Those colors: Night Beats play Freakout Festival 2018. (photo by Tony Kay)
Autumn’s traditionally a quiet period for local rock festivals. It’s too damn cold. It’s too damn damp. It’s a time to sit at home and get caught up on your Netflix binging, you might be thinking.
Freakout Records, one of this ‘burg’s best indie record labels, extends a hearty middle finger in the direction of that notion this weekend. Like the label’s previous Fests, this sixth edition takes over a Seattle neighborhood for the weekend, delivering a hearty snifter of music that ranges from lysergic psych-rock to some of Seattle’s finest hip-hop. This year, Ballard becomes ground zero for Freakout Festival, with eight different venues playing host.
It sounds like a cop-out of the most heinous order to say it, but yeah, Freakout Festival 2018 is so stacked with great acts that it’s a fool’s errand to even try to narrow it down. That said, here’s a semi-random sampling of acts I’m especially interested to see in action.
Friday, November 16
Sassyblack (9:00 P.M., Lagunitas): I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Sassyblack, former singer with the late, great THEESatisfaction, could sing the damn phone book, and that dusky voice could still raise the temperature in the room 10 degrees. She deploys that instrument in the service of some seriously booty-shaking electro-soul grooves.
Los Honey Rockets (9:30 P.M., Sunset), Los Mundos (10:45 P.M., Sunset), Los Blenders (Midnight, Sunset): Three Mexican indie bands play back-to-back at the Sunset, and I’ll lay dollars to donuts they’ll rip live. Los Honey Rockets are Mexican post-punk, jumpy and catchy with a pinch of garage rock. Los Mundos sound like the Jesus and Mary Chain en espanol, all epic fuzztone stomp and menace. And Los Blenders play blasting, spastic indie rock a la Superchunk.
Death Valley Girls (10:00 P.M., Tractor): There’s definitely a hint of the retro in this LA band, replete with some whirring 60’s-vintage keyboards and purring femme vocals. But singer Bonnie Bloomgarden’s chattering demon-possessed witch voice and the band’s thick, knuckle-scraping guitars live in a time of their own.
All Them Witches (Friday, 10:30 P.M., Salmon Bay): Nashville’s All Them Witches grind out stoner rock, flecked with traces of shoegaze and dreamy psychedelia, anchored by Charles Michael Parks Jr’s resonant singing. Bet it’ll sound enveloping as hell in a large-ish venue.
Deap Vally (Friday, 12:15 A.M., Tractor): Two-person rock bands are pretty proliferate in the indie-rock landscape, but damned if LA’s Deap Vally don’t carve out their own niche. Muscular heavy rock, with Lindsey Troy’s assertive, idiosyncratic vocals coming off like Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs elbowing her way to the front of the arena stage.
Saturday, November 17:
Alaia D’Alessandro of Tres Leches. (photo by Tony Kay)
Tres Leches (9:00 P.M., Umbria): There’s a reason why there’s been a metric crap-ton of buzz around this Seattle trio. Their live shows are loose and fun as Hell, with plenty of instrument-switching and caffeinated energy to go around. Best of all, they deliver tunes-wise, swinging between winsome, lo-fi pop and in-your-face punk, sometimes in the same song.
The Shivas (10:45 P.M., Sunset): To know this scrappy Portland garage-surf-psych band on a live stage is to pretty much love ’em.
Stas Thee Boss (11:00 P.M., Tractor): THEESatisfaction’s other member has likewise forged her own path, applying her very smooth lyrical flow with beats and arrangements that somehow manage to be experimental, twisty, and genuinely danceable, all at once.
Just go with it: Monsterwatch. (photo by Tony Kay)
Monsterwatch (11:30 P.M., Conor Byrne): I caught Monsterwatch at the MercerXSummit Block Party last summer. Their wild, energetic-AF set felt like jagged math-rock jabbing performance art in the ass, hard. Do not miss.
Night Beats (Midnight, Salmon Bay): The most psychedelic of the psychedelic acts storming Freakout, Night Beats are the brainchild of Texas-born, Seattle-based lead singer/guitarist Danny Lee Blackwell. He plays like a muthafuckah and writes songs that transcend psych-rock tropes with go-for-broke fury.
B.A.G. (12:15 A.M., Tractor): There’s something wonderful about the Tractor Tavern, arguably one of the hotbeds of Seattle’s roots/Americana scene, playing host to some spot-on local hip-hop for much of Saturday. You’re in for a hella great roster of acts (OCNotes, Jusmoni, and Porter Ray) all night, but for my money, this meeting of minds between SF MC Blimes and our own Gifted Gab could well be the most fun. There’s easy, bluntly-funny wit to spare in the rhymes, and this duo’s voices snap, spar, and intertwine famously.
Tickets for Freakout Festival 2018 can be purchased on the festival website, here. https://www.strangertickets.com/events/56270350/freakout-festival.
