The aliens land on Pitchfork’s second day, but another foreigner steals the show

By Sheba White
Published: July 20th, 2008 | 12:00pm

Bruised skies, spit-warm rain, and a bug-loving humidity didn’t stop the refreshing, brassy breeze that the Pitchfork Music Festival Saturday opening act, Boban & Marko Markovic Orkestar, brought to the Balance Stage. Having the legendary Serbian father and son at PMF is a bit like having Rudolf Nureyev dance on The Muppet Show. Yet the 11-piece, trumpet-led orchestra couldn’t have seemed more relaxed and approachable, effortlessly running through its polka-based classics and throwing in jazz and disco movements for spice. What happens when all traces of righteous entitlement are removed from a performance? Boban & Marko Markovic Orkestar happens.

Its sunny opening performance set the mood of the Balance Stage, a stage that PMF organizers seemingly stack with more progressive and innovative bands that have yet to garner the large indie-rock following that Pitchfork is known for having, such as the experimental jazz rock of the bizarrely named Chicago musician collective Icy Demons (neither icy, nor demons), whose sound is a mixture of seminal krautrock bands like Neu and Can and that of experimental tropicalia like Adrian Orange, or the one-man wall of noise that is Deerhunter lead vocalist Bradford James Cox’s Atlas Sound, who like Jamie Lidell at PMF 2007, took the stage solo, but lacked the costumery and showmanship that carried Lidell’s set.

In previous years, the Balance Stage was a tent (located a bit east of its current location) that featured up-and-coming acts like Flosstradamus and Diplo (2006), but soon became a semi-stage (2007) that retained some of its electronica mystique with early national appearances by bands like Girl Talk and Dan Deacon. Now in its current location on the southwest side of Union Park, the Balance Stage has a full-blown stage setup, yet it’s still wrestling with its small-stage sound issues.

Sound from the larger Connector Stage and the Aluminum Stage continued to overwhelm performances by quieter Balance Stage bands like New Mexico’s A Hawk and a Hacksaw and Festival staff favorites, Kenyan-American folk band Extra Golden. A Hawk and a Hacksaw patiently played their Slavic, folk-based compositions under the bleeding strains from Titus Andronicus and Jay Reatard. And while A Hawk and a Hacksaw’s instrumentation was beautiful and complex — particularly the bird chirps they threw in — the band’s delicate musical selection for the Balance Stage did nothing to carry the complexity of the music to the audience and may have been an unfortunate choice for a large festival setting.

Jay Reatard and Titus Andronicus, on the other hand, must have surely come away from Pitchfork feeling like gods of their stages but particularly in the case of Titus Andronicus. The Jersey boys left all their typical experimental noise bells and whistles at home and played a palate cleansing-set of beery-chorused rocknroll, with frontman Liam Betson proving that pint-sized Charlie Manson look-alikes aren’t so scary when they’re thanking their parents for coming to Pitchfork and gushing that they’ve always wanted to open for Dinosaur Jr., “even if it means being one of 40 or so bands to do so.”

Jay Reatard, on the other hand, should pay attention to Betson’s stage performance. A longtime favorite of punk-rock dudes with grand ideas about rocknroll authenticity, Reatard’s large-stage performance was a dull photocopy of his previous shows. The performance pattern would be familiar to Art Brut fans: shout out the song, play the song, shout out the next song, bang head. But in Reatard’s case, there’s none of the cheeky jocularity of 2007’s Art Brut PMF performance on the same stage, nor any of Art Brut’s crush-worthy playfulness in the songs, just a fairly bellicose dude shouting out three-minute songs with an undeserved confidence that the audience will pay attention.

Reatard’s stage presence was a far cry from the more sublime presence of Caribou’s performance on the Connector Stage. Their wispy lo-fi cinematic movements briefly parted the clouds and set a bucolic atmosphere over the Festival, paving the way for the mountain-boy harmonies of the over-hyped Oak Ridge Boys–sounding Fleet Foxes on the Aluminum Stage and the astral mist of Fuck Buttons' synth loops, distorted organ, and muffled lyrics on the Balance Stage.

But the real draw of the early-afternoon roster was English rapper Dizzee Rascal, who woke the crowd up with a dazzling proclamation of “You hear that folk shit? Yo, fuck that shit. Put your hands in the air!” Rascal’s over-the-top performance pulled in the majority of the wandering heat-struck, zombie-like concertgoers and seemed to shift the mood momentarily from sleepy to exuberant. “You probably don’t understand a word I’m saying,” Rascal shouted midway through his set, “but by the end, you’ll know my name.”

The PMF crowd may have known Rascal’s name by the end of his set, but they also seemingly knew all the words to the only release from New York’s self-described Upper West Side Soweto band Vampire Weekend. The band played through all of their recent hits on the Aluminum Stage, whose previous night’s mic problems all but disappeared for the majority of Saturday’s sets. In its shadow, the concurrently timed Elf Power set on the Balance Stage seemed lost in the shuffle, though the angelic Cheap Trick–ish voice of lead vocalist Andrew Rieger is a force to contend with, and the band brought the first truly rocking moments to the Balance stage with the lush psychedelic background of its song “the New Mythology.”

The Aluminum Stage also hosted former Lifter Puller frontman’s newest bar band, the Hold Steady. Much like Fleet Foxes, the hype far out-shadows the music, though credit should be given to vocalist Craig Finn, who seems to have left the arrogant sing-talk stance of his Lifter Puller stage performances behind with booty-shaking dances and crowd-pleasing white-boy windmill moves.

As great as a performer as Finn has become, no one does white-boy dancing better than !!!’s Nic Offer. In disturbingly booty-tight blue shorts, Offer and co-vocalist Shannon Funchess (a true anomaly in being one of two black women to appear on Pitchfork’s stage) got the crowd moving more than just their hands with their dance-punk histrionics and funky soulful crooning.

Their arrival was just in time for the show-stealer of the night. Though No Age held its own as the last Balance Stage act on Saturday’s schedule, the performance of the day has to go to ex-Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker. In the often suffocating youth-oriented, newness-for-newness’s-sake atmosphere of Pitchfork, the 44-year-old non-mentally damaged, non-spiritually bereft, pop-centric frontman was seen as a dinosaur by most fans. “I mean, who really cares about Jarvis Cocker?” one fan was overheard saying.

But Cocker’s performance not only revealed what was lacking at so many of the day’s Pitchfork performances — a genuine love for performing and an effort to connect with an audience — but it also revealed that Jarvis Cocker may just be the next best thing to the recently departed James Brown. The man is a dazzling, strutting, charismatic, and charmingly eccentric presence (removing his sport coat in one quick shrug) on the stage that shouldn’t be so easily dismissed. And with songs dedicated to waitresses who make $4.50 an hour and science-minded ladies as lovers, one suspects Cocker will hold a soft spot for fans just stumbling upon his genius at Pitchfork.

Fan favorites Animal Collective ended the night on the underused Aluminum Stage with a semi-engaging light show and their brand of Muppety shout-singing. But by their 9 p.m. set, the humidity and mud-soaked fields had taken a toll on most festival goers. Fans left the rainbow-lit Union Park grounds like aliens disembarking from a giant spaceship, a little blurry-eyed from the day’s events and covered in the detritus of the journey.