Terça-feira 7 Set 2010, 9h:10

Sat 4 Sep – FYF Fest 2010
(cross posted from the Coachella forums)
http://coachella.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1853703#post1853703

My guess is that they're stretching themselves too thin and they just don't have enough planners or staff to get everything organized well. Some of the problems were just stupid. The music was pretty good other than that.

When I bought the early sale ticket for $20 will call wasn't an option so I thought they had wised up and weren't allowing will call. I'm sure they had to re-enable will call later when it was too late to mail tickets though.

I got down there around 12:45 so I missed Magic Kids who I was thinking of checking out and found parking for $4. I felt sorry for the people in the line for will call.

I'd say it was in the 90's so I didn't think the heat was too bad. It gets that hot or in the 100's in my house all the time so I'm used to it. I thought there was plenty of shade areas with the trees scattered around.

The $4 water was silly and their ice was melted by 4 or 5. The lines for food was fine until around 3 and after that it was silly. I skipped eating all day since I had a big breakfast. I did buy a giant can of coconut water from the Gogi truck for $3. I don't know how "12 food trucks" turned into two food trucks (Gogi and Frysmith) plus 6 food booths and a small Babycakes booth. I like Babycakes but I wasn't feeling like sweets at all. The other vegan options were slim and the two food trucks ran out of vegetarian food before 6pm. There was a huge amount of space near the Oak stage for more food trucks so someone really screwed up there. I've never been to a festival that didn't give out wristbands for the alcohol areas but wow, that was a bad idea. Those lines for the beer gardens and vip area were silly but I don't drink and I'm more interested in the music. Over the day I spent $3 on a coconut water, $5(?) on a lemon icy, and $4 on a water.

I went by the merch booth and checked out what they had for sale. It looked like only a small portion of the bands had anything for sale. I asked one of the guys working there why they didn't have more bands' things for sale, if there was some kind of communication problem, and he said, "Well it was all sort of last minute." Don't they do this thing every year?

Abe Vigoda - I hadn't seen or heard them before– not bad but nothing really stood out to me.

Cults were cute and played well for such a young band. I saw them at the 6th street warehouse a month ago and their set was similar. It remains to be seen if they can expand their sound beyond the couple catchy songs they have.

Screaming Females were a good surprise. I'd never hear them until a couple days ago and the singer just wails on the guitar through every song. They were fun to watch.

Warpaint were good. I have their EP and I've seen them a few times before. I like their songs but recently, since they got their new drummer Stella, every song includes a long meandering jam section. I don't mind the occasional jam but I don't think every song needs one. I think they played about 4 songs over 30 minutes.

Best Coast was fun and sounded good. You can always tell when a local band is playing a festival since they have all their friends hanging out on the side of the stage. They could probably use a bass player with some background vocals for live shows though.

After that I wandered around and saw a couple songs from AA Bondy and The Soft Pack.

Wavves - Sorry if I offend anyone but these guys sounded like a junior high version of Blink 182 or something. Their un-funny stage banter was kind of annoying.

Lolcat Natives played really well and the crowd was loving it. That was a fun set.

Ariel Pink - I only heard the last song or two, just to check them out and I wasn't digging it. When the vocal got loud something was distorting really bad, making a horrible CKHCKHCKH noise. It could have been the speakers, amps, or in the mixing console but someone was screwing up the sound. I can't say I'm that into these guys so I took off.

Dead Man's Bones were better than I thought they'd be. I liked the choir and their crazy Halloween costumes.

Washed Out was awesome for the short 30 minutes he got. He played mostly new stuff plus "Get Up" and a new arrangement of "You'll See It". Who ever was doing the sound had the volume down really, really low though! I was about 15 feet from the stage and you couldn't feel any sub hitting you at all. I was trying to hear him over the three different conversations going on around me. I really think the crowd would have gotten into the music a lot more if they could have heard and felt some low end.

For some stupid reason they scheduled Cold Cave 5 minutes after Washed Out. They should have set up most of their gear before Washed Out or something since he's just one guy. Anyway, their setup took about 25 minutes so everything on the Sequoia stage was late by 20 minutes after that. The scheduling for every other stage seemed really tight and on time otherwise.

Cold Cave were ok (much, much louder than Washed Out and I was way in the back.) I like their songs "Love Comes Close" and "Life Magazine". They sound like a cross between New Order and Ladytron to me.

School of Seven Bells played really well. The first song sounded pretty off while they got the mix sorted out. By the second song it was sounding good but the low end sub was overpowering everything but I couldn't hear any of the bass part at all. I walked over to the sound booth which was way behind everyone and way over on the left side and there wasn't any low end sub at all and I still didn't hear any bass part. I saw them the night before in Chinatown and noticed that the bass part comes out of the laptop into a bass amp so something much have gotten unplugged or turned off. It was pretty unfortunate that the sound guy couldn't hear what most of the crowd was hearing and they never fixed the missing bass part.

Delorean sounded good and played the same set as the night before.

I caught a couple songs from The Rapture and they were really loud and the crowd was a huge dance party. The sax sounded awful like a kazoo though. During "House of Jealous Lovers" a crowd of about 10 people stormed onto the stage from the side and danced all over until the security pushed them back off the side.

Panda Bear - I only caught the last couple songs. His stuff sounds too much on the wanky/indulgent side to me. There are interesting parts but a lot of the time it gets pushed into the "guy messing around with a sampler and loop pedals" sound. The loud parts had the same distortion problem that Arial Pink had but not quite as bad.

So overall, the music was good and the bands were worth seeing. The food, water, beer, vip, and a lot of other things were poorly planned and organized but I went primarily for the music.

Cheers.