Maybe Bumbershoot 2014 should’ve renamed itself Reunion-palooza. Several of the acts playing throughout the weekend were either recently-reunited veteran bands on the comeback trail, or bands reuniting for one last big show before calling it quits. That phenomenon was resplendent on Sunday, with half of the 14 acts I saw falling under the reunion umbrella. Amazingly, every reunion band playing that day delivered solid-to-stellar turns onstage, contributing to a Day Two of remarkable consistency. Simply put, I loved (or at least really, really liked) every band I saw in action that day.
The Great: The highly-anticipated reunion of The Replacements on the MainStage Sunday evening hit a great happy medium between cozy greatest-hits familiarity and the ragged-but-right fire of their drunken glory days. Guitarist/singer Paul Westerberg sounded energized, and most of the old chestnuts got a roaring treatment: The band rip-sawed through “Tommy Got His Tonsils Out” with the abandon of a buncha drunk kids.
Plenty of heavier acts made a strong impression, too. Hobosexual provided a double-barreled blast of rock-and-roll buckshot to kick off my afternoon, as guitarist Ben Harwood and drummer Jeff Silva delivered piledriving riffs, crushing backbeats, and cartoonishly virtuosic solos with customary brilliance. Sandrider’s ferocious, whiplash-inducing punk/metal blasted the afternoon open, and the band prowled the stage with the cartoon menace of giant Japanese monsters. Portland’s Red Fang cranked out hooky, classic, muscular hard rock that mixed vintage Judas Priest-style British metal with a hearty needle full of Queens of the Stone Age’s skewed narcotic magic.
Finally, how to describe Seattle’s Schoolyard Heroes? Cabaret arena rock carried to Queen levels of theatricality, dragged over razor blades of speed metal while demons possessed Siouxsie Sioux, maybe? Whatever it was, it raged with teeth-snapping fury and provided the most riveting display of goth-rock heroics I’ve seen in many a moon. Sunday’s Fountain Lawn set marked their farewell as a band, and they went out swinging. And shredding. And screaming.
On a dreamier front, I’ve been taken with Golden Gardens’ eddying, diaphanous goth pop for awhile now, but they were a revelation live as they morphed into a darker, more dangerous onstage animal. Gregg Neville’s guitars took on a more menacing cast without losing their crystalline texture, and the band amped up its wall of percussion to propulsive effect. Aubrey Rachel Violet Bramble strode across the stage like a woman possessed, wild black hair obscuring her face as she sang haunted songs in a haunted-siren voice that enchanted and chilled in equal turns.
I only caught one of this year’s KEXP live sessions this go ‘round, but it was a special one. Big Star’s Third, an all-star band of sorts corralled by original Big Star drummer (and sole surviving original member) Jody Stephens, played the cultishly-adored band’s third album, Third/Sister Lovers, in all its messy masterpiece glory. A full band of indie-rock luminaries including Stephens, Ken Stringfellow and Jonathan Auer of the Posies, Peter Buck and Mike Mills of REM, and a stirring string section nailed the ramshackle, sometimes achingly beautiful material without descending to mimicry. The end result was breathtaking, both at the KEXP stage and at the ensemble’s Starbucks Stage appearance later that night.
Last but certainly not least, funk wizard Bootsy Collins closed out Bumbershoot Day Two in sublimely funky and high-energy fashion. Backed by a crack team of fellow funketeers and taking center stage with nigh-extraterrestrial showmanship, Bootzilla served up elastic jams for over an hour.
The Really Good: Blues journeyman and harmonica wizard Charlie Musselwhite held court for a set of easy-shuffling blues tunes, keeping his tight band of young guns on their toes with some seriously mean and dirty harp blowing. Another band of reunited vets, The Dream Syndicate, goosed neo-psychedelia with exposed-nerve post-punk twitch to fetching effect back in the Reagan Years, and they played a tough-rocking set that made the most of Karl Precoda’s jagged guitars. Luscious Jackson provided a breath of fresh air in the 1990s with their scrappily sexy soul-pop songs, and their Sunday reunion performance (yes, another one) went down with the tastiness of a great cocktail.
It’s weirdly appropriate that I passed rows of tents bloated with advertising and unwholesome festival food to get to Negativland’s Pavillion Stage appearance: The band’s senses-bombarding sound collages, often powerfully anti-corporate and political in nature, offered an incisively-funny palate cleanser to the usual run of corporate festival shilling. The band remains eerily relevant after thirty years (yup, another reunion), and watching them assemble their audio-visual assault on laptops and mixers offered a surreal spin on traditional rock-band chemistry.
Boston post-punk trio Mission of Burma have been kicking around for even longer than Negativland (Burma formed way back in 1979), and damned if they didn’t likewise deliver a forceful set that underscored their continued relevance as a creative entity. The slashing fury of Roger Miller’s guitar, Peter Prescott’s spartan backbeat, and Clint Conley’s nimble bass playing remain undiminished.
Sunday’s most surprising set turned out to be that of local heroes Pickwick. Frontman Galen Disston, normally a boyishly-buoyant focal point for the band, prowled the stage in pensive and moody fashion, casting an almost apocalyptic hue on the band’s jumping, soul-inflected pop songs. Whether Disston was just in a bad mood, or whether he was reflecting a sea change in the band’s creative direction, it made for absorbing rock theater, and most importantly he and his bandmates still sounded great.
The Rest: That was it. Seriously. Liked or loved everything I heard on Sunday. Go figure.
Crap! I missed it: Acclaimed Sound Off! finalist/electronic artist Manatee Commune; British guitar band Kins; The Head and the Heart’s reliably tight live show.