Greetings from Bonnaroo, the rain-soaked music festival that kicked off Thursday afternoon in Manchester, Tennessee.
For the eighth straight year, some of music’s biggest names will be descending on what seems to be an eternally mud-caked plot of land in the Central Time Zone. This weekend promises to be no different on either front with upcoming shows from Bruce Springsteen, a newly reunited Phish, and Nine Inch Nails scheduled between thunderstorms.
The main stages sat gathering puddles while Thursday’s shows in the smaller tents served as an indie rock appetizer platters before the more mainstream main courses this weekend. The schedule was stacked with overlapping performances from up and comers and almost-theres.
Two of the best shows I caught were from Brooklyn’s White Rabbits and recent Q-magazine darlings Hockey. Both sets had the ever-increasing crowds rocking hard enough to forget about the weather and the latter resulted in the festival’s first glow stick appearances.
White Rabbits are a percussion-heavy six-piece whose dual drummers bang out rhythms that are enthusiastically matched by Stephen Patterson’s piano. Their most recent release, It’s Frightening, has producer/Spoon front man Britt Daniels’ fingerprints all over it…but I like his fingerprints.
The band tore through several songs from the album and they have an even richer sound live, especially when accented by multi-instrumentalist Matt Clark’s endless mix of drumbeats, tambourine shakes, or one man dance party from his section of the stage.
Two highlights of their set were “Kid on My Shoulders” from their critically acclaimed debut album, with three—THREE!!—drummers bashing away during the song’s chorus “We held a torch throughout it/One day we’ll laugh about it”, lines that beg you to shout along. They also did a blistering version of “The Plot”, also from Fort Nightly, which got the biggest ovation of the evening and had the well-dressed band sweating through their skinny jeans.
Next on The “This Stage” were Portland, Oregon’s Hockey who made their Bonnaroo debut…and what a hell of a first impression. Lead singer Ben Grubin—all stomping feet and flailing elbows—bounced around the stage as they opened with “Work Work Work” and their dancetastic new single “Learn to Lose”. Their guitars and swagger are borrowed from the Strokes with a drum machine swiped from LCD Soundsystem to produce an insanely catchy blend of rock-fuzzed funk.
Hockey is coming off a much buzzed about performance at Seattle’s recent Sasquatch festival and within two songs, you realized that they earned all the hype. By the time Grubin told the crowd that they were “freakin’ very very nice!”, it had doubled in size and after their set, I heard their name mentioned in more than one port-a-john line, which has to be a good sign.
Hockey’s first full-length, Mind Chaos, will be released in August and they’re on the bill for the Glastonbury, Leeds and Reading festivals this summer. I highly recommend you check ‘em out, cause with tracks like these, they aren’t going to be on the side stages for long.