Chiefs.
From the performance by The Brian Jonestown Massacre I can only assume he’s insane or mixing prescriptions. Blue Merle suck, but they played a respectable cover of "Psycho Killer" by Talking Heads. I don’t like Tegan and Sara, but they win points for exciting drama by quitting after one of the twins threw up due to the heat and couldn’t continue to perform. Spoon was disapointing as usual – I just don’t know why I don’t like that band.
Next – my summary of the show…