Fujirockers: The official Fuji Rock Festival blog

WIDESPREAD PANIC LIVE @ SXSW

We here at Fujirock.com are big supporters of Smashing Mag. The bilingual music website is Japan’s premier concert coverage publication. Smashing Mag’s dedicated staff post live reports of a lot of really cool shows in Japan. They travel abroad for gigs and high profile international festivals, too.

For the last several years, a team of Smashing Mag writers and photographers has flown to Austin, Texas to cover the South by Southwest (SXSW) Music and Media Conference. This year marked the 25th anniversary of the massive event. Around 2,000 acts from 61 countries played from March 16 – 20. With that many performers, it comes as no surprise that a number of Fuji Rock bands appeared.

Smashing Mag’s got great photo reports of the following FRF ‘11 artists from SXSW:

Widespread Panic — playing 7/29 @ Field of Heaven — SXSW photos here

Ron Sexsmith — playing 7/29 @ Field of Heaven — SXSW photos here

Oh Sunshine — playing 7/31 @ Red Marquee — SXSW photos here

Apollo 18 — playing 7/31 @ Red Marqueee — SXSW photos here

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Best voice: Moriarty's Rosemary

Best shows
Ozomatli
John Fogerty
Rustic Pans

Best voice
Moriarty

Worst voice
Ian Brown

Best new thing
The hammocks

Worst new thing
Getting eaten by vampire forest beasties, probably while sleeping in the hammocks

Biggest disappointment
Hearing that Matt & Kim canceled the Naeba Shokudo show because they didn’t like the look of the stage.

Best food
The red tomato curry

Best drink
Atsukan sake at the tokoro tengoku

Worst drink
Hot rum coffee at the tokoro tengoku

Weirdest celebrity sighting
James Murphy at 5am, shirtless, bragging about how fat he is

Lessons learned
Wellies. Not sandals.
And insect repellent.

So Ozomatli played a storming show at the Field of Heaven, and had to do it all again 9 hours later in the much smaller Crystal Palace spiegeltent. Every year the Palace seems to have one act that tears the place to pieces, and it wasn’t hard to guess that Ozomatli would be the one this year. So the two questions were:

* Could they top their first show?
* Could they top Rafven and Gogol Bordello’s madness of previous years

The quick answers: yes, and maybe.

They were more playful than earlier in the afternoon. At one point, Ulises makes a gesture with his finger and thumb to his lips. He then gets a sax solo, so the gesture must have been the reed to his mouth. Then the band join in and it’s “Pass The Duchie”. Probably wasn’t a reed gesture then. In quick succession, “Pass the Duchie” becomes “Top of the World”, “Pass the Duchie” again, “Strawberry Fields” and back to Musical Youth, all with a sound halfway between reggae and traditional Ozomatli.

From the new album, there was “45″, “Elysian Persuasion” and “Malagasy Shock”. The latter is clearly the one that’s set to become an Ozo live favourite.

What’s most amazing about this show is that they steered clear of most of the giant hits and live signatures, but had the crowd revved up as much as ever. With this band it’s not about which songs they play – they know exactly how to whip up an audience and they’ve got 5 strong album’s worth of music to mine.

When the music stopped, we waited for the encore, but it never came. This ain’t Woodstock. Ozo didn’t even get to take their instruments into the crowd, and I suspect it wasn’t their choice.

Raul, Wil-Dog, Jiro and Ulises

The multi-culti, musical hybrid L.A. collective Ozomatli gets lots of props in this blog and from FRF in general. This was their fourth time at the festival, and the feeling is mutual.

“Top festivals in the world?” pondered percussionist Jiro Yamaguchi. “Fuji Rock, Glastonbury–Glastonbury because it’s an actual city.”

“This is better, though,” said bassist Wil-Dog Abers from behind a pair of enormous shades and underneath a white ball cap.

“Yeah, it’s cleaner,” said Jiro. “But it’s the people, too.”

Yamaguchi, Abers were sitting in the back of the Prince Hotel with sax player Ulises Bella and guitarist Raul Pacheco, talking about the band’s new album, Fire Away, which is the first they’ve released since becoming ambassadors for a cultural outreach program sponsored by the U.S. State Dept., and the experience of playing to people in far-flung areas of the world had a profound effect on it. Continue Reading…

There are some evil little beasties at this festival that suck blood from you and leave you with a grapefruit-sized swelling. The medics translated the name as “gnat”, but these things are no gnats. They’re some kind of super-strength vampire flies. And when they coordinate an attack by biting you all around the ankle, it also cripples you. I had to hobble to see Ozomatli, limping like I was wounded in some war. I wondered if I’d be able to stand through the whole set.

It took 3 or 4 seconds of the show before I was jumping around. They opened with “Ya Viene”, and played it even more furiously than usual. The crowd was bouncing and so was I. Anything less would have been letting the vampire flies win.

The first sign of the new album was “Malagassay Shock”, another big party tune to get the crowd romping.

On a tangent, I’ve heard Muse described as the best live band in the world. I saw them two days ago and it was just some blokes on a stage with lasers. Ozomatli are the best live band in the world. They take up the whole stage, they throw instruments at each other whether or not they need to. They don’t let the set go for two songs before pulling out something to get you jumping to. And they have crowd interaction that nobody comes close to.

The only foot Ozomatli ever put wrong was to get Jack Johnson singing a song about how being rich doesn’t necessarily make you an arsehole. J-Lo already wrote a song about that, and we didn’t believe her either. Jack’s not here today, but we still get the tune, with Raul and Asdrubal on vocals. At least it’s more uptempo here.

Raul, the shaven-headed guitarist-singer, then decides to rock out, going all metal on us as the rest of the band make devil-horn fingers. There’s a time and a place for rock guitar solos, and this seems like both. It fits the moment and the crowd loves it.

Next up, “Nada For Free”, from the new album. It’s a great party tune, and likely to be repeated tonight at the Crystal Palace. It also sounds like it was written for Biz Markie, with bouncy rap about a girl kicking you in the nuts. We get a stripped-down, heavier take on “Saturday Night”. Rapper Justin starts surfing the crowd as a taster for what’s to come. Ozomatli, as always, end the set by taking their instruments into the crowd and jamming. How are they going to top that tonight?

Ozomatli

I loved Phil’s idea to watch the band rated lowest on Pitchfork. It reminded me of my very first editor and the first time he asked me to write a movie review. It went roughly like this:

Him: (Handing me a videotape in a plan white case): “Can you knock out a review of this tonight?”

Me: “Sorry, I’ve got no time to watch it tonight.”

Him: “I asked you to review it, not watch it.”

Me: “I don’t even know what it’s about.”

Him: “It says on the box, it’s called ‘Lionheart’. It’s either about Richard the Lionheart or some brave geezer. Just say the acting was wooden, the plot predictable and make a pun about bravery. And give it one star. People like reviews that slag something off.”

So I did. And that piece of advice stuck with me, along with his lessons about how to doctor pictures to match what you wrote or believe. And in the spirit of enjoying the bad reviews, here are the acts I’m excited about, complete with their best (worst) review on Amazon: Continue Reading…

Aye Carumba! Is it hot in here?

The 2010 Fujirock schedule has its share of francophone acts, but anyone who’s a fest regular knows that the guys who run Fujirock have a healthy hard-on for all things Latin (and they’re not the only ones in Tokyo). Every year, there are bands from Italy, Spain or South America to spice things up on the side stages. There was cumbia troupe, Very Be Careful playing out of the back of a slow-moving pickup, and the tropical sounds of Ska Cubano splashing off the Avalon stage. And of course no one can forget the scorching sets by Manu Chao from years past.

A quick look through this year’s lineup proves that the Latin love affair continues.

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Ozomatli first played Fuji Rock in 2000, before they were that band from the iPod ad. Back then we had this to say:

“… on Friday night over at the Field of Heaven, even in the rain everyone was dancing. The hundred or so of us gathered that night ended up abandoning our rain coats to the wind. It was as if the sky was dancing, too, and the rain was simply the heavens perspiring to cool down – and us too, in the process.”

Or in a nutshell, it was pissing down, but we didn’t care. Ozomatli’s cumbia-hip-hop-salsa-some-other-genre-names-jazz-rock is perfect festival fodder and will have the kids dancing with the grown ups.

Four years after that first Fuji show, the band sold its soul to Steve Jobs and shifted a bazillion downloads of their tune “Saturday Night.”

Other iPod ad alumni include Coldplay, the Black Eyed Peas, Paul McCartney and U2. Just saying.

Still, not only did it give Ozomatli the publicity they deserved, but it also lead to a show at the Apple Store in Ginza which ended with them parading down Chuo Dori, still playing. The show-that-ends-offstage is one of the band’s trademarks, but it works better than usual when they’re prancing down Ginza’s main drag, scaring the big brand dollies.

I first found Ozomatli in a rack in Shibuya. It was their first album and I bought a vinyl copy because I saw that (back then) Cut Chemist of Jurassic 5 was a member. It’s one of only two albums that I was hooked on from the first play and never, ever tired of. The other one is the Greatest Hits of Belinda Carlisle. No it’s not really. It’s Coldplay’s “Parachutes.” No, it’s not that either.

Anyway, this makes Ozomatli the only band I’ve ever been ahead of the curve on, and it’s why they’re top of my list of bands to see this year at Fuji Rock.

Ozomatli, a great SoCal-based cumbia party band in the FRF2010 lineup, has a bunch of new remixes available via the website of the Los Angeles radio station KCRW. Check em out here.

-Dave

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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