“Every band you see this weekend, in some way, has been influenced by the Cure,” says Davey Havok from his signature riser, positioned lifeless middle on the Riot Fest’s important stage, as he appears over the mud-splattered crowd. When it involves AFI, there’s definitely no argument to the opposite — frontman Havok has by no means been one to shrink back from eyeliner, and his Instagram web page is constantly populated with photos of Robert Smith. But after three days at Riot Fest, whereas not all pay tribute as vocally or visually as Havok, his evaluation of the invoice rings true.
Read extra: The Aquadolls embody fashion on and off the stage
The Cure, the darkish and brooding cherry on high of a wet weekend, who performed the competition’s closing set Sunday evening, have been a cornerstone of other music and tradition — one in all the first bands of its sort to interrupt, earlier than different had hit the mainstream — and a ringleader in the post-punk motion and founding father of the gothic rock style. Whether we’re speaking about the first waves of emo or modern hardcore, the Cure’s adamantly nonconformist perspective, gut-punching basslines, and gloriously addictive whine with which Smith delivers such heartbreaking lyricism has left its mark, nonetheless not directly, on these in the business making their means exterior of the mainstream.
All that’s to say, in the case of artists who refuse to be boxed in, Riot Fest is, yr after yr, replete with the finest. And this yr, from the Breeders to Death Cab for Cutie, Turnstile to Ani DiFranco — we had been really amongst different royalty, in each form and kind. Though the highlights are too many to incorporate, we witnessed a slice of pizza crowd-surfed to L.S. Dunes vocalist Anthony Green — an homage to the slice he’d been surfed at a Circa Survive present years earlier — we had been doused with rain and Faygo throughout an unruly and unforgettable ICP set, and watched Corey Feldman take notes from Bert McCracken, ripping off his holographic sequin shirt onstage.
Album play was a theme for a lot of bands on the invoice this yr, the Deal sisters performing the entirety, “even the weird ones,” from their band the Breeders’ Last Splash, Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service working by way of Transatlanticism and Give Up, Glassjaw’s Daryl Palumbo taking part in by way of 2004’s Decadence together with his group Head Automatica. However, there was nothing trite or cute about these nostalgic moments — every band introduced actual warmth, cementing their impeccable sound in each the previous and current for an expertise that was each deeply emotional, sonically spectacular, and an enormous reminder that although we’ve chosen to dive into the panorama of all issues different, its truest depths are but to be found. And we hope they by no means will.
With Zach Hill’s immaculate drumming throughout the Death Grips set, High Vis frontman Graham Sayle’s sprightly hardcore excessive kicks, or 100 gecs’ potential to move an exhausted, damp viewers to a different, far weirder and extra fantastic place and time — this Riot Fest was one for the books. And although it may not be the stems of “Just Like Heaven” that ties a devoted, unimaginable social activist and folk-rock legend like DiFranco to Dave Grohl, from set to set it was made evident that the thread tying every artist in Chicago collectively, similar to Smith, refuses to be categorized — and relatively, chooses to give attention to honesty, authenticity, and by no means shying away from the darkness.
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