This year’s ride through the festival wonderland that is the Austin City Limits festival has come to an end, with the Foo Fighters kicking our asses in the best of ways, sweating rivers with Drake and Twenty One Pilots, and – as of last night’s finale – dance partying the weekend away with The Strokes.
Along the way, we caught a water-spraying party with Chance The Rapper, contorted deliciously with Sylvan Esso, tranced out to alt-J and got our woodsy-folk rocks off with The Decemberists. Here’s how Day Three went down at Zilker Park…
Biggest Onstage Evolution of 2015: Sylvan Esso
None were more surprised at the enormous turnout for Sylvan Esso’s midday trip-hop magic than the duo themselves, who delivered a mesmerizing set at a cross section of Bjork and Purity Ring with a dash of Pomplamoose for taste. The Durham, NC duo’s fusion of electro-pop and indie spirit is infectious, with Amelia Meath’s enchanting vocal shapes syllables with concision over a gorgeous tonality. It’s been exhilarating to witness their growth and onstage comfort transform over the last few months, and the charisma and confidence evolution between Sasquatch and ACL is starkly clear.
After flawless renditions of “Coffee” and “Hey Mami,” through yoga-dance contortions Meath dedicated “Dress” to all “the ladies who dress fierce but feel a bit awkward about it.” For added flavor she worked a snippet of Beyoncé’s “Flawless” into the song, before oversharing that she had “tiny waterfalls coming from my armpits” in the blazing heat. Those armpits are bushier than Nick Offerman’s, so the imagination would most definitely enjoy moving on.
Victory Lap: Chance The Rapper
Equally shocked by a dense turnout was Chicago hero Chance The Rapper. “You guys are a lot louder and know a lot more of the words than I thought you would,” he said after a searing opening with “Everybody’s Something” and soaking the front rows with a water bottle. Fronting his jazz-influenced band Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment, body-shuddering bass grooves and jazzy flourishes crafted a bedrock foundation for Chance’s flows on positivity and social fuses.
Reaching back to his breakthrough mixtape “Acid Rap,” CTR dabbled in the Social Experiment’s “Surf” as well as his own verse from Action Bronson’s “Baby Blue,” one of the summer’s biggest hits. But “Sunday Candy” was the major selling point, driving the sweaty masses into a bouncing frenzy.
Beat Champions: alt-J
Bathed in psychedelic lights and fog, alt-J seamlessly wove fan-favorite material from both their LPs into a celebrated set as the sun dipped below the Austin skyline. After seeing them at least a dozen times, our theory has been proven: the MVP of this band is Thom Green, their metronomic, kaleidoscopically diverse drummer who crafts the most intricately varied beats in their breeze-hop meditative sound. His energy carried the performance well beyond the gentle, semi-ethereal glide of the band’s persona, adding an insulating depth within the percussive framework that serves them spectacularly well.
Potent Folk is Important, Folks: The Decemberists
I’d been in a Decemberists funk for a few months, after their underwhelming Sasquatch set over Memorial Day weekend. Frontman Colin Meloy’s look of determined focus through the majority of the set gave the impression that the band feels the need to prove something – but after a decade of robustly rich indie folk-pop greatness, the idea is baffling. This year’s What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World left no doubt that the Portland outfit is undiminished in potency, nearly a decade after their major-label breakthrough The Crane Wife. Though no complaints would be offered if they pulled more from their perfect Hazards of Love album.
Samplings of new material included the trumpet-punctuated “Cavalry Captain,” and “Why Would I Now,” a winner from the band’s new Florasongs EP due out next week. And are they really the woodsy hipster geeks they’re made out to be? The set’s 10-minute finale about a mariner’s revenge, complete with giant cardboard-cutout whale, should answer that in full color.
Popped-Collar Rock Sendoff: The Strokes
Ending our Austin City Limits experience was The Strokes, and goddamned if sunglasses-at-night frontman Julian Casablancas doesn’t still creep around the stage like a hungover sloth after all these years, leaning half-bent against the mic stand like it’s his only hope for vertical presence. Good thing he’s still got the popped-collar chops to enrapture tens of thousands of people.
“I love me some city limits,” Casablancas said three songs in, before joking: “Will you keep it down? I’m trying to work up here.”
Sure, the Strokes drew the smallest Samsung audience of any headliner, but it’s Sunday night and The Weeknd was playing across the way. But even Julian bemoaned the tough choice to end the weekend’s events after a wildly celebrated run through “Last Nite”: “Music festivals,” he mumbled, resulting in perplexing maniacal cheers from the crowd. “I don’t know if I’d be cheering that, but amen, that sounds good. What’s going on over there?”
He gestured across the field to the Honda stage, irritated by the noise bleed. “Could I get more Weeknd in my monitors? Why do they always do that? Everyone’s playing at the same time. ‘You must only choose one’. I’d like to see both. I’ve got to miss half each of both and wonder if one was better?”
The New York rockers tore through a 75-minute set ranging from the dreamy ambivalence of “Is This It” from their 2001 debut to the tropicalia of “Machu Picchu” and “You’re So Right”. At encore time, Casablancas played well to the crowd, marveling ”You’re still here!” before tearing through “You Only Live Once”.
“Thanks so much, I hope you guys have wonderful lives,” he laughed. “Do you want anything?” he then asked a fan at the front of the stage. “For the record he just said get out of here. Take it or leave it, people.” The perfect segue into their festival-closing anthem “Take It Or Leave It”.
The Strokes Austin City Limits setlist:
Is This It
Barely Legal
Welcome To Japan
You Talk Way Too Much
Someday
Heart In A Cage
Hard To Explain
Killing Lies
Last Nite
Reptilia
Machu Picchu
You’re So Right
The Modern Age
Automatic Stop
New York City Cops
What Ever Happened?
You Only Live Once
Take It Or Leave It
All photos: Johnny Firecloud
