Festival Review: The Sasquatch Superlatives

While Sasquatch remains the most mellow of the upper-tier North American gatherings, each passing year finds the festival at odds with the region's formerly rockist tendencies, casting the widest net possible in hopes of getting anyone and everyone in the Pacific Northwest and beyond on the grass with a Bud Light Lime-a-Rita in their hands. Plenty of bands who make a ruckus with guitar, bass and drums are still on offer for those who think EDM is a medical condition rather than a serious money-maker, but the hope that acts like Sleater-Kinney or Modest Mouse—now legacy acts by festival standards—pack the main stage each night is verging on the the point of desperation. There were flashes of greatness on other stages and within other genres, however, and the amount of music one can consume throughout the weekend is still staggering. There's still hope amid the midafternoon malaise at Sasquatch, with the following sets providing it in some way or another. 

Best Anarchists: Montreal's Ought seems like a strange bedfellow for a festival that brings Volcom-wearing suburbanites out in droves, but its pissy-yet-oddly-danceable brand of agitprop punk served as an excellent catalyst for the small gang of diehards who showed up early Friday to get shit started in the pit. 

Best Slow Jams: AlunaGeorge found itself with a clutch, make-or-break moment on its hands as a massive crowd sprinted for shelter in El Chupacabra in anticipation of a gnarly thunderstorm. The rain lasted all of five minutes, but the quiet storm inside the tent bumped and grinded in all the right places, with a cover of “No Diggity” thrown in early to properly calibrate the expectations of the folks who were mostly there to stay dry. 

Best Future Disco: Leave it to a group of middle-aged Swedes to create some of the sleekest, airtight electropop of the weekend while still maintaining an aesthetic that’s too anti-fashion for “normcore” to encapsulate. Little Dragon gets an unbelievable amount of mileage out of its minimalist, bass-heavy mixes that allow Yukimi Nagano’s voice to float up and down the frequency spectrum, and its rudimentary array of neon triangles looked absolutely huge in contrast. 

Best Reunion: Although the crowd gathered at the Sasquatch stage was ghastly thin, no one expected anything less than a revelation from the newly reunited Sleater-Kinney. It would’ve been exhilarating to watch Corin Tucker’s banshee wailing during songs from The Woods or newer tracks like “Fangless” and “No Cities To Love” pin the people on top of the hill to their seats, but it was not to be for the typical reasons that scatter crowd interest at festivals of this size. The crowd up front was electric as expected, but the lack of an encore after Carrie Brownstein thanked the crowd for being “very polite” left some existential quandaries about rock music floating in the air. What age group were organizers expecting to lockdown with the 11th-hour addition of “America’s best rock band”? Would the girls take it personally when the reanimated corpse of Robert Plant filled twice as many sets later in the weekend? 

Best of Laurel Canyon: It's no secret that vaguely anthemic folk rock is the path of least resistance for young bands with festival stages in their sights, but the ability to transcend the limp-wristed platitudes that are all over 94.7's airwaves at the moment is crucial in getting out of the shadow of vanilla ringleaders like Fleet Foxes or Mumford & Sons. Milo Greene often plays like a group of waifs who don't know which direction they're about to turn from Sunset onto Crescent Heights, but the northbound route into the realm of the Eagles and America suits them far better than a trip down into the world of slinky disco-pop and funked-out preening. One can imagine that folks in the band's hometown of Los Angeles are sick of this already, but there's no denying the group's vocal harmonies and dancy ambition will see them nipping at Of Monsters and Men's heels very soon. 

Best Bro-down: You can't name your band Diarrhea Planet then settle for being boring, which made this hirsute band of Nashville stoners an important pit stop for anyone interested in getting whapped in the face with one quadruple-layered guitar solo and guttural sing-along after the next. 

Best Local Heroes: Watching five minutes of Bellingham's Odesza was surely a startling revelation for the few people left in the Pacific Northwest who had not yet seen the duo (bolstered by a guest vocalist or two and some live drums) perform in the past year. This music was tailor-made for the Sasquatch set, and it burst to life in undulating Technicolor with every bassline and beat-drop. The visuals were a rich, lightly psychedelic blend of sunsets and mountains and all that other shit bros in Poler hats love to watch swirl through their periphery while pitch-bent vocal samples snake their way through the mix, but the parsing out of each individual element for review is a useless exercise. This is a quintessential experience for the El Chupacabra tent, and this group is bound to be as great as the vistas and mountainous expanses that inform their music. 

Best Throwback: Somewhere between the rock kicks, the vivacious vamping and the groovy vibes that Ex Hex radiated throughout its Sunday night set, I managed to regain hope for the future of guitar music at Sasquatch. If it's packaged as a female-fronted Dazed and Confused redux with a healthy dose of Ric Ocasek for good measure, I'm totally OK with it. It's a good thing America gave up on the Donnas after their three minutes in the sun, because this is the real deal. 

Best Troll: We all know Ryan Adams is going through some shit, so can't we just leave the guy alone already? Dude still knows a thing or two about penning the perfect rock 'n' roll song, but when he's not belting out tearjerker heartland rock about this little ol' one-stop town called New York—look out. It only took 10 minutes for him to turn on the audience for requesting "Summer of '69," but the prickly exchange between Adams and some drunk dude clearly too young to have the lyrics to "Pick Me Up" permanently etched onto every memory of their ex-girlfriend begs the question of whether or not this guy has anything else left to live for besides fucking with strangers over the same petty grievance for what he views as a playful comedic aside. He could choose to ignore it, but he obviously didn't, and for that he is a douche canoe. Schlepping around vintage arcade games to place between your vintage American flags to make your stage look like "authentic Smalltown USA" is also idiotic. But hey, the songs were great!

Best Voice of a Generation: If it weren’t for Kendrick Lamar’s show-stopping performance to close out the main stage on Monday night, I would still have my druthers about live rap music. But goddamn, he absolutely crushed it, and was wholly deserving of the headline spot. Lamar had a modest band in tow, most likely with the intention to replicate the heady space-fuck moments that make To Pimp A Butterfly pop the way it does, but the reimagination of cuts like “Swimming Pools (Drank)” and “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” was reminiscent of last year’s Outkast performance in the biggest way possible. The existential dread that made Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city resonate with today’s youth—bound to the ghetto or not—was hammered home by a massive screen split into three panes displaying a highlight reel of what looked like a Linklater film about any old day in Compton. The result was a narrative thread that ran through each track like first-person tours of the streets that inspire so much of Lamar’s personal turmoil, which culminated in an epic, 10-plus-minute rendition of his studio debut’s title track. Between gnarly guitar solos and the chorus being chanted again and again, Lamar recruited two kids from the crowd to lead the rest of the audience in the verses without missing a single word. It was a stunning moment of positive mob mentality that will not be soon forgotten. If the future of Sasquatch lies in relative newcomers like Lamar, there’s hope for us yet. 

WWeek 2015