Bridgers displays her sense of humor at Pitchfork
Pitchfork Music Festival has opened in Chicago’s Union Park for the weekend with bands, music, crowds, dust and lines.
Headliners Friday included Phoebe Bridgers, Big Thief, Yaeji and Animal Collective (a report on the music from Old Town School’s Nikki O’Neill is below). The festival continues through Sunday with headliners including St. Vincent and Chicago’s Jamila Woods. Pitchfork reported on social media Saturday that Sunday tickets were sold out.
As the most boldface-named music event in Chicago since Lollapalooza in late July, Pitchfork, which has a daily capacity of 19,000, opens under the shadow of rising COVID-19 numbers in Illinois. The festival, which took last summer off, moved from its usual mid-July dates to mid-September.
Full vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test from the past 24 hours is required for admission, tightened from the 72-hour test requirement from Lollapalooza.
Once inside the gates, music fans seemed mostly focused on the experience.
“I feel like we have to live it up a little until the restrictions come back,” said Karin Gredvig of Chicago, attending with a few fellow Marquette University alums. “It feels like it’s going to a short window.”
The best part about Pitchfork’s move to mid-September: a dry, sunny, late-summer kind of weekend, no storm clouds or humidity. The worst part: that dry part.
With Union Park pressed into service for other music festivals over the past few weeks, most of the park’s grass had already been ground to earth Friday and a haze settled over the grounds.
Fest-goers Gus Fuguitt and Carleigh Knowles of Chicago say they attend Pitchfork every year and
this year seemed especially crowded, which surprised them because some of their friends who usually attend stayed away because of COVID-19 concerns.
“It does seem more congested,” Fuguitt said.
Chalk it up to pent-up demand for live music.
Across the grounds, those wearing masks were in the minority, but they were still a noticeably higher number than at Lollapalooza. Plus
masks did double duty with the dust.
There were long lines for the food and drink concessions — Goose Island had one beer concession mocked up as a CTA train car. The longest line by far was for the band merchandise, a single tent with a handful of checkouts.
Ren Pierse, of Detroit, was about an hour’s wait back, but her enthusiasm was undimmed.
“I’m in line for Phoebe Bridgers merchandise, of course!”
Pierse was at Pitchfork on a free pass, she said, having inherited a ticket from someone who had them for the canceled 2020 fest “and never cashed them in.” She planned to be back in Chicago next weekend for Riot Fest in Douglass Park.
As Pitchfork Music Festival opened in Union Park, it was obvious the female headliners, and noticeable numbers of female electronic music acts, instrumentalists and frontwomen performing on the three stages, hadn’t scared away male audience members.
That’s a conclusion from which other music festivals whose lineups are over 80% male can learn.
Drew Daniel delivered an entertaining set with a strong anti-fascist sentiment through his house-music project, The Soft Pink Truth, as three women way back in the audience performed their own dance commentary, catching soap bubbles with hula hoops.
Over at the Green Stage, the guitar- and saxophone-fueled mayhem of black midi, a London-based noise rock band, laced with chaos-thriving improvisations in the spirit of Defunkt and Mahavishnu Orchestra, drew a big, cheering crowd. They also had the gleeful audacity to fire off bright white stage lights at 4 in the afternoon.
Great expectations faced the reunited Fiery Furnaces, an indie rock band on Jack White’s Third Man Records fronted by brother and sister Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger. The siblings from Oak Park put the band on hiatus to enjoy solo careers but returned in 2020 with their first song in 11 years.
As the band supposedly used a Soviet drum machine on the tune, the Russian influence didn’t appear to have stopped there. Kooky, cabaret-inspired melodies on fuzzed-out keyboards were prevalent through much of their live set.
Indie favorites Animal Collective let the energy build gently and slowly as friendly, pentatonic melodies evoking traditional Japanese music swirled over quietly hypnotic beats.
The first acoustic guitar and lush harmony vocals of the festival were introduced by the indie folk four-piece Big Thief. Twenty minutes into the Brooklyn group’s hauntingly poetic set at the Red Stage, parts of the audience experienced decision anxiety as the much-talked-about Korean-American DJ Yaeji launched into her set at the Blue Stage with a fistful of stylish and powerful beats.
As the mournful lead vocals of Big Thief ’s Adrianne Lenker pierced the night sky, Yaeji’s bilingual lyrics brought the more dance and party-focused segment of the crowd to a carefree cheer.
In her headlining set, Phoebe Bridgers delivered the catchiest and most “big stage”-sounding songs of the festival. As she and her band finally got to perform the songs from “Punisher” on stage, her stage presentation was grand and imaginative but with a sense of humor and refreshingly ego-free. Even in Bridgers’ most reflective and intimate songs, the audience faithfully stayed with her.
As many lament the decline of the guitar in rock music, Bridgers showed that the instrument is integral to her music as she switched between multiple electric and acoustic guitars throughout her show.
The guitar is alive and well. It just depends on where you’re looking.
Report on the music Nikki O’Neill is a recording artist, an instructor at Old Town School of Folk Music and writes for Guitar Player magazine.