Pitchfork

Photos by Eirik Lande (unless otherwise indicated); text by Stephen M. Deusner

Superfamily

Photo by Stephen M. Deusner

The great thing about festivals is that there are always discoveries. Entering the grounds this afternoon, I passed by the Enga stage shortly after Superfamily had started. First band of the day, but they played like headliners. They also had the best stage accessory of the day: Two guys in matching suits doing matching dance moves and generally hamming it up. They were the Hives to singer Steven Wilson's Bono, an unapologetic cheeseball who looks like he's having the time of his life on stage. He introduces one song by saying it's about the time he injured his knee when he was a 30-year-old male prostitute in Paris during the 60s, and his own personal Pips unfurl French flags at the song's climax.

Architecture in Helsinki

Photo by Stephen M. Deusner

A few songs into their set on the large Enga stage, Cameron Bird asks for applause for coming the farthest to be at the festival. It's a legitimate request that the audience graciously indulges, even if they don't sing along with his waa-waa-waa's and even move about much. Either it's too early or they're too sober.

You couldn't tell the band that, however. Their energy seems endless, even a little desperate. Most of the band members trade off instruments from one song to another--sometimes even from one verse to another. And everybody gets at least one turn being a drummer. Kellie Sutherland bops about manically, at first a foil for Bird but later stealing the best vocals. They make faces at the zipline camera as it sails back and forth over the crowd, and Bird admits, "My banter is not as good as Superfamily's is. That was pretty impressive." Hey, not everybody can be a Parisian gigolo.

If they start slow and a little unsure, their show picks up considerably when they replace their zig-zagging arrangement with longer, more linear jams. Even at a festival as diverse as Øya, when Architecture in Helsinki hit their stride, they sound like fizzy world pop, full of complex layers of syncopated sounds and unpredictable melodies.

Spoon

The Goth teenager standing in front of me is not into Spoon's tightly wound guitar pop. About halfway through "Jonathan Fisk", she coolly signals to her friends that this is a no-go and points to Heroes & Zeroes, a Norwegian pop-metal group with a jazz saxophonist, on her program. They trail out of the crowd just as "Fisk" dies down and "Stay Don't Go" starts clicking into place.

I can't imagine how the Norwegian crowd hears Spoon. In America, they have a Top 10 album and a fervent following, and the band's music appears to have made its way over to Scandinavia, but most of the natives I've talked to don't seem to know what to expect. Britt Daniel walks on stage chewing gum like a teenager and tries to address the crowd in Norwegian, but he apparently mangled the pronunciation because there is absolutely no response from the crowd. Still, his Norwegian is better than mine.

Immediately, they rip into "My Mathematical Mind", which sets the tone for the show in two ways. First, the band's set draws surprisingly few numbers from Ga5, opting instead for older songs like "The Fitted Shirt", "Jonathan Fisk", and a version of "Stay Don't Go" that loses the breath beats but turns up the tempo. Second, Spoon sound like they're carefully holding back, artfully controlling the songs' series of tensions and releases, which works better on "I Turn My Camera On" and "The Way We Get By" than on "Don't You Evah" or "Black Like Me". "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb" loses nothing without the horns and in fact benefits from sounding even more pent-up.

As the show progresses, the band pack in more of Daniel's self-reflexive songs, such as "The Beast and Dragon, Adored", "I Summon You", and closer "Small Stakes". In this festival context, with so many young bands bringing high hopes to the grounds, it begins to feel like he's creating primary source material about indie-rock life, not just lyrically ("When you believe, they call it rock'n'roll") but musically as well. The band draws from so many sources-- Billy Joel, Elvis Costello, the Pixies, old soul and r&b-- bad or good. There's no filter; you are the sum of everything you've ever heard and everything you aspire to create.

Devendra Banhart

Across the grounds at the Enga stage, a very long soundcheck cuts into Devendra Banhart's set. Seriously, it seems to go on forever. And even when the band finally take the stage, they spend several more interminable minutes twisting nobs and adjusting levels, taking so long that when they finally do play a song from Banhart's new album, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, it feels inevitably anticlimactic. Despite a full backing band that seem as if it wants to unleash a heavy California stoner groove, the first few songs sound subdued and even timid. Banhart could be playing solo and there wouldn't be much of a difference. The one artist most closely associated with the dubiously defined freak-folk movement, he sounds as SoCal retro as Beachwood Sparks. Perhaps due to the late start, the crowd seems expectant, like they're waiting for something big to happen.

It finally arrives about midway through "Sea Horse", a new track from Smokey Rolls, when the song evolves from a typically weird folk tune into a spirited rock jam. Banhart sounds remarkably good with a little muscle behind him, and you wish they'd just cut loose and take us all to Thunder Canyon. Unfortunately, such moments are few and far between.


Battles

Battles take almost as long as Banhart to set up, but their soundcheck is fascinating to watch: There are so many wires and switches and plugs and computers and unidentifiable doodads crisscrossing and tangling in and out of one another that it becomes not just the means of making music, but a visual representation of that music. Their set consists of tendrils of rhythm and melody spooling and unspooling, different keys and time signatures plugged into one another-- amplification as medium. As with their album Mirrored, however, there's a human element as well, especially in the way that Ian Williams and Tyondai Braxton interrogate one another on guitar and in the way grimacing drummer John Stanier puts so much into his complex rhythms that he's completely drenched in sweat before the first song ends. The band constantly tweaking their sound even midsong, and each adjustment shifts the sound and redefines each element's relation to the whole. It's a busy set, but easily one of the best of the festival.

Jens Lekman

Another day, another British diva flame-out. Apparently trying to keep up with Amy Winehouse, who canceled her Wednesday appearance, Lily Allen also pulls out, also cites exhaustion (though, unlike Winehouse, she did bring a doctor's note). Will Lady Sovereign complete the triumvirate?

The announcement of Allen's cancellation provokes cheers from the crowd; the announcement of her replacement nearly incites a riot. Jens Lekman will be playing the Sjosiden stage in her place. He's such a tenderhearted romantic that I expect the crowd to be mainly women and their eye-rolling boyfriends, but the crowd is surprisingly mixed and the sexes are equally excited. When Lekman and his all-girl band break into "A Sweet Summer's Night on Hammer Hill", two guys run up to the front of the crowd, hug the security guard, and proceed to dance giddily for the rest of the song. Everyone dances, everyone smiles. Lekman makes people happy.

He may be one of the only performers who can have an all-female band-- and all uniformly cute, too-- without looking like an indie Robert Palmer. It helps that his songs are almost always about lost or badly timed love, and his musicians represent either his failures or his undying hopes for happiness. Plus, they highlight his relaxed stage charisma; despite his ordinary appearance-- jeans, plaid button-up shirt, slightly receding hairline-- he's as watchable as any rock star. He gets down on both knees to perform the first verse and chorus of "Julie", then wrestles his mic down so he can sit at the edge of the stage and serenade his audience, who go ahead and smile.

...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead

Texas is very well represented at Øya today. Spoon played earlier, Dallas-born psych-rock icon Roky Erickson is scheduled for later, and Trail of Dead play the Enga stage in the early evening. I had originally resigned myself to missing their show, but fortuitously, I catch their last few songs. Wandering back from Jens, a burger in hand, I arrive when the group is at peak intensity. Conrad Keely stands at the lip of the stage, sweat-drenched and serious, slamming out a melody on guitar while the rest of the band huddle around the drum set, cacophonizing furiously. Even at the show's climax, they sound as loud and chaotic as expected, but stop just short of destructive.

The Jesus and Mary Chain

Earlier in the day I heard a rumor that Scarlett Johansson would be singing with headliners the Jesus & Mary Chain, but it's obviously Coachella-inspired wishful thinking. Yeah right she's in Norway. Instead, it's just the Reid brothers and their band playing the Enga stage, the festival's obligatory reunion group. Their show turns out to be one of the most talked-about of the day, if only because opinions diverge so wildly. Some people I talk to love the barebones re-creation of their former sound in all its dissonant glory. Others think it sounds too muddy, too messy, or too spartan. And those at the furthest reaches of the crowd put hands over ears to block the noise.

There is a sense of cold professionalism to the performance, as if for the band members this is just another day at the office. Jim Reid stands, then kneels, then stands, and so on, but constantly sizes up the crowd, as if he or they will pounce on the other at any moment. William Reid just plays guitar off by himself. Their no-frills approach conveys a punkish antagonism that builds throughout the set, culminating with a pounding version of "Reverence", in which the feedback swirls freely and psychedelically.

Roky Erickson & the Explosives

Former singer for the 13th Floor Elevators and rock-and-roll casualty Roky Erickson is such a cult figure in the States that I figured I'd be one of only a few people at his show, cheering for "I Walked with a Zombie" and "It's Cold Night for Alligators" while stragglers wandered in and out of the crowd.

How wrong can I be?

Of the many shows so far at Øya, this is by far the most feverishly attended, even more so than Nine Inch Nail or Tool. Granted, it's the only show scheduled for this time, which might have something to do with the massive attendance, but most of the people in the crowd appear specifically excited to see Erickson. Front and center are the rock buffs, mostly males in their thirties and forties, a few even holding homemade signs. Radiating from that core are fans of every age, from guys older than Erickson himself to small children wearing special kid-friendly headphones. In front of me, a girl in pigtails, no more than five years old, dances and claps happily atop her father's shoulders.

Especially for a musician who has had a pretty tough life-- he was busted for acid in the sixties and received mind-damaging shock therapy-- this crowd is a nice sight to see, and Erickson seems genuinely moved, addressing his fans warmly and frequently. His psych rock has devolved into more familiar blues rock, but it's still weird and feisty and even a little exciting. It certainly galvanizes the audience, who eagerly push toward the stage. Leaving my post just to the right of the stage, I try to make my way around the crowd to the other side, where I foolishly believe there will be more room, but the crowd seems literally endless. I never even see the stage again.

Low

Exhausted from the Erickson show, I take a quick breather at the hotel before heading out to see Low play an Øyanatt gig at John Dee. I get lost, of course, but find the place soon enough. It's a small club off a side street near the Grünerløkka neighborhood, and it's packed with locals. Many of the festival acts this year-- Justice, the Lionheart Brothers, Malajube-- would have been perfectly in their element here, but none so much as Low, whose delicate sounds would have been lost in the open daylight.

The dark, cramped stage only adds to the drama of the music, as Alan Sparhawk's guitar pierces the songs' quiet passages. His voice meshes nicely with Mimi Parker's subtle vibrato, especially on "Sandanista" and "Dragonfly". As a drummer, she hits out very easy beats, not unlike Meg White, but as with the Stripes, the simplicity of her rhythms is crucial to the band's deceptively gentle sound and offsets Sparhawk's inventive guitarwork. The softer they play, the louder they sound. Rapt, the crowd remains eerily quiet throughout.

Oslo
As I walk through sparse crowds back to my hotel, I notice a small band playing on a restaurant veranda across the square. A block later, just as that song is beginning to fade, street musicians perform for passersby. European dance music blares from nightclubs, American hip-hop from empty kebab grills. Oslo on a Friday night is its own music festival.

New Violators


Anja Garbarek