i'm picking friday as my favorite day, although i know i will be upset when the actual schedule comes out.. i'm sure out of the strokes/spoon/vampire weekend/the black keys, at least two of them will be in one timeslot and i'll have to make a tough choice. that is always the delimma. hopefully sonic youth comes through this year, last year's pull-out was a bummer.
btw, big congrats to C3 for lining up austin-boys the sword (another friday band i want to see). they are fucking rock, great live show too.
also, wtf hold steady? no austin date on the summer tour? i hoped that would mean an acl appearance..
Posts: 93 | Location: Hou. | Registered: 27 April 2010
Someone thought last year was the worst ACL? I guess we have totally different tastes in music. I thought it was the best year. In particular, the middle bands were great.
Phoenix, Medeski, Them Crooked Vultures, Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear, Passion Pit, Dead Weather, Girl Talk
And then Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Pearl Jam were incredible.
Here are some headliners from the other festivals that I would have loved to see at ACL:
Jay-Z Les Claypool MGMT Phoenix (played last year so I'll give them a pass) Passion Pit (ditto) Ween Weezer Tenacious D Hot Chip Soundgarden (what's the deal with Lolla? They get RATM and Soundgarden to get back together to play one festival?)
Partly different tastes, but partly highlights without depth.
Phoenix was great. Ditto Them Crooked Vultures. The rest listed, largely eh (admittedly I didn't see all of them; family consensus sometimes puts us on a different stage than I'd be at otherwise). Girl Talk was probably the best of the lot, but really gimmicky.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs were incredible. Pearl Jam was a bit better than expected, but still, eh, it's Pearl Jam. Never been a big fan.
The problem is, even if we accepted that whole list as awesome, that's 8 middle bands and 2 headliners. I usually see 30ish bands at ACL, arriving at 11 and leaving when the music stops. I saw 10ish really great performances last year. It's the other 20 that fell down. There's never been an ACL before where I looked at a two-three hour block and figured I might as well keep my spot for the band three hours down the line because there wasn't anything worth moving for; last year that happened more than once. There's never been an ACL before last year where I looked over the whole mid-level when it came out and didn't see more than one or two gotta-be-there acts.
Admittedly some of that was the incredibly poor scheduling last year; there were at least three points where three or more really great bands that would draw the same crowds were back-to-back-to-back. Why not shift them around so the people who like that sort of thing can hear all three?
I've got quite a few bands that I first saw (and in some cases first heard) at ACLs littering my iPhone playlist. Only one of those is from last year, and frankly while pretty cool to my ears, they're also pretty lightweight (White Lies, for reference; that they were in the top few mid-day shows all weekend says a lot about how weak the lineup really was). This year looks, on paper at least, a whole lot better. We'll see how it plays out in practice; last year would've been a lot better if the schedulers had had a clue.
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