Pitchfork, Day 1

While today was officially the first day of the Pitchfork Music Festival, events associated with the event have been going on all week and their was a pre-party at The Metro yesterday. There has been a poster show by Graphic Noise going on in the loop for the last week. There have also been rock music documentaries being shown at the Gene Siskel Film Center all week. I went to neither of these events. While I like documentaries, I have little interest in Rock documentaries because the idea of each seems (to me) to run counter to one another. I wanted to go to the poster show because I really like rock posters but I didn't have time. I did go to the pre-party. The performers were The Joggers, comedians Eugene Mirman and Todd Barry (Aziz Ansari was also going to perform but he was stuck in New York with flight troubles.), Voxtrot, and Sunset Rubdown. The Joggers were pretty good, they do post-punk with a hint of 70s Prog Rock, I had seen them before when they opened up for Pretty Girls Make Graves. The comedians were weak. Voxtrot, while I found them technically proficient, I also found them pretty boring. They do a flavor of Indie Rock that reminds me of a cross between Ted Leo and Spoon. Except for the fact that the lead singer of Sunset Rubdown seemed pretty drunk, They put on a pretty good show. They are an Indie Rock group from Montreal with members also in Frog Eyes, Wolf Parade, Destroyer, Arcade Fire, and others and sound like these groups.

Of the 20 bands that played today at Pitchfork (12 on the main stages), I only saw full sets for 3: Man Man, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, and The Silver Jews. I did see partial sets for all of the bands on the main stages except for The Futureheads who while they are ok, don't really turn me on. I also caught partial sets on the second stage from 8 Bold Souls (who were great), Chicago Undergound Duo, and Ghislain Poirier. I liked the artists that I have listed, but I also liked Mountain Goats and Art Brut.

And tomorrow is Day 2. I imagine that I will be pretty tired tomorrow so i will probably report about it tomorrow.