Sucking? Vampire Weekend. All photos by Matt Wysocki.
By K. Tighe
I’m a bit of an evil sister. You see, I promised my little bro a good time during Pitchfork Music Festival. Kevin (the other K. Tighe), who is your typical unemployed drummer, flew in from Arizona under the auspice of a fun-filled weekend of great music – I never told him he’d have to work for it. This makes him something of an unwilling assistant, but since he’s preconditioned to do whatever his big sister tells him to, this also makes him quite abiding. So from here on out, we’ll call him my abiding assistant. His chief responsibilities include fetching beer, letting me know whenever the drummer fucks up, and lighting my cigarettes. Oh, and making breakfast. He’s a genius with eggs, which is why we didn’t arrive at the fest until the Caribou set was almost over.
It was clear the Caribou set went over remarkably well, and we managed to catch the crowd’s favorable reaction to the last songs as we headed over to the Aluminum stage for Fleet Foxes. It had rained all morning, leaving Union Park a soggy mess. Festival organizers attempted to clean things up a bit with wood chips and sod, but with little success. An ominous prairie sky loomed overhead as the Seattle quintet took the stage.
Fleet Foxes shine on.
The harmony-laden Fleet Foxes seem like they’d do better on a sunny day, but once they broke into the a capella serenade of “Sun Giant,” an ode to seasonal changes that rings like gospel and swells like field music, it was clear that undesirable weather wasn’t going to hold them back. Some of the festival’s trademark sound difficulties began to crop up toward the beginning of the set, but they quickly subsided – due, in no small part, to a massive effort on behalf of festival organizers to completely overhaul and improve the sound this year, which made an enormous difference throughout the weekend. Fleet Foxes spent the rest of the set doing their vest-wearing shaggy brethren proud, with tunes that managed to conjure notes from the Beach Boys as much as Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The crowd reaction was strong throughout, but swelled considerably during the impressive harmony showcase of “White Winter Hymnal.”