Day 3 of Fucking Awesome Fest 2011

The first band for me was Amy Gore & Her Valentines. I was expecting more of a garage sound, but instead it was more of a pop-rock thing. Amy is still rocking the big Gretsch guitar though.

Over to The Majestic Theater to see what hardcore punk had to offer. It was a completely different experience compared to the last two nights. There was a large turnout, which made the moshing look less forced. I got to witness some interesting phenomena.

Take the circle pit. During a performance, the singer might occasionally shout "Give me a circle pit!", and all the people who had been moshing would start running in a counter-clockwise circle. I'm not sure why it was always counter-clockwise. It would have been hilarious of half of them ran counter-clockwise while the other half run clockwise. It was still amusing to see people standing perfectly still in the center of the circle, like a lonely island.

There was also the phenomenon that I'm going to refer to as "thrash dancing". I like to think that I made up that term, but chances are someone else has used it to describe this activity. It's basically when someone is standing in one spot, and acts like they're spasticly trying to fight with a ghost. (This is the part where my Uncle Dean would normally go on a rant about how back in his day people would slam dance at punk shows. According to him slam dancing involved running around punching people in the face, and from what I've been told, repeatedly, is that it was way more intense than moshing.) The highlight of the hardcore shows has to be when people would dive off the ten foot speakers into the crowd. I first saw it when the singer from Terror dared the crowd to do it. Some guy climbed onto one of them, and then jumped off while doing a flip in the air. Everyone dove out of the way, having no interest in trying to catch him, and he must have hit the ground hard, because it took about half a minute before he got up again. It worked better later on when a skinny hipster girl tried it. No one was worried about what would happen if she landed on them, and they consented to catching her.

Over to the Garden Bowl to see Pupils. They're made up of two of the guys from Marco Polio and The New Vaccines. Unlike Marco Polio, this band doesn't use any elaborate electronics, and is more of a noise/no wave kind of band (probably not, because I don't really know what that means). It still had a lot of crazy antics from Steve. At one point he crawled around on the floor grabbing everyone's feet, and on several occasions went out to the outside patio while continuing to sing.

Next at the Garden Bowl was K.I.D.S., a new band that included that guy from Silverghost. Just like Pupils, this band has chosen to forgo the electronic elements their members usually employ, (or used to anyway), and much like Pupils, they seemed to have a noise/no wave thing going.

Upstairs at the Stick was Those Darlins, a garage rock band from Tennessee.

Their lead singer really likes giving the audience a Bachmann-esqe wild-eyed look. I dug their music so much that I forgot to make it back over to the Majestic to see Madball, the hardcore band with the highest billing at the festival.

The music ended for me that night with Ty Segall, a post-punk rock band. They had the Stick about half filled, and the crowd got really into it. Moshing near the stage, along with people throwing their beer everywhere.

*NOTICE*

The city is following through with their plan of expanding the parking meter times in the hope of making cash grabs. Brilliant, crack down on parking, and let the whole violent crime thing wait for later.

As for Saturday:

Yacht is supposed to be a big deal, and they're playing a lot of festivals this year, so I guess I'll try to catch them. Other than that, I have no idea.

Mixtapes for Saturday's lineup:
 

 

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I'm a dork, I live in the Detroit area, and sometimes I take blurry photos on an outdated camera