Pitchfork 2007 video captures :)

I know that Serene said I would be waxing lyrical on this blog about the various performances we caught at Pitchfork last week. However, my travel schedule has been really crazy. And also, I thought that I would let the performances speak for themselves. Below you'll find clips of my favorite performances at Pitchfork 2007 with a little blurb from me about them. Our Panasonic Lumix LX2 camera actually took very high quality wide-aspect ratio video captures of these performances. But in order to get them on youTube, I had to reduce the quality of the videos and trim some of them down.

"Teen Age Riot" - Sonic Youth



This was the opening to their ATP/Don't Look Back performance of the Daydream Nation album in its entirety. It was a real kickass opener I must say and got the capacity crowd on its feet as you can see. While I really liked the idea of watching a band performing its (seminal) entire album live, I have to admit to losing concentration about an hour into the show. Not because the performance was bad, but not all the tracks on Daydream Nation lend themselves to an outdoor live festival performance well. The band admitted as much towards the entire of their Daydream Nation set by saying "Ok, we're finally on Side 4 now. Home stretch..." Their encore set comprised of songs from their latest album, Rather Ripped and this was very well received by the crowd (the bulk of whom I am sure were only toddlers when Daydream Nation was released).

"Atlas" - Battles



I was not able to secure a good position in the audience for this show, as you can tell from the video above. And rightly so, because this was essentially the most anticipated act for a lot of people. The band was tight and extremely skilled at what they were doing. However, the performance was plagued by technical issues- wires were plugged into wrong sockets it seemed. And this somehow sapped the energy of the performance and the second half of the set was a little lackluster. However, I was really impressed with John Stanier's drumming - he looked like he was about to have a heart attack given his very physical style.

??? - Grizzly Bear



This band easily gets my vote for the best performance on Saturday. I wasn't expecting much from this Brooklyn band's performance because I thought their sound would be hard to translate to a live outdoor festival venue. However, they really blew me away with their set. I'm not sure what the title of this song is as it isn't on their album, Yellow House- the only album of theirs that I own. If anyone can help me with the title, it would be much appreciated. Also, I have two more video clips of their performance that I captured. You can get them here and here.