Fujirockers: The official Fuji Rock Festival blog

I discovered New Zealand’s The Naked And Famous when Dave played them for me in his car in Taipei. I had been thinking about MGMTs “Time To Pretend”. Great song. One of the best ever. Listened to it every day on the way home from work last week. The problem I ran into is, once you’ve set yourself up to be in the mood to listen to that song, where do you go from there? Certainly not to more MGMT. I mean, “Kids” is also great, but once you take that one-two punch, MGMT steps out of the ring. Nothing else on that album, Oracular Spectacular, even comes close. And nothing on the follow-up, Congratulations, can or should be listened to under any circumstance ever. It’s one of the few albums I’ve actively deleted from my collection, and I have like terabytes of space for this stuff. (Here’s me trying to be kind to it in my pre-fest write-up last year. Gah.)

Then I head The Naked And Famous and discovered the solution to my problem. And people on the Internet seemed to agree: if you like those two MGMT songs, you might also like The Naked And Famous. People on the Internet can be right sometimes.

They have two hits, “Young Blood” and “Punching In A Dream”, but they are not Continue Reading…

Thom Yorke

What I do like, of course, is Thom Yorke, a genius whom I had never seen live, and Flea, also quite great, so I don’t fault myself for making the mistake of requesting to cover this set. But still, The Eraser? This was a dull, dull record. Not a bad record, mind you, just a niche record, a bedroom record, to be greatly beloved by a few, and certainly not meant for the Green Stage on any night of the weekend.

So, you know where I’m coming from here, and consider yourself warned that you might prefer reading Clay’s excellent preview if you liked the show (or if you just like bagging on Gene Simmons). (And you are not a good human being if you don’t like bagging on Gene Simmons.)

My first time to see him live, it is clear that Yorke must have long since been welcomed by Dylan and Springsteen into the pantheon of unlikely superstars. Looking like a hobo John McEnroe (unshaven, unkempt, headband, etc.), his movements are not graceful, but hunched and greasy, almost golem-like. He struts about a bit like a slutty 1970’s secretary who knows she is too smart for the glass ceiling (a.k.a., Rod Stewart). Except, again, he looks like a hobo John McEnroe golem, which makes it a little creepy. Good thing talent still counts for something in this world. And shame on you all for thinking about such low matters.
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So, to recap: MGMT made an album that everybody loved, even the president of France. “Kids” and “Time to Pretend” were the two monster tunes, but the rest was pretty likeable.

Then they made Congratulations, a follow-up that some thought was made deliberately to piss everyone off. I loved it, but then I’ve always loved Love’s “Forever Changes”, which was exactly the same album. To add insult to injury, MGMT have been playing shows recently without playing “Kids”, confirming that they’re just being spiteful.
So any MGMT gig review has to be about how they blend “Oracular Spectacular” and “Forever Changes” into a single show, and whether or not they’re still being bastards and refusing to play the songs we all want to hear.

So, in a nutshell, they played “Time to Pretend”, they played Kids, and they played a lot of their second album and it all blended perfectly well into a psychedelicy spectacular that thrilled the packed White Stage. It seems like I’m not the only one that likes their second album.

Hits ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Other bits ★ ★ ★ ★
Saturday nightness ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

MGMT

In “Kids” and “Time To Pretend” (2008)  MGMT may have had two of the best indie rock dance singles since the genre coalesced out of the collective consciousness of the yungins (thank God they didn’t invent a music style I hated, I might start feeling old), but since then they seem to be more bent on confounding expectations than endlessly repeated attempts at creating celebratory fellow-feeling. Actively eschewing the fame the club singles have brought them, their new album, Congratulations (2010), has been, shall we say, polarizing. Continue Reading…

This should have been posted a bit sooner, but better late …

Anyhoo, the new additions to the fest along with links to check ‘em out are after the jump!

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