And, Pareles' Lolla journal (there are lots of audio clips -- just sound bytes, not full songs -- available at the NY Times
website, but you have to be registered -- free, but I know some of y'all freak at the idea):
Lollapalooza Journal
Jon Pareles at the Lollapalooza Music Festival
JULY 25 | 2:08 AM
A Revamped Miscellany
The Killers' "Indie Rock & Roll" was always a good joke: a big, pompous arena-rock march with lyrics vowing loyalty to indie rock. It was even funnier to hear it played at Lollapalooza, the festival that began as a conduit from indie to mainstream and, in its latest incarnation, was full of bands - like the Killers - whose songs have latched on to old indie styles that now sound so familiar they're accepted by pop radio stations. (The indie-loving Killers have sold 2 million copies of their album, "Hot Fuss," in the United States.) New wave rock always prided itself on its pop clarity, and had its share of hit singles the first time around; with the current neo wave, sounds that once alarmed radio gatekeepers just register as attention-getters. And whether or not they feel arch about it, the Killers also know how to write a jealous, synthesizer-pumped, neo wave song like "Mr. Brightside" and put it across as pure pop melodrama.
Steve Kagan for The New York Times
John Bell of Widespread Panic, which ended the festival with an upbeat show. More Photos >
Jon Pareles is the chief pop music critic for The New York Times.
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Sampled at certain moments, Death Cab for Cutie can sound like the kind of mild-mannered folk-pop that tries to make self-absorbed whining sound pretty and palatable. Those moments are misleading, which is why I was enthralled by the band's set. Benjamin Gibbard, the band's songwriter, is self-absorbed and then some, and he does have a modest, reedy voice. But as his confessions grow more painful, or his imagery grows more elusive, pretty melodies are swallowed in guitar crescendoes and vows turn into obsessions. He sang old songs, and a few from the band's album due in August, about disillusionment with himself, with lovers, with a father he can't forgive even at his funeral. The songs, especially a quiet and then shattering "Transatlanticism," were precisely plotted but never simplified. The beauty of the music was the way form followed dysfunction.
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T-shirts told the story. On Sunday afternoon, I started noticing quite a few souvenirs from Phish concerts and some Jerry Garcia memorials. That's because the last few hours of the festival drew on the jam-band circuit. It's a bastion of self-reliant indie-ness that's often disdained by hipsters, and that certainly found no place at previous Lollapaloozas. This year, Lollapalooza's finale belonged to Widespread Panic, the Southern rock jam band that was booked for two sets on Sunday evening.
I can't resist calling it deja Bonnaroo, since Widespread Panic headlined the last two nights of that festival in June, where I had soaked up four sets stretching about 7 hours. What I heard of Widespread Panic tonight - I was mostly at the bands playing simultaneously across the field, though the sound from their stage was loud and clear - suggested that being surrounded by bands that prized concision kept Widespread Panic mostly upbeat, a good thing. But they certainly picked a bleak ending for the festival: "Climb to Safety," a vision of disaster - trainwreck and drowning - in which the singer offers himself as a ladder to someone who may not use it.
From its 1991 inception, Lollapalooza was always, and pointedly, a variety show: a proscriptive one, insisting to its audience that there was music it would be happy to discover. This year's revamping was more of a miscellany: ferocious alternative bands of yesteryear, current million-sellers, many revivalists and a handful of brilliant younger bands. The festival was booked at the last minute after waiting for the city of Chicago's approval, said Perry Farrell, its creator; that might explain some of the unevenness. This year's festival didn't forge a 21st-century identity for Lollapalooza, but there was enough strong music to keep that prized trademark alive.
DAY 2, JULY 24 | 9:08 PM
Homegrown Anthems
A lot of the bands at Lollapalooza have been stuck in the past: their own better days or the retro styles they love best. The Arcade Fire's chiming, triumphant set just proved it doesn't have to be that way.
The band has a different past in mind: warped, semi-fantasized recollections of childhood from Win Butler, a Texan relocated to Montreal. He finds parables in power failures and parental secrets, and the Arcade Fire sets them in songs that are both churning and comforting. Sure, the band has guitars, but it also has fiddles, French horn and an assortment of instruments that plink and tinkle. Mr. Butler's weedy high voice leaps above a surging beat, but is nestled in what sounds like a parlor orchestra: it rocks and it's folksy, but it's definitely not folk-rock.
The songs magnify a private world into something like anthems - the audience that packed the field cheered with every crescendo - but they're anthems that sound strictly homegrown.
DAY 2, JULY 24 | 7:30 PM
A Party Full of Funk, Rock and Dancing Girls
It's his party and he'll play if he wants to: Perry Farrell, Lollapalooza's founder, introduced his latest band, Satellite Party, this afternoon. He's still after an optimum mix of world-music exotica (a sitar twang, a touch of Arabic vocalizing), anthemic choruses, danceable funk and hard-rock riffing, and as he has since his days with Jane's Addiction, he likes to have dancing girls onstage. He's a born performer, skinny and graceful and self possessed. He made things simple for the crowd: Before each song the video screen showed its title (next step: subtitles!). But the songs....well...they're slight at best. Mr. Farrell seems blissed out these days, with choruses like "awesome" and "you make my whole life easy." Nice for him, but not for his songwriting.
By the way, will every festival now have its own cellphone duty? Live 8 collected names, and Mr. Farrell announced that Lollapalooza was collecting text messages to demand steps against global warming. He called it a "virtual march," though it's more like a petition. Marches are more strenous; still, anyone on their feet here and dancing in the heat could probably handle it.
DAY 2, JULY 24 | 6:00 PM
Dinosaur Jr. Reunites for a Magnificent Set
J Mascis's hair was long and unkempt when his trio Dinosaur Jr. headlined Lollapalooza in 1993. This year, it's still long and completely gray, which didn't stop him from playing a magnificent set. Dinosaur Jr.'s songs were college-radio staples in the 1990's for the paradoxical way they put power-trio clout and flailing guitar solos behind Mr. Mascis's drawled reflections on his failings. Reunited with Dinosaur Jr.'s bassist, Lou Barlow, who had gone on to start Sebadoh, he didn't make any time for his lackadaisical side. In songs like "Sludgefeast" and "Bulbs of Passion" he sounded equally fed up with himself and the world, and then the guitar soared above it all. Is it only a booking coincidence that two of Lollapalooza's fiercest bands, Dinosaur Jr. and the Pixies, have been "alternative" rockers from the previous decade?
DAY 2, JULY 24 | 4:30 PM
Pulsating Keyboards and Swelling Guitars
As Lollapalooza got under way this morning, the earnestness of a new band could be gauged by the retro era it chose. Rowdy types favored the 1960's, like the Ponys, who add a punk-rock bawl to their garage-rock and folk-rock, or Kasabian, a band that likes slinging science jargon over pulsating keyboards and swelling, echoing guitars out of vintage psychedelic space-rock.
The really nice guys â?? there are hardly any women in today's lineup â?? are devoting themselves to the guitar patterns and pained confessions of 1980's mope-rock. The Changes had insistent, tightly wound patterns behind a singer with a tender croon, like Morrissey of the Smiths, as he professed unrequited love. Cathedrals, whose patterns were more measured, leaned toward the Cure. Both bands are promising, if they can only outgrow their album collections. After all, there's more than one way to do the Cure, as J Mascis and Dinosaur Jr. proved when they revved up and pulverized the Cure's "Just Like Heaven."
DAY 2, JULY 24 | 3:30 PM
New Wave and 1960's Garage Rock
Only the foolhardy and the dedicated arrived for the noontime hour of Lollapalooza in 91-degree heat. But that didn't stop one of the day's first bands, OK Go, from performing in jackets and ties, socking out songs that split the difference between new wave rock and its 1960's garage-rock roots. Not only that-at the end of their set they put down their instruments and as their next single, "A Million Ways," was played through the P.A., they stood side by side and started a full-length dance routine: swinging and crossing their arms, pivoting and semaphoring, even throwing mock-punches to the beat. N'Sync has nothing to fear, but the Monkees should look to their legacy.
DAY 1, JULY 24 | 1:30 AM
Power Pop and Hip-Hop
Two kinds of deceptive coziness wound up Day 1 of Lollapalooza, with simultaneous sets: power pop from Weezer and hip-hop from Digable Planets. Reunited after 10 years. Ladybug (a woman), Doodlebug and Butterfly (two men) returned to the dense, free-associative raps from the two albums Digable Planets made in the early 1990's. Their backup band, including Gil Scott-Heron's longtime collaborator Brian Jackson on keyboards, dispensed funk, jazz vamps or synthesizer blips and hisses. Digable Planets' conversational tone understates the complexity of their rhymes, which stir together Brooklyn pride and fashion statements with politics A decade ago, they won a Grammy award; now, they would fit in alongside self-styled underground rap, which rarely reaches the Digable Planets' balance of ease and ambition.
Weezer proffered the comforts of pop-rock, looking back to the music of Buddy Holly and the Beatles, but adding some power chords and filling in the song forms with confessions of alienation, loneliness and despair. Were they getting women's squeals and full-crowd singalongs for the songs' reassuring catchiness, or for the anomie of the lyrics?
DAY 1, JULY 23 | 10:30 PM
No One Wants to Miss the Pixies
A year after they started a reunion tour that has by now reached virtually every whistlestop in the United States and Europe, the Pixies are still the band that no one wants to miss. At Lollapalooza, a club-sized audience stayed with the Walkmen, the New York City band that plays worked-up, bent-up garage-rock, but everyone else flocked to the Pixies. For a band that barely got a chance at arena shows in the United States before it broke up in 1992 â?? it opened for U2 â?? the Pixies turn out to be ideal for wide open spaces. Frank Black's songs announce themselves with guitar lines that blare happily across crowds in the thousands, and then each song gets its own skew: with lyrics about suicide, incest, UFO's and Luis Bunuel, with vocals that coo or snarl or scream, with distorted guitar solos applied like electroshock therapy. The Pixies always were businesslike on stage â?? there seems to be a band rule against saying more than 10 words between songs â?? so those twisted hooks just keep coming. The songs are lean, funny, precise and untameable, and now that the first blast of Pixies nostalgia is over, the songs are still standing on their own.
DAY 1, JULY 23 | 8:33 PM
Not Hip to Hip-Hop
A few stray thoughts:
What happened to current hip-hop? Back in the Lollapaloozas of yore, the organizers took pride in the way supposedly separate audinces would enjoy Snoop Dogg along with Korn, Wu-Tang Clan along with the Ramones. They were right â?? rock and hip-hop long ago learned to party together.
Hip-hop even developed schisms, as rock had, between commercial strivers and self-consciously indie types, so Lollapalooza could have chosen all kinds of sounds and postures. For that matter, Chicago-rooted rappers, like Kanye West and Common, have done well lately by defying the formulas of bling-bling and crunk. But you'd never know it from Lollapalooza's lineup, which is as overwhelmingly white as the widely criticized Live 8 concert in London was.
Even the festival's bits of funk and blues come from white bands like Primus and the Black Keys. There have been disc-jockey sets on a small stage, and the reunited Digable Planets is on tonight's bill. The hip-hop poet Saul Williams is due to perform Sunday, but the virtual exclusion of hip-hop makes neither commercial nor musical sense.
Another stray thought: As the day wears on, more and more people are wandering by with Lollapalooza 2005 T-shirts, and not carrying anything else with them. What were they wearing when they got here?
DAY 1, JULY 23 | 6:34 PM
Mad at Carrabba
People who saw the documentary "Dig" now expect anarchy from Anton Newcombe, the lead singer of the Brian Jonestown Massacre. What they got at Lollapalooza today was spacy, deliberative drone-songs (one feedback-laden coda stretched beyond 10 minutes) and snide comedy at the expense of Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional, whose ultra-sincere songs about tormented romance came blasting across the field during every pause.
He pointed a finger, he cursed, he called Mr. Carrabba "Jon Bon Jovi," he said he would put the band's picture over his bed "for birth control." Finally, he sneered, "Don't give up your day job, punk!" Sound bleed, as the engineers call it, has its benefits.
DAY 1, JULY 23 | 5:44 PM
A Phair Comeback
Liz Phair is part of Lollapalooza's hometown Chicago contingent, and she started her summer tour with a midafternoon set including two songs from her next album, "Somebody's Miracle." They suggest she's unrepentant about her move toward radio-ready, slickly produced pop on her 2003 album "Liz Phair."
The new songs, "Somebody's Miracle" and "Everything to Me," are determinedly straightforward, striving for the classic simplicity of old girl-group songs; they lament the way romance is passing her by and head for chiming three-chord choruses: "I wish it could happen to me," she sang in "Somebody's Miracle." Earnestly crafted and determinedly generic, they were like senior projects for a songwriting class. But they had none of the personality of the old songs that shared the set like "Supernova," which was just as tuneful and romantic, but way too strange for the mainstream Phair.
DAY 1, JULY 23 | 4:05 PM
A Re-Invention
At the entrance to the Lollapalooza Festival here at Grant Park in downtown Chicago, a list of do's and don'ts includes moshing, crowd-surfing and stage diving â?? among the don'ts. That's only one of the changes for this latter-day Lollapalooza, which has turned from traveling extravaganza to a one-weekend festival, from a taboo-tester to a magnet for corporate sponsors.
It's not your parent's Lollapalooza, or maybe it is: This year, there's a stage of children's entertainment, where Lollapalooza's creator, Perry Farrell, performed with Peter DiStefano from his old band Porno for Pyros. They found two Porno for Pyros songs, "100 Ways" and "Pets," that were family-friendly, and played a new one, "Agua," about how dolphins just "smile and swim away."
"The world has changed," Mr. Farrell said beforehand backstage. "I'm not afraid of the mainstream. The mainstream is not such bad people."
The festival is taking place on the wide, flat Hutchinson Field, with big stages at each corner. Bands playing simultaneously simply have to drown out one another.
When Lollapalooza started in 1991, it announced that punk, hip-hop, tattooed hard rock and pierced post-punk rock were headed for every mall in America. Once they got there, Lollapalooza didn't seem so alternative: it signed off after 1997, resumed as a mainstream rock showcase in 2003, foundered and was canceled in 2004 and has returned with more than 50 bands on five rock stages over two days.
Getting its cachet back will be tough if not impossible. Other festivals, like Coachella in California, have seized the initiative; one of today's headliners, the reunited Pixies, was at Coachella last year. But Mr. Farrell's taste ensures that a good percentage of the music is worth hearing, even on a bill that extends from the 1980s MTV nostalgia of Billy Idol to the jam-band Southern rock of Widespread Panic, which headlined the Bonnaroo festival last month.
Most of Saturday's early bands harked back well before the first Lollapalooza. Redwalls switched between microphone-sharing Beatles harmonies and Rolling Stones snarls. Ambulance Ltd. played wistfully tuneful 1960's-style pop with some bitter twists: "Relax, don't think about the way I treat you." The Warlocks, with three guitars tolling away, got their drone from the Velvet Underground and the Jesus and Mary Chain, while M83, which had its female vocalists recorded, drew its drones from someplace more dreamlike.
...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead would have sounded at home in the 1990's. The songs were volatile, intemperate outbursts: sullen and life-affirming, slowly tolling and then breaking into frenzied punk tremolos. They even kicked over equipment at the end of the set. Sure, it was precedented, but for a moment it was like an old Lollapalooza.
