Old-Fashioned Rock 'n' Roller Coaster for Indie Fans
By KELEFA SANNEH
Published: July 19, 2004
Dou know the story about the boy whose father catches him smoking for the first time? The father sends the boy to his room with the rest of the pack and tells him not to come out until he's finished.
On Saturday afternoon more than a few of the fans baking in the sun at Coney Island seemed to be suffering a similar punishment. They had come to see The Village Voice's Fourth Annual Siren Music Festival, a free eight-hour concert on two stages that might have been designed not to reward indie-rock fans but to cure them.
Some other music festivals aim to please a wide range of fans, but Siren's two stages were full of old-fashioned, guitar-driven alt-rock acts, with surprisingly few exceptions. The festival reflected neither the diversity of New York City nor the eclecticism of its sponsor, The Village Voice. But most of the glassy-eyed fans survived until the end, fortified â?? which is to say, stupefied â?? by a potential toxic mixture of sun, beer and fried clams.
"We are the oldest, most naïve people in Coney Island," said Clint Conley as he snapped a between-songs picture of the crowd. Mr. Conley's band, Mission of Burma, formed in 1979, split up four years later, then reunited in 2001. Mission of Burma played one of the day's most infectious sets, joyful and unabashedly nostalgic; when Mr. Conley roared the words to "That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate," from 1982, he seemed to be having more fun than just about anyone else.
Since the lineup was so conservative, stacked with retro-rock strivers (Vue, the Fever) and alt-rock perennials (Blonde Redhead), it was hard not to root for the Fiery Furnaces, whose 2 p.m. set was, in the best sense of the word, irritating. Eleanor Friedberger spat out her urgent, deadpan scrambled stories while the band bashed out restless bits of melody and rhythm. The new Fiery Furnaces album, "Blueberry Boat" (Rough Trade/ BMG), opens with a 10-minute song, "Quay Cur," and the band played pieces of it throughout the set: "And now I'll never, never, never feel like I am safe again," Ms. Friedberger sang, staring out into the middle distance.
Another highlight was TV on the Radio, which built grand songs out of slow-changing, hard-scrubbed guitar chords and breezy vocal harmonies that hinted at a time before rock 'n' roll. People were packed in too closely to dance; as usual, the best dance party on Coney Island had nothing to do with Siren. Out on the boardwalk, at the weekly Black Underground dance party, a motley crew of revelers shimmied in time to old disco records. This seemed like a humane alternative to the indie overdose on the two stages.
Luckily, Siren's headliner was well chosen. Just before 8 p.m. Death Cab for Cutie played the main stage, arriving with the twilight to play a gorgeous set full of glimmering love songs. More than any band that played all day, Death Cab delights in the possibilities of lightness and quiet. In "Photobooth," Ben Gibbard sighed, "And as the summer's ending/The cold air will rush your hard heart away," and it seemed like an act of mercy, as if he were extinguishing all the light and heat and noise of the day.
