All Points West, July 31 and Aug. 1, Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ

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All Points West, July 31 and Aug. 1, Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ

POSTED: Thursday, August 6, 2009, 4:59 PM

Filed Under: Music | Show concert photos

Photo | John Vettese

Muddy feet were a popular aesthetic choice in this year's APW coverage...

So by now you've probably heard the big news about last weekend's All Points West festival. It rained, and rained, and rained some more. There was lots of mud. There was more than a bit of complaining among grumpy slaves to fashion who weren't used to coping with a storm front while watching live music. So many new kicks were tarnished, so many paper-thin dresses were inadequate for the elements, so many spirits were broken. Behind it all, there was more than enough stellar music to make up for the conditions. Let's recap.

Photos | John Vettese

ACT 1 - Rain and redemption

My girlfriend Maureen once made the great observation that an unusual number of Vampire Weekend's songs deal with dressing appropriately for the weather ("Is your sweater aaah-aaah-on?"). Maybe they have some kind of weird New Wave foresight and knew that someday they would play in front of a couple thousand people in the worst climate imaginable for a concert - they wanted to warn their fans! VW's set coincided with the pinnacle of Saturday's monsoon-ish downpour, during which I was so drenched that you probably would have believed me if I told you I'd fallen in the Hudson. (This was the point when my camera was cooked; thankfully my good buddy Chris from MusicSnobbery.com was on hand to lend a point-and-shoot that did a fine job getting me through the rest of the weekend). Onstage, frontman Ezra Koenig was undaunted, neither by the storm, nor the possibility of electrocution. I've always said that one of my favorite elements of Vampire Weekend is the fun that the guys obviously, unashamedly have while performing. They amped this up several dozen notches to offset the rain at All Points ; "It's kind of a fucked up situation we're all in," Koenig told the crowd. "So let's all try and enjoy it." Opening with the lovely (and apt) new song "White Sky," he beckoned everybody to scream along with "One (Blake's Got a New Face)"; only the appropriately-dressed were asked to join in on the weather-referencing "A-Punk" (the line "Look outside at the raincoats coming"), but the participatory element was appreciated all the same. Likewise, The National preceded VW and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs followed them with exuberant, above-and-beyond sets that were tight, energetic (yes, The National was energetic'that's something, innit?) and momentarily able to deliver the crowd from the bog it was unwittingly mired in. I blame Fleet Foxes for the atmospheric conditions - between their lovely folksy madrigal harmonizing earlier in the day, they made references to Gandalf, Shadowfax and conjuring of things.

Damnned Middle-Earth hippie magicians.

Photos | John Vettese

ACT 2 - Jay-Z, and hip-hop that's not as good as Jay-Z

The bad weather eventually subsided, as did the comparisons to beleaguered chapters of global history (Maureen on the cluttered, chaotic press tent: "This is like 'Nam!" Chris on a dude washing off in muddy water: "What is this, Calcutta?"). As the audience dried, the festival's first night capped with Jay-Z being, if you'll pardon the blog-o-hyperbole, just fucking incredibly awesome. An eight-piece band. "No Sleep 'Till Brooklyn" kicking things off. Memphis Bleek helping out on the rhymes. A career-spanning set. A freestyle encore. Several minutes of thanking random individual members of the crowd for singing along. A born entertainer in top form. Was it raining earlier? I'd forgotten.

The first act we saw the next day was also a hip-hop group - Chicago trio The Cool Kids - and man do I feel for them. With Jay-Z's spirited production still fresh in everybody's minds, the Kids' comparatively stripped-down approach was fated to pale in its shadow. They have two MCs and one DJ, they do the party rhymes and do them well, have swagger and style, but it all gets dwarfed on the huge stage and swallowed in the vast open air of Liberty State Park. All that was audible, unfortunately, were beats and scratches, with the vocals coming through occasionally at best.

Evidently, the Ultramagnetic crew that came next has much more experience at doing turntablist hip-hop in a live, outdoor setting. Kool Keith more or less schooled Cool Kids on how its done: a DJ mix with texture and variety, more bass bumping the front row off their feet and volume generously cranked on the delivery. Adopting his resurrected Dr. Octagon persona, Keith was flanked onstage by an entourage that included none other than Ice-Motherfucking-T, and they worked the field with panache and aplomb. "Sometime it's good to just be on the side, be a hype man," Ice told the crowd. "That's how we all got our start." He dropped a bit of unaccompanied gangster shit into the mix, but about a half-hour in, the novelty of "Woah, that's Ice-T" wore off and Keith by that point had slipped into the raunchiest corners of Dr. Octagon's raunchy mind. Time to move on.

The day's final hip-hop moment came from Chairlift, who started off their early evening dance tent performance with a cover of Snoop Dogg's "Sensual Seduction." It was great, but also the only remotely edgy trick the trio had up their sleeve; the rest of their set was a more or less pleasant, inoffensive performance of St. Germain-ish bubbly lounge pop.

Photo | John Vettese

Interlude - Cynicism

My mind went wandering far and wide during The Arctic Monkeys' midafternoon appearance. Maybe it was because they frontloaded their set with new-ish, minor key Motorhead-fucking-Kings-of-Leon garbage. Maybe it was the boom cameras cris-crossing our sightlines at all angles imaginable. If you were in the crowd, the booms blocked your view of the stage. If you moved back, the booms blocked your view of the screens they were ostensibly filming for. Did the cameras even care if we saw the musicians? Or were we, as Chris suggested, nothing more than extras in their concert-film DVD? And what was with all the dry ice? The Monkeys are trying really hard to be dramatic. Back to the crowd. Many attempts at witty t-shirts, most failing miserably. "Things go better with Coke." Hah, yeah, we get it - and it's not funny. "Who the fuck is Mick Jagger?" Now this prompted some googling, since I've seen kids in my neighborhood wearing it as well.

Apparently Keith Richards sported a similar jersey when the Stones were on tour in the mid-70s. I wonder if the shirt-wearer was aware of this, or just liked the idea of wearing something with the word "Fuck" in big letters. Oh, hey, it's "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor." This song is going to be their "Bang a Gong." Make of that what you will.

Photo | John Vettese

ACT 3 - Six string idolatry, likely and not

Dude, nobody told me Annie Clark is a guitar god! Wow. This was my first time seeing her live after a few years of appreciating St. Vincent's records as quirky, hauntingly arranged things of beauty and grace. But man, she can rock it. Solo electric on a cover of The Beatles' "I Dig A Pony" and Clark wailed, 12-bar blues style. And the noise jam, the visceral back-and-forth strumming that closed out "Laughing With A Mouth Full of Blood." The rumbles, the squeals, the torn air. It was the set to see on Saturday. Were he not in seclusion back at the main stage, Kevin Shields with be looking on with pride.

As for Shields and My Bloody Valentine, theirs was easily the most polarizing performance of the day.
You had your devotees for whom this concert was a effects-pedal Mecca, who crowded the front and craned their neck to get a look at the gear setup, who were bouncing with antsy anticipation. (This carried over to the photo-pit for whatever reason as well; it was seriously a logjam of lenses up in there.)

Then you had your people who were indifferent on MBV, but were so irritated by the zealots that they went the opposite direction and took to loudly hating on them just for the sake of hating on them. This prompted a bevy of rather asinine criticisms. "They don't do anything, they just stand there!" Well, uh, yeah...people call them "shoegaze" for a reason. "You can't hear the vocals!" Dude, have you ever listened to Loveless?
Once they went on, their set proved neither as transcendent as the fans believed (or wanted to) nor as disposable as the haters insisted. They opened with two of my favorite Loveless cuts, back-to-back: "I Only Said" into "When You Sleep." From there, they just kind of coasted. Songs were on point and true to the recordings, almost to a fault. Shields pre-sequences a lot of the sounds and loops that make the music, well, great; that jingle-jangle in "Soon"? Yeah. Not live. Disappointing. The song grooved and I enjoyed hearing it, but kind of the same way as I enjoy hearing it on CD.

To be honest, the bulk of their set underwhelmed me - until "You Made Me Realise." This is the number they're famous for ripping shit up on; holding one insufferable chord, frying power circuits, making people nauseous, etc. etc. The go-to comparison is an airport hanger. And when the freakout first started, I was reluctant to buy into it, but wow, they just did not let go. We had a stopwatch going; 9 minutes and 40 seconds. I took my earplugs out just to get an idea of how heavy it was. And while I think Bardo Pond is louder at the Khyber, they're only slightly louder; and that's in a teeny, enclosed room. This was in a giant outdoor field. Eventually the release came, and the music concluded to a mix of thumbs-up, devil horns and middle fingers from the crowd.

ACT 4 - Prog-metal healing

As evidenced by Tool's All Points West appearance, the band is focusing on the visual more than ever:

Photo | John Vettese

Ha. Haha. Eh, ok, not funny.

Their stage setup actually looked like this:

Photo | John Vettese

And now, for some self-indulgent background, because blogs are a self-indulgent medium:

Go back in time about 13 years and Tool was the shit to the teenaged, goth/industrial-leaning John. I'd like to think my tastes have improved since then, but nevertheless I've always had a soft spot for them.

Go back about three years and I saw Tool again, for the first time in forever. I was a bit put off by the way the show seemed to favor the sprawling, half-hour long songs in their newer offerings, and I was further put off by the perplexingly high concentration of burnouts and frat-bar-looking dudes at the show. I mentioned this to some friends, asking when the hell the crowd took this turn and naively wondering whether or not they "got" the music. In response, a douchebag named Rob who I was acquainted with at the time showed me this SomethingAwful.com article, which generally skewers Tool fans for complaining about Tool fans, their pervasive self-righteous self-loathing. (It does a pretty good cut-up on the band themselves, to boot.) It's so very harsh, so very true, and honestly, kind of hysterical. Of course my reaction was way dickhurt at the time: "Oh fuck, no, I'm being one of Those People."

It killed things for me and since then, I've been unable to listen to Tool (the relative merits of this can certainly be debated). But after taking in a few songs of the loud and blinding Crystal Castles on Saturday night, I decided to trudge back to the mainstage and check in on Keenan and co.

Going into it expecting to see what I saw at The Tower - a metal jam band, a football game crowd - I was able to relax and enjoy the show. I appreciated how well the Quay Brothers-esque music video clips were looped and synced up with the music, and the LED stage set that turned the band into silhouettes. I dug the hypnotic, elliptical drumming and how fully it surrounds you live. I had fun singing along with "Stinkfist." "Third Eye" was dope, "Schism" badass. Keenan's voice doesn't ring as true as it did at the Factory in '96, but he thankfully is once again comfortable showing his understated sense of humor: "Yeah, New York is a pretty cool city I guess. But in all seriousness, you don't fuck with Jersey." Right on, man.

It was a healing moment; forgiving myself for loving the band, forgiving my distancing from them, releasing whatever tension and frustration lingered from the wet, mud-caking, equipment breaking weekend. Just spacing out, enjoying the scene, and then quietly walking away.

EPILOGUE - Yet more photos

Photo | John Vettese

I wasn't kidding about the photo pit being a logjam. This was during Jay-Z; it was easily twice this during MBV. For bonus points, locate Music Snobbery Chris, whithout whose generosity this photo would not have been taken.

Photo | John Vettese

Neko Case is a fine singer; it's a shame her own songs aren't more interesting. This was during "Hold On, Hold On."

Photo | John Vettese

She had curious video footage, at least. Tigers and cyclones with hearts, etc.

Photo | John Vettese

Crystal Castles kicked off their set with a thermal detonator.

Photo | John Vettese

In case you were unsure where the "arts" came from in "All Points West Music and Arts Festival," here you go - a half dozen site-specific sculpture installations that looked badass at night.

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