The National/Black Lips
Although The National were slated to be the closing act, delays at the Balance Stage meant the Black Lips went on afterwards. Incidentally, this proved to privde the best dynamic between the main stage and the more Black Box Balance Stage of the night. After 8 hours of a seriously confused arrangement of bands, Saturday night closed with two bands of relatively equal age, target audiences, and career lengths, but drastically different aesthetics.
The Black Lips are a band that you go to when you’re piss drunk and want to raise hell. That’s obviously in demand as much today as ever, and Black Lips fans have now replaced the antics that the band had to generate themselves. I have now seen the Black Lips three times, and that they stayed on stage and as relatively well-behaved as they did was rather astonishing. Meanwhile, the fans were on their worst behavior, and that was sort of the point. Half of them had just woken up a few hours ago, hung over the night before, and were about to repeat the cycle. That’s a lot more dangerous than songs about Drugs, Mohammad, Katrina and death.
The National, meanwhile, took the feel of last night’s Built to Spill set even further. More relaxed than the Black Lips, the National still rocked hard enough to drown out the Lips to the periphery. The folk-rock band sounded more rock and felt more folk, and with two fantastic recent albums in Alligator and Boxer, the band is only getting better. Four years ago, The National was being ignored when Pitchfork heaped praise on their opening act, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. There are few bands left from 2005 that still ring as true today, and Clap Your Hands, who may have produced the better album four years ago, ended up with the worse luck. In any event, where the Black Lips were a band for pre-gaming, the National were a band to go home with, or hell, a band to propose to your girlfriend with. I can’t think of a better band from this decade to play at a wedding.
Musical highlight:
Surprise! Nathan Williams is a rock star. The new Wavves tracks sounded no less fantastic, and showed that Williams’ creative juices have just begun to flow, hype be damned.
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