Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Life Is Beautiful’s opening day rocks, pops and simmers
As Friday night drifted into Saturday morning, the whiskey-swilling pleasuremonger sounded a note of triumph.
“Look, Mama, I made it to Vegas!” hip-hop libertine G-Eazy boasted over bowel-punishing dubstep beats as bursts of flames shot up from the stage like geysers of fire.
A five-minute walk away, Americana-lusting Brits Mumford & Sons performed banjo-enhanced foot stompers with hearts as heavy as the aforementioned MC’s wallet — at least according to G-Eazy’s accounts of his riches, and since when have rappers been known to embellish?
On the surface, these two wellreceived bookends to the final hours of Life Is Beautiful’s opening day had little in common with one another aside from songs filled with underdogs vying to prove that they’re no mutts.
What united Mumford and G-Eazy was that their respective repertoires are ultimately pretty life-affirming: For the former, true love tends to prevail over the screwups of a given song’s protagonist; for the latter, by diligently staying true to one’s craft, you, too, could one day earn stacks of cash to “blow on strippers and drugs.”
As such, both were snug fits for this fest.
As its title suggests, Life Is Beautiful aims to be a feel-good event, and true to this end, there were only smatterings of angst to be had Friday — and even then, you could usually dance to it, be it Tegan and Sara’s lovelorn synthpop or Bloc Party’s pathos-filled post-punk.
In a way, there was a synchronicity between the performers on stage and the crowds standing before them, because both were there for the same reason: to be seen.
The festival grounds were made with the selfie in mind, with block after block of photo ops, so everyone could be the star of their own show. Costumed as Teenage Mutant Turtles, Waldo and David Bowie, to name but a few, they snapped pics in front of a motel slathered in brightly colored papiermache, giant metal letters that spelled “love” and the Space Wench “mutant vehicle,” a massive, musicbelching pirate ship where booty was meant to be shaken, as opposed to plundered.
The hike between the two biggest of the festival’s four stages was a long one by design: The whole point was to take in your surroundings, to hula hoop with aggressively dancing clowns, to blow bubbles from atop a repurposed piano, to ask the dude lugging around a large, inflatable slice of pizza why he was doing so.
It all led to a carnivalesque, blockparty vibe, where the bands were hardly an afterthought, but they certainly had to share the spotlight with the thousands of revelers in attendance. At times, the performers obliged. After an eager young fan hurled her panties at the stage during Tegan and Sara’s set, singer Tegan Quinn grabbed the leopard-print undies in question, leaped down from the stage, returned the skivvies to their rightful owner and snapped a picture with her.
But not everyone was so accommodating.
“This is no time for a selfie,” Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke chastised during a set-ending “Ratchet,” he, too, departing from the stage, but to interrupt a fan’s photo op as opposed to taking part in it.
At times, the audience could be too much of a distraction: The crowd chatter was so loud during the first half of a fantastic showing from The Shins that the band’s meticulously wrought indie rock initially seemed muted. Ultimately, though, The Shins prevailed, with frontman James Mercer clamping his eyes shut, tilting his head back and aiming his voice at the stars above as guitars crested around him.
Joining The Shins among the day’s most compelling performers was saxophonist Kamasi Washington. Despite taking the stage 25 minutes late because of technical difficulties with the sound, Washington compensated by leading his peerlessly funky band in a set that both embraced and disrupted jazz orthodoxy. When it was Washington’s turn to blow a solo, which he’d do for minutes on end, the two fellow horn players and flutist who surrounded him at the lip of the stage watched on in clear admiration, as did the crowd before him.
Later on in the evening on the same stage, Banks & Steelz, a collaboration between Interpol singer Paul Banks and Wu-Tang Clan mastermind RZA, made the night seem darker still with Banks’ deliberately dissonant guitar playing arcing above RZA’s brusque rhymes in a seemingly unlikely, yet engrossing pairing.
It was Mumford & Sons, however, who delivered the day’s most eagerly received set. They began with the brooding “Snake Eyes,” which opened their performance on a slow simmer. But soon enough, this bunch was at full boil, the crowd raising their voices in unison with frontman Marcus Mumford’s.
“I will hold on to hope,” he promised during “The Cave,” his grip shared by countless hands on this night.