Palm Springs – Continued from part 1
Surprisingly Sub Par Acts
One: MGMT
After that love-fest, let’s move onto the bands that left a bad taste in my mouth. First up is MGMT, their debut album, Oracular Spectacular, was repeated on my iPod for ages when it first came out. Amazing from start to finish. Their second album, Congratulations was a departure from their indie rock smash hit, a little more disjointed and psychedelic and took a lot of listens to begin to grow on me. Regardless I was pretty psyched to see them live, they arrived on stage and announced that they would play all the songs from their new album, okay fine, it just came out. They played about 3 or 4 songs from their new album which no one really knew and were underwhelming live to say the least. These guys just have no stage presence, their vocals are weak and they make no effort to involve the audience. They finally got to songs like Kids and Time to Pretend, however, still with no audience interaction, fine, you’re still pretty inexperienced. The kicker for me is at one point between songs, they actually had the audacity to ask the audience to buy their new album. Come on guys, many bands at Coachella just dropped new albums and not one of them shamelessly promoted themselves. Live tours are how you promote an album and it helps when you show audience appreciation and actually have some presence on stage. I may buy their future albums, yes, but will I ever attend another MGMT show? Definitely not.
Two: Vampire Weekend
Vampire Weekend tunes are always a regular in the summer, an indie band made up of rich white dudes playing catchy Californian pop songs that have a somewhat African edge. Both Vampire Weekend albums are great, start to finish. As you can probably tell I’m big on the stage presence and these guys just don’t have it. They played all their hits, but the crowd and myself were not moving, at all. I saw some head bops but they didn’t really get things going, their performance was basically boring.
Three: Pavement
Pavement, what can I say, didn’t like them before Coachella, tried to open my mind and see what all the reunion buzz was about so I caught some of their set. Still don’t get it. Not a fan.