@ZackTeibloom We’re going live for this round. Why not? Andy and I have both seen these bands live, though never together. I was lucky enough to see MMJ at Lolla and M83 at Fun Fun Fun. I’ve already got tickets for M83′s May show at Stubbs and after watching the video below, it solidifies my wish that it was an indoor venue. Both are headline worthy, even though MMJ is the only one who gets the slot at this point in their careers.

Andy picked seeing Emimem over My Morning Jacket at Lollapalooza while Caitlin and I were confident in our MMJ pick. Andy also picked Stevie over MMJ at ACL, but after Stevie had sound issues, he caught about 5 MMJ songs, including some with The Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Caitlin and I chose option c), The Arcade Fire ACL Live taping. If MMJ and M83 were playing at the same time, I’d have a really tough time deciding. I do have an opinion on which song I’d rather hear though.

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@ZackTeibloom In case you haven’t heard, Ryan Gosling was at Fun Fun Fun fest. Oh, you’ve heard? The Gos (We’ll call him Gos from here on out) was pretty hard to avoid, wasn’t he. Some people hated that Austin lavished attention on the world’s most handsome man, but I think it was justified. You’re probably also aware that Ryan Gosling at Fun Fun Fun exists, tracking his every handome move as he hung out with Wayne Coyne and Big Freedia and even non-famous, unimportant people like us! He wasn’t just hanging out on the side of the stage, he was shooting a movie with the “Girl in the Dragon Tattoo(!)” We could be in a movie, you guys! Could this be any more buzzy/awesome?!

I was so busy coming up with my own Hey, Girl‘s, I almost forgot there were bands and comedians on stage performing relevant* entertainment for me to enjoy. Now that it’s been a week since we were blessed with The Gos in our lives, I decided to look at the very best of Fun Fun Fun festival and see how it stacked up against Gos standing around and being amazing at posing. I’ll post a picture or video of something great that happened at Fun Fun Fun and you can vote whether it was better than Gos.**  Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom A music festival is a wet dream for the easily distracted. It’s why Andy will constantly “A.D.D. out” as he calls it. It’s easy to get caught up in thoughts like, “Hey girl, it’s Ryan Gosling on the stage with YACHT! Why’s he brushing that girl off when she just wants a hug? Oh, he’s making a movie! Whoa, now he’s hanging out with Wayne Coyne while wrestling Odd Future in the skate park!” Only some of that happened, but it was the usual fest full of fun distractions.

Fun Fun Fun brought back the skate park, wrestling ring and mechanical bull, and I found myself stopping by to catch an entertaining video of each one. As much as I loved watching the bands and comedy, sometimes a back flip on a bike, a flying elbow in the ring and a little girl struggling to say on a mechanical bull is too entertaining not to watch.  Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom. We don’t do after shows. I know that sounds lame and about the least hardcore thing you could say, but it’s just a necessity with the way we festival. We get to the fest for the first band around noon, go until the headliner’s encore around 10 and then have hours of writing (and eating) to do. It’s usually a logistical nightmare to get to them, and after-shows are generally populated by people who have either been drinking all day and don’t have anything to rush home to or by the kinds of people who show up to the fest at 4, never get against the guardrail for a show and are just there to have a good time. No judgment, that’s just never been me or Andy or Caitlin. We’re blistered, sun-burned messes at the end of a festival day done right.

As much as me and Caitlin were drooling over the prospect of a Spoon after-show, we talked ourselves out of it the night before. We’d have to miss Public Enemy (and maybe more) to get to the ND in time for the doors at 9, and had no idea what the line situation would be for free Spoon at an intimate venue that only holds about 350. After getting our fill of “Yeah, boiii’s!” and “Fight the Power” with our fists held high at Public Enemy, we headed for the shuttle. We got on just as they were about to leave and they took us directly to our parking spot, at the ND. Since the show happened to be at the exact spot they dropped us off at, a block from our car, we thought we’d at least get close enough to see if we could hear a song as we walked by. We were shocked by what we saw.  Read the rest of this entry »

@supercooleric — Who should you see at Fun Fun Fun Fest this weekend? Not the bands you like. No, you need to impress your friends (and attractive tattooed guys/gals) with your fantastic taste. Screaming along to “Sleepyhead” is not going to cut it. Here are 14 bands that should do the trick.

M83

Yeah, he’s not exactly under the radar any more (you can still get extra street cred if you pronounce “M83″ in French), but how can you not get excited about seeing songs from the lovely double album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming live? Since it first worked its way into my brain, I’ve been convinced that “Midnight City” is going to be 2011′s “Kids” — you know, the song that starts out brilliant and ends up being picked up by your music-ignorant bros and played ad nauseam to the point of disgust. (Please prove me wrong here, world. If you don’t know who or what M83 is, don’t go see him. Don’t listen to his records. Don’t make his songs your ringtone. Don’t ruin the magic for me. You know he’s French, right? How about Passion Pit, huh? OMG! Did you know he made those first songs for his girlfriend?)

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@ZackTeibloom Something about Fun Fun Fun Fest 6 feels like this will be a defining year. The year FFF “makes the leap” from Austin’s little festival that could, to the national festival that does. With swag. They’re poised to make the leap with the move from cozy Waterloo Park to the expansive Auditorium Shores. With the expansion to a full three plus days. The incredible leap in talent pool. Fun Fun Fun Nites. The taco button*. Fun Fun Fun Festival is re-writing the book on how you grow an entity without selling out. They’re making all the right moves and doing it with a distinct style.

Friday at Fun Fun Fun in 2010 was a relatively tame affair. The fest was just getting underway with a Queen cover band as 9-5 workers raced out of the office. Todd Barry followed to a nearly non-existant crowd which slowly built through Chris Hardwick and culminated with a solid, if not all that big, showing for Weird Al. Compare that to this year. Fun Fun Fun blasts out of the gate with four stages in full swing in the noon hour and culminates with a three-way conflict that ACL wishes they had in their empty pits of despair they called main stage afternoon sets in 2011. You’ll have to choose from Passion Pit, Public Enemy and Danzig Legacy after your afternoon slowed with the multi-talented whirlwind that is Reggie Watts’ or the wildly under-appreciated Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah. Say yeah, indeed. Bigger isn’t always better, but it sure feels like it will be when in the hands of Fun Fun Fun’s tireless crew. Oh, and don’t think your night is anywhere near over after you leave the grounds. FFF6 will be taking over Austin this weekend. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom I want to go to Utopia Festival for the rest of my life. This isn’t just post-festival-euphoria exaggeration. I was intoxicated with Utopia from the moment the afternoon sun started beating down on me in hill country, I became enthralled as Peelander Z blew my mind hole open, and became a lifer by the time I was lying on my back with Caitlin, during Danny Malone, looking up at an endless sea of stars. Let’s start at the beginning. After an exhausting week full of overtime at Apple, Caitlin and I desperately needed a day off. Most people wouldn’t consider 6 hours of driving and 6 hours of live music a relaxing day off, but we live for this stuff. With me navigating (usually a terrible idea) with no GPS service, (could have been a death sentence) we followed the festival’s perfect instructions (with details like “Stay right when at the Y. You will cross two other cattle guards before taking a left at the third”) and pulled into the fest grounds where we traded press e-mails for purple wristbands and entered Utopia. Read the rest of this entry »

@supercooleric Over the past two weeks, mythical and mysterious indie legend Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel has performed four public shows. Some fans (optimistically) speculate that Mangum’s recent return to the spotlight signifies a coming reunion for Neutral Milk Hotel, a band that hasn’t played a show since 1998. I would not have speculated such things, but my pessimism took a blow earlier this month when I saw Mangum make an interesting remark during a set of shows in New Jersey.

Now I have to ask myself, “Could Neutral Milk Hotel really be getting back together?”

YES: He said it.

Well, kind of. During his Sunday night show at the stately Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, New Jersey, at All Tomorrow’s Parties: I’ll Be Your Mirror, Mangum repeatedly implored the crowd to sing along with him. Like his Friday show before it, audience participation was low. (This isn’t unusual for these recent set of shows. It seems fans are too awestruck at the sight of their idol to dare vocalize during what may very well be the first and last time they see him perform.) But this night, Jeff asked the crowd to sing the horn melodies and added, “Scott [Spillane, one of the four members of Neutral Milk Hotel] is not here to play horns. But he will be soon.”

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@ZackTeibloom This was everything I ever wanted and everything I always feared when I started calling myself “The Festival Crasher.” In a cocktail party, anecdotal “Oh, wouldn’t that be funny if they were actually looking for me” kind of way, I wanted to be hunted. But when you find yourself cornered by two uniformed cops threatening to tase you as they ask you how your prison lingo is while holding your license, you question why you ever wished this on yourself. I knew what I was getting myself into when I decided to put my full name and picture all over the Internet, and friends would joke about wanted signs with my picture, but I always laughed it off. I knew when C3 blacklisted us back in May, I knew I’d have to be extra careful for Lollapalooza and ACL crashes. Lollapalooza was harder than ever, but Andy and I were confident we could get by again at ACL, which has always been a literal walk in the park, having crashed it easily the last 3 years.

We got to the festival grounds early on Friday. It wasn’t even noon yet, but there were so few people going in at that hour, there was no way to blend into the crowd and the security set-up was air-tight. We started at the main entrance to scope out the situation. To get in, you needed a wristband with an RFID chip in it that went off when you walked through a metal detector like booth. Typically, guards stand off to the side of these booths and half-heartedly watch you go through, but these guards were smartly positioned inside the lane. You would have had to run them over to go through and with a second line of defense right behind them, it wasn’t worth an attempt. I saw some second-line guys with walkie-talkies, but no uniformed cops, so we figured we could try again when it got more crowded. We figured we might as well try the crash that got us in last year. Go to the booth where they help you if your ticket won’t scan, pretend the issue is resolved, pick up a schedule and walk right in. If only it were that simple. Read the rest of this entry »

@ZackTeibloom When you put out the album of the year, you get to take an 15-month headlining tour with a built-in victory lap. Arcade Fire took the victory lap of victory laps joyfully, wrapping up the last leg of their masterful tour in ACL TV’s new studio in Moody Theater with orchestrated wildness, as infectious smiles stretched across their earnest faces. Take the best touring band in their prime, put them in the most prestigious, intimate space imaginable and I had hopes for a rare 10/10. They got damn close. And so did we. The immaculate Moody Theater only holds 1,500 people, and accurately boasts that there isn’t a bad seat in the house. Not that anyone dared to sit. Even up in the balcony, they were pretty much all standing from the word go. (No go!) Read the rest of this entry »