Viva (small portions of) Nateva

My band, by virtue of playing an early far-off stage at 11:15 a.m., got the privilege of free passes to the first Nateva Festival. Of course, because some sort of holiday was occurring this weekend (and apparently still is or something), most of my bandmates were unable to stay past our admittedly last-minute invitational show. Me? There was never any question I was staying from the time we arrived at 9:30 a.m. to the time the Flaming Lips stopped playing (scheduled for 12:30 a.m.). After some consideration, I think four performances are worth briefly reviewing.

One of them is not the Flaming Lips performance. I’m not sure what I can say at this point about their ability to create spontaneous participatory chaos. It’s hard to really review their performances. Wayne Coyne certainly talks too much. That’s OK. He also does this:

He also, at various times, rode the crowd in a giant bubble and used giant hands to shoot lasers off mirror balls at the top of the stage setup. So what remains to be said about the Lips? Really, nothing. But I can say more about the warm-up acts.

Grizzly Bear

This was the strongest set for me primarily because they were maybe the one I was looking the most forward to but also because I wanted to see how they held up as a unit over the course of an over-one-hour set. The truth is, however, perhaps what I’m looking for in a set is different from what others were looking for. While the festival PR flaks described their set as “surprisingly aggressive,” I was left with the impression that this set wasn’t terribly aggressive but was heartfelt and passionate in ways that are hard to pick up in a giant dustbowl festival like this one.

Especially when they hit their third song of the evening, their gorgeous, off-kilter, electric version of “Little Brother,” they appeared to be at one with the struggle of making complicated music work live but fighting surroundings that are less propitious for the music fan who likes to pay attention. They did have a beautiful evening and perfect sunset to play to, and they did amazing, amazing work under these circumstances. More than that, there was, other than the Lips, no other band who seemed as grateful for the opportunity and more humble about it. That’s worth more than sheer volume or confetti can provide. They poured themselves into this show, flute/clarinet looping and all, and it was my favorite moment of the night.

She and Him

It’s not like I don’t hear every single day that I need to get over myself. My opinion of M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel’s project probably is Exhibit A in the ongoing case against my own humility as a music critic in my own mind. I really never decided anything about She and Him by actually listening to the songs (really only to one song). I just decided that this was a pet project, a show piece for Zooey and lord-knows-what for Matt. So it was nice to see real joy on the stage, if not real passion. The two of them didn’t have particularly great on-stage chemistry (apparently Ward doesn’t actually like playing shows, so that might explain it), but Deschanel and the Chapin sisters who were the backup singers. They were smiling, jumping, and on top of it.

For that matter, so was the whole band. All members were clearly very professional and very good at what they do. It was easily the most technically proficient set I saw the whole day. This was a group of hired guns. But they were there for a reason: She and Him is all about short, “breezy” (as the announcer said) pop songs that require tightness above all else. And yes, they were all so very very good – Deschanel, Ward, the Chapins, the, uh, other folks…

So what? That’s where I got to at the end of the set. I really actually didn’t care. I was perfectly willing to believe, going in, that Deschanel was a talented-enough singer on her own merits to belong in this project no matter what. And she did nothing to dissuade me. But the whole thing felt like this precise, efficient exercise in musicianship. That’s just not what I’m into, and it felt stale to me. Perfectly executed, joyfully executed, yes. And yet stale nonetheless. Does that make you sad? Yeah, me too.

STS-9

Um. Really? This band was to me the perfect example of what could happen when George Winston eventually turns to electronica. Clearly placed in the 2nd-to-last slot of the night to bridge the gap between Grizzly Bear and the Lips for those too acid-addled to sit for an hour and 20 minutes, STS-9 delivered a set only a Guitar Player magazine subscriber could love. It was filled with plenty of booming drum programming augmented by live drums and cringeworthy bongo drum fills. It was filled with live bass playing that could charitably be described as serviceable – perhaps incharitably described as dull.

What hurt me the most was probably the fact that live guitars were used – and used in a way that did real harm to the sound the guitar makes. Because they chose to use the most canned-sounding amplification for those poor, poor guitars. Like exactly what the writers of musicals ask rock guitarists to use when they are playing in the musicals’ orchestras. Tinny, soulless, unnecessarily grungy with no depth. And use was frequent. It was as if they really wanted you to know there were live guitars. For my money, they could have passed on those.

Frankly, they could’ve passed on the whole set. It was a light show and beats for white rural/semi-urban kids who really just needed a chill tent. Sad that they got second billing under the Lips. Really sad, in retrospect.

Drive-by Truckers

I know why the breeziness and brevity of the She and Him songs were as appealing to me as they were at the time – because prior to that set, the Drive-by Truckers ground away the hottest part of the afternoon with the worst set of rock’n'roll songs I’ve ever heard in my life.

They were all about the same length except for the ones that got all jammy at the end. They were all three-to-four-chords-and-a-cloud-of-dust. They were delivered with just enough aggression for the band to get away with being called “alt country” rather than country – but not enough aggression to actually matter. In short, they were standard rock songs with a twang delivered with a snooze-inducing three-guitar Lynyrd Skynyrd approach that deserves to die. Seriously. Just because you put more guitars on stage doesn’t make it sound better.

Listening to the Truckers’ monotone monochrome set was like being suffocated, like being stuffed in a trash compactor, for an hour and 20 minutes straight. As the bass droned on and the drummer plodded on and the organs made their entirely predictable warbly swells, I found myself wondering why I even listen to or play anything that resembles or could be called rock music anymore. They made the entire genre sound as dead as the music video. There wasn’t any diverse sound, tempo change, or even a moment’s breath.

It’s unfortunate to think this was a band whose reputation preceded it, who was talked up by locals I met right before the show. And I can only assume that the credit the Truckers get has something to do with earnestness and integrity. It certainly has nothing to do with creativity, songcraft, or musicianship, because none of those were on display. It was an buzzsaw to the eardrum and creative palate. For 80 minutes straight – and, just to mix metaphors, I won’t ever get those 80 minutes back.

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I do have high hopes for future Nateva festivals, though I fear location and steep prices might keep more people away in the future. Still, the quality of the festival overall depends on the quality of the bands. Certainly between the Lips, Grizzly Bear, and She and Him, Saturday at Nateva was a worthwhile expedition. What’s in store next year? Depends on who shows up.