After spending an unsuccessful hour looking for tickets or a way into Friday night’s festivities, I was a little downtrodden on Saturday morning. Lollapalooza was completely sold out for the second day in a row and I was sans ticket. It took some perseverance but we found our way into the festival with the help of an aspiring business man and his security guard brother. Entrance for half the street price of a ticket was a good thing, and missing Dr. Dog’s set was not.
Instead, we headed over to Devlin & Darko for some booty shaking music. Devlin & Darko are the Spank Rock DJs but I really enjoyed their solo set better than that with Spank Rock. They killed a remix of “Get Innocuous” that got me up for the day.
The next band up was Foals, who really impressed and are now at the top of my list of bands to see indoors, at night. Their blend of dance-punk and math rock is remarkably fluid. The coolest thing is that they are so young but can really play live. From the Foals we made our way over to MGMT, which was an absolute cattle call. The entire south field was completely full. It was the most crowded I’d ever seen this festival, probably due to people sneaking in — people like me.
MGMT was a good live show, not great. I have a feeling being too far away added to my feelings about the set today. They played most of the songs from Oracular Spectacular. Oddly the crowd thinned out right after “Time to Pretend” and those who scattered missed a raucous “Kids”. It was one of the highlights of the day, complete with a dedication to the ice truck guy stuck in front of the stage.
Once out of the masses we took some time off our feet before Spank Rock came to the stage. Not very impressive, Spank Rock brings comparisons to the Black Eyed Peas. This is not a favorable likeness. The backing music was the only redeeming aspect. Battles came up next on the Citi Stage. These guys absolutely rock. Walking a razor thin edge between chaos and order, Battles were definitely my favorites of the day.
Choosing Wilco over Rage Against the Machine was either the best decision we made all day or the worst. The music was stopped into RATM set because of people were getting hurt. Though it is not cool that people weren’t looking out for each other, Rage must have been crushing it. Wilco played their consistently amazing live show. Tweedy kept it very fresh by continually ripping on the outfits they were rocking. Touching on a lot of hits, it was a great end to day of great music.
