AS WE DROVE ACROSS THE RIVER INTO WESTERN ILLINOIS

Slanted and enchanted.

It's been an eventful several weeks, not that you'd know it by my recent posting around here. Since Des Moines' own 80/35 Music Festival on July 4 weekend, I've been to Chicago twice, first for the Pitchfork Music Festival and then this past weekend for Lollapalooza (which I'd actually never been to before).

What direction should we choose?

At Pitchfork, I wrote a quick little thing about tUnE-YarDs, but the real highlight for me was Deerhunter, who, OK, I'm definitely a huge fanboy for,  but the way they'd just string maybe three of their songs together and then stretch them out into space-rock jams, confident the crowd would go along with them but not totally oblivious to audience reaction like the ultra-boring Animal Collective a night earlier, well, it was just fantastic, and singer/guitarist Bradford Cox didn't really say much, but at one point I remember him complaining about those "fucking crypto-fascists," which was already hilarious and the kind of thing you want your noise-rock icons to say, but then he followed it by adding, "I don't know what that means; I was just trying to sound smart." Fleet Foxes, who headlined the second night, were also awesome, every bit as amazing as on record-- such gorgeous harmonies, and it felt like every song they picked was one I liked more than the last. "Oh, man, I don't think it's going to get better than that. Oh, wait, THIS song? I love this song!"

La cocaina no es buena para su salud.

At Lollapalooza, I was there as a member of the press, covering the event with the hard-working, very cool team from SPIN magazine. They'd all done this together before at Bonnaroo, but were kind enough to welcome me into the fold. Skin-reddening sun, wallet-destroying rain, Pete Wentz: I saw it all. For SPIN.com, I wrote about Kid Cudi, Arctic Monkeys, the Cars, Lia Ices, Titus Andronicus, Lykke Li, Beirut, Local Natives, Mayer Hawthorne, Friendly Fires, Disappears, Ratatat, A Perfect Circle, White Lies, Foster the People, Naked and Famous, Ryan Leslie, and Crystal Castles. (I guess I'd especially recommend the posts on Beirut, Local Natives, Crystal Castles, Titus Andronicus, Foster the People, and Lykke Li, in that order.)

Sweat drips from your pores like the falls of Niagara. 

As of today, I can also share an online radio station that eMusic has allowed me to put together. The genre is nominally "indie rock," but they've kindly let me take a pretty expansive view of that genre, encompassing electronic music, hip-hop, and some local favorites along with archetypal indie bands. There was other stuff I might've included, because not every label is in eMusic's catalogue these days, but I think there's still a lot here to enjoy. The songs are on shuffle, but you can see the full selection after the jump:

I ONLY WANT SOME HONEST FUN

The kids are on fire in the bedroom.

In a recent Tumblr post, one of my online pals, the talented musician and music writer Douglas Martin, reminded readers of an old Calvin & Hobbes comic strip that was particularly astute on the subject of shock value in music. Calvin & Hobbes holds a place close to my heart for way more reasons than I can probably articulate right now; probably a big part of it is the way Bill Watterson was able to do something so imaginative, singular, and emotionally resonant and also succeed commercially, and then walk away when he felt like he was being made to compromise too much. Like a lot of people, I once had to spend some scary times in a hospital, and I remember a head specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center telling a 13-year-old me and my parents about all kinds of gruesome things they might have to do with me, including possibly cutting me open or else risking some kind of cerebral explosion years down the line (fortunately none of this happened and the dude just had really awful bedside manner); at some point he and I were able to bond over a reference to Calvin & Hobbes, the only human connection in our entire scary conversation. Earlier, my friends when I was in elementary school all used to read Calvin & Hobbes, too, and we would draw our own characters, envision our own universes in between playing kickball or trading baseball cards. So my love of Calvin & Hobbes might have something to do with all that stuff, too.

According to the Des Moines Register, a record 25,000 fans went to Lazerfest in Indianola on Sunday to see Alice Cooper, Rob Zombie, and Godsmack (although it sounds like the crowd had thinned out a bit by Godsmack). No matter how you feel about the acts involved, if you care about live music in the Des Moines area, that's awesome, and huge kudos to the people who put the event together. In a really interesting interview with the Register's Joe Lawler, Cooper basically brags about what this Watterson strip decries, putting a hip postmodern self-awareness on being a typical golf-loving Arizona Republican who occasionally, like a carnie finding his mark (and these days in some of the same venues, probably, right?) gets earnest young kids to part with their heard-earned money to see him do his best PT Barnum: "Jim Morrison trying to be Jim Morrison all the time is what killed him. Why not leave that character on stage? That's what allows me to be married, have kids and coach Little League baseball. When I get on stage, I play a character that's nothing like me: an arrogant, over-the-top, egotistical villain. That's what makes it fun. I'm sure Anthony Hopkins feels the same about Hannibal Lecter." Whatever, it's all show business. But it's nice when that rare talent like Watterson can entertain you and tell you something true, too. Beauty is truth, and vice versa, etc., and all that.

I doubt many people at Lazerfest experienced anything as heavy as they would've felt standing in front of the speaker for the The Twilight Sad's set at Vaudeville Mews on Tuesday night. I thought there was another opener on before them, so a friend had to text me during the first song, and in my rush to get over there I forgot to grab earplugs. I vividly remember squinting because of the gale-force distortion, which doesn't even really make sense. The Twilight Sad are a band from Scotland, and their name almost describes what they're like, if you can use some imagination: jet-engine guitar effects and wobbling vibrato evoking My Bloody Valentine (that pink Loveless cover looks sort of like a pretty sunset, right?), plus a whole lot of sad in the form of lead singer James Graham, who burrs barely comprehensible (to American-accented ears) lyrics about adolescent pain and adult drunken anguish, often while closing his eyes. The Twilight Sad have two albums out now, 2007's Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters and 2009's Forget the Night Ahead, and they played songs from both of them; here's something I wrote about them in 2006. Not that many people were there yet, and I suppose if you didn't know the songs it would've been hard to figure out what Graham was getting at over the racket, but somehow I'd never seen the band live before, and I was pleased to see they could make the same sound happen onstage. Only louder.

Japan's Mono were the headliners, and they gave the 95 or so paid attendees their 15 dollars' worth with a 90-minute set of brooding, dynamics-driven post-rock instrumentals. In general I might not be the go-to guy to go around critiquing post-rock-- when Mark Richardson and I went to a festival together, he was the one who got to write about Mogwai-- and I was running low on sleep at this point, so it doesn't say much that my attention was lagging from time to time. Mono were as intently focused on their instruments as classical musicians, and they seemed as expert, too, shifting from hushed to cacophonous in ornate bursts of melody, their long hair flapping in the air. Good stuff, but at the same time it reminded me that local instrumental rockers the Autumn Project are pretty damn great at this type of thing, too.

An ear-splitting shoegaze-emo-folk band from Scotland and a galactically epic instrumental band from Japan-- not bad for a Tuesday night in Des Moines. I'll try to figure out what this all has to do with Calvin & Hobbes some other time, sorry. (I'll try to post updated concert dates tomorrow, too-- the Mountain Goats are coming to Iowa City!-- but for now, check the previous post.)