Laneway! Sold out!
And the thing is, I don’t know if all you beautiful extra people saw it at its best. They withstood two cancellations, they held on to a third year in a very good venue, but the whims of fate and a couple of odd scheduling decisions make this one of the middlers in the five-year strong run. It’s a long way beyond the scratchy seat-of-your-pants one in Britomart 2010 (I think there’s still a plaque for the beer tent gulag survivors by Kate Sylvester) but it wasn’t as back-to-back fun as when Holy F@#& and Deerhunter upset downtown Auckland residents in Aotea Square in 2011, or M83 blowing the roof off in 2012. What happened?
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A word first, on Laneway’s short sets: They’re great. It breaks the day up really well. One of the things I’ve come to realise as a git adult who sits all day long is that consistently standing in one place is hard and it’s nice to be able to go stretch your legs. It’s also oddly democratising. No one gets to be the two-and-a-half hour heritage act. On the other hand, Laneway’s also (increasingly) bleeding-edge hip, and plenty of acts this time barely had one album to their name. In that sense, 45 minutes of Chvrches and Savages and Haim is a relief. They could give us what they know and what they’ve burnished to a fine sheen, and didn’t have to test (much) new material to give us some sense of money’s worth. It’s no surprise they were some of the better-received acts of the day, and I wonder if it would have been different if they’d had to do another 20 minutes each.
But other choices felt a little off. I went in thinking the Red Bull Thunderdome might just be a new stage, because surely they couldn’t do it in a silo again. They did – and while being in that concrete bunker is a rare and remarkable experience, it fills up in the bat of an eye, so I also know people who had paid for things they wanted to see and couldn’t. Meanwhile, Danny Brown is one of the most critically-revered rappers going at the moment and it felt strange to be fighting to see him minutes after a limp set by Frightened Rabbit with plenty of room to spare over at the main space.
And The Presets were really only suited to their place in the bill if you proceeded on the generous assumptions that it was 5pm, you were actually at Rhythm ‘n Vines, and the year was 2006. Scheduling an event like this is like a hugely expensive game of Tetris though, except the blocks never disappear when you line them up and instead there are hundreds of people who don’t have to play Tetris grizzling about you on Facebook for being bad at Tetris. So I’ll leave it be. It’s not an easy task.
Such highlights, though! Danny Brown played to a seething, stoked and increasingly at-ease audience, as did Earl Sweatshirt earlier in the day, and it suggests rap is going to sit increasingly comfortably alongside the indie staples in future. The reluctant revivalists in Jagwar Ma and Parquet Courts each put on raucous, raw shows that gave solid albums an interesting new facet. Kurt Vile kept it weird just when it seemed like his music was heading inexorably toward that somnambulant dad-rock sunset (I was really happy to hear Freak Train).
Everyone faced Jamie XX obediently on stage like they were waiting for him to turn into the actual XX rather than just dancing, but he hunkered down for a phenomenal DJ set. And Literal F@#& might have seemed like a pisstake on first spec, but there’s actually a valuable role for violently weird happenings between the cracks at festivals like these, and I hope they keep leaving room for something similar in future.
I think Cat Power will be talked about for a while after this one too, and not necessarily for reasons I’m all that fond of. As listeners, we’ve reaped the benefits of Chan Marshall’s very troubled life, transposing the products and premonitions of ravaging alcohol abuse and psychotic episodes onto our bad days at work and unreciprocated crushes. For all of its moments of beauty, this was one of her dreaded performances of yore where she could barely hold it together, and it’s immensely upsetting to think of someone fighting to overcome this for years, even managing to make fun of themselves, and not being able to beat it. I don’t want to condemn it, because Cat Power “sucking tonight” is more than most of us will accomplish on a stage ourselves, but I’m also uneasy about any “dam…so emotional…I was ther…” bandwagoneering. That’s all.
Onwards Laneway! It’s a shame it’s leaving Silo Park, and I feel super aggrieved at the possible short-sighted loss of another Auckland public space just as we got to know it. I’ll be interested to see what happens next. Part of being a local institution is the ups and downs, and so for all the warts this time the day kinda felt like a fixture.
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