May 4, 2004
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK, The New York Times
A Festival for the Progenitors and Their Heirs From Today
By JON PARELES
NDIO, Calif., May 3 â?? The new wave was the old school and the 1960's were rock prehistory at the fifth Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival this weekend. It was a festival for collegiate music tastes in the post-era: post-punk and post-disco, with hip-hop represented by an underground so self-conscious it's almost meta-hip-hop. And it presented music of self-absorption, idealism and the urge to dance.
The sold-out event drew 50,000 people on Saturday and Sunday with 12 hours of music on four stages each day. While many bands are reaching back to find underexploited ideas from yesteryear, this year's festival booked 1970's and 1980's progenitors: the Cure (founded in 1976) on Sunday and the Pixies (founded in 1986) and Kraftwerk (founded in 1970) on Saturday alongside their latest heirs and emulators.
If outbreaks of promising collegiate rock were on a map, this year's festival would have a pin in most of them. There were representatives of punk-funk from New York (the Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, !!!, Le Tigre), elaborately pained emo from Omaha (Bright Eyes, Cursive), art-rock and dance-music hybrids from London (Radiohead, the Cooper Temple Clause, Dizzee Rascal, Basement Jaxx) and politically minded rappers from the San Francisco Bay Area (Hieroglyphics).
Even bands whose songs are generally devoted to private upheavals, like Cursive, made election-year statements. There was also protest dance music from Antibalas, the New York band that updates the Nigerian Afrobeat music of Fela Kuti.
Of course there were some duds. Muse, an English band, seeks to reconnect the art-rock of Radiohead with the melodrama and classical flourishes of progressive rock, a perfectly awful idea. The Flaming Lips made a brilliant entrance, as their leader Wayne Coyne bounced into the audience in an inflated plastic bubble, then proceeded to play a shopworn set with the old songs and animal costumes the band has been using for years.
The Cure is about to release its first album since 2000, titled "The Cure" (on the I Am label), and its Coachella set was the band's return to the concert circuit. Before the Cure played its headlining set on Sunday night, the band could have heard its repercussions throughout the festival.
There were the intimate and volatile regrets of Bright Eyes and Cursive. There were the gradual, swelling, thoroughly absorbing instrumental textures of Broken Social Scene from Toronto and Mogwai from Scotland. There were the yelping vocals and pulsating bass lines of the Rapture, Elefant and Stellastarr, all from New York. Of course none of them mixed method and obsession in precisely the same proportions as the Cure.
Robert Smith, the Cure's leader, has a pop songwriter's gift for distilling lovelorn sentiments into simple language and a voice that sounds as if it's just emerging from a crying jag. With his disheveled mop of hair he's the epitome of mope-rock, suffering from betrayed love and his own endlessly examined mistakes: emo bands learned a lot of their self-recrimination from him.
But Mr. Smith is equally fixated on musical patterns: short, layered phrases for guitar and keyboard. Circling and piling up, those little motifs turned into long instrumental introductions, as if Mr. Smith had to stew over his troubles before they'd finally burst forth into words. The band's set worked like one of its songs, starting out subdued and orderly and gradually making its way toward high drama. For encores Mr. Smith turned playful, scat-singing and playing slide-guitar meows for "The Love Cats." He had managed to plunge into misery yet emerge unscathed.
One of Coachella's four stages was devoted to disc jockeys, who generally pumped out the familiar, single-minded thump of house and trance music. But on smaller stages, a few disc jockeys tried more avant-garde notions. Prefuse 73, a group of disk jockeys and programmers, brought along a rhythm section for its dense collages.
Dangermouse, the producer and disc jockey who became nationally known for his illicit "Grey Album," which mixed Jay-Z's raps from "The Black Album" with unlicensed samples from "The Beatles" (otherwise known as the White Album), was on hand with a set of other, less contentious remixes of a cappella raps.
Somewhere in the background, for bands like Radiohead (Saturday's headliner), the Thrills, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and the Sleepy Jackson, were distant memories of the Beatles, the Byrds and the Velvet Underground. Belle and Sebastian's delicate pop obstinately resurrected scorned easy-listening styles of the 1960's; the French band Air hinted at Pink Floyd when it wasn't turning campy. But they were the exceptions. For most of the Coachella Festival, rock history began in the mid-1970's.
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Robert Smith, the leader of the Cure, is the epitome of mope-rock. He sounds as if he just had a crying jag.