Fender Jaguar Electric Guitar

At Coachella, When the Night Comes

31.12.69

During the daylight hours of Coachella’s opening day, Fenders and innocence linked many sets, across styles: Yuck, EMA, Ximena Sariñana, Frank Ocean, M83. (There’s an indirect link between those guitars and innocence, having to do with thin or trebly tones that can cut through a group sound like a child’s cry.) All these bands and singers, from Yuck and M83’s revisitings of ’80s underground and overground pop, to Frank Ocean’s antiformulaic R&B, are working on underdog models of one kind or another; they’re full of hope and the performances spilled over their edges.

Then night fell, and the music grew bigger, cleaner, and more wised-up. The Black Keys, once scrappy and spindly, now sound enormous. Refused, the politically engaged Swedish punk band that broke up in 1998 and just recently started playing again, was full of fine, strong, and microscopic detail, in furious songs like “I’d Rather Be Dead” (“than alive by your repression”). And their very different countrymen, the DJ group Swedish House Mafia, playing on the main stage as night turned into morning, achieved its stultifying watertight formula: rise, rise, rise, release, repeat.

Source: New York Times (blog)