Coachella Day One: The Breeders, Tegan and Sara, Black Kids and More While most attendees were still smuggling their stashes past security at the front gates on Coachella’s Day One, math-rock outfit Battles had a large, vocal crowd enraptured at the Gobi tent with their pounding single “Atlas.” Battles are more concerned with complex rhythms than melody, and with a pumped festival crowd feeding off their energy, the band effortlessly locked into curious, mind-blowing grooves, turning what can come off on record as slightly joyless exercises in syncopated songwriting into something spectacular and energetic, like a dancey, mutant Rage Against the Machine. A tent away, the Black Kids were proving that they’re rapidly growing into the band their early buzz promised they would become. The Jacksonville, Florida five-piece’s Motown-garage jangle came off as robust and charming in the mid-afternoon heat. The band got the crowd moving to single “I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You,” a bit of poppy disco-rock that brings out the Robert Smith in frontman Reggie Young’s yelpy voice, and hit their peak on “Look at Me When I Rock With You” as Youngblood took a break from ripping out smooth-toned guitar flourishes to sling his instrument off his shoulder and boogie. Back at the Gobi tent, Dan Deacon took the stage — or rather, the floor just in front of it — and smashed away at his keyboard as walls of synth noise kept the kids jumping around to no particular rhythm, while at the Outdoor Theatre, Les Savy Fav frontman Tim Harrington scaled the scaffolding and threatened to jump, to the delight of his fans and dismay of security (he didn’t make the leap). Click here for photos from Day One of Coachella Meanwhile a modest (and slightly older) crowd gathered at the main stage to watch the Breeders play “some songs from Pod, some songs from Last Splash, Title TK and Mountain Battles,” as Kelley Deal put it. “I can feel it,” Kim Deal intoned as the band kicked into “Overglazed,” the triumphantly droning opening
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Published: 2008-04-26
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Rock News, Coachella
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Tegan and Sara’s Coachella Blog: Prince, The Raconteurs and “The Dog Whisperer” Tegan and Sara will be filing dispatches from Coachella. Here is their opening entry. Click here for more from Rolling Stone at Coachella. Tegan: We watched The Dog Whisperer this morning when we got up, that helped us ease into Coachella. Sara: It’s like a safe place to watch Cesar Millan talk to the dogs. I own two seasons of The Dog Whisperer on DVD, and I don’t even like dogs, I’m a cat person. T: It really trained us. Then we got up and we got on a cart, a really nice girl came and gave us a ride to our dressing room, and it’s covered in stars and butterflies and rainbows and hearts. It’s super girly, it’s hilarious. S: The people who do the trailers say they have a sweet spot for us every time we play, so they put extra effort into it. T: For each artist, they get artists to paint funny paintings. The one we got this year is two bunnies and their umbilical cords are all tangled up. Which is kind of funny because yesterday we got a fan video for the song “Floorplan” on our new record, and in it there’s a little girl character that’s supposed to be Sara and she’s wearing bunny slippers and they’re all evil at the end, so when we walked in today and it was the bunnies I was like, oh my God! Then we ate, so we took another ride in the cart. S: And that was scary for me, because Tegan and I did not go to camp, our mother was a single parent and camp was totally out of the question. We found out later because she went to Catholic boarding school, she doesn’t like communal living without parents, so she enforced a no-communal living rule when we were growing up, so we have never done camp really. Now we’re at Coachella and we’re in the catering tent and all the bands are there and I’m sweating profusely, I’m very uncomfortable, I’m afraid everyone hates us. I see people looking at me, I think maybe we know each other. I avoid eye contact. The next time we play Coachella I hope we are the size of Prince … T: We are the size of P
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Published: 2008-04-25
Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Rock News, Coachella
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