Project Pabst in Portland, Oregon, has a long and nuanced history that most music festivals don’t share. Launched as a Fall festival in 2014, Pabst Brewing Company hoped for it to be a “love letter to Portland”. In 2015, the time of year was moved to July and has remained a Summer festival ever since. In 2016, they changed locations from Zidell Yards, just a short jaunt down the road from their current home at Tom McCall Waterfront Park. Throughout the years, they have experimented with putting on evening shows at different clubs and bars around town and have reinvented themselves after a chosen hiatus and some forced years off. In 2017, they had their last show until an attempted comeback in 2020 that was halted by COVID, only to return last year finally.
Pabst Fest has an interesting format that I’ve never quite run into at a festival before. With two stages laid out on either end of the 10-acre waterfront park, there is no overlap in music whatsoever, and even if both stages were going at the same time, if you were in the first 200 rows of one of the bands playing, there would be no bleed-through from the stage behind you. If you want to catch every note of every band playing and don’t care how far back you are in the audience, you could easily navigate, making it from one stage to the next while maintaining the music within earshot. If you want to get close to your favorite acts, however, they might be back-to-back, and you’ll have to choose whether you want to have Mark Mothersbaugh hear you yell that you love him or be swamped by Iggy Pop. Still, this is a massive improvement from going to a festival and finding out that your two favorite bands are playing at the same time.
Now, with all of that being said, I did my best to go in with an open heart and an open mind, and unfortunately, experienced some genre fatigue. If you look at the past lineups of Pabst Fest, it wasn’t uncommon to have hip-hop and rap acts performing at least once or twice per day. Ice Cube headlined a day in 2016, Lizzo played in 2017, and just last year, T-Pain and Denzel Curry were both on the bill. This year was a lot more alt-rock oriented, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, there were more than a few acts that I was unable to sync up with as a listener. The price of having two stages and not three is that inevitably, not everyone is going to be able to appreciate the festival’s curated day of musicians without a third option. Sometimes, after seeing an incredible band I had never heard of before and heading over to the next stage, I’d listen to another band that seemed a little similar in tone but without the “Je ne sais quoi” of the previous act. As a result, this left me a little frustrated and unable to get into certain bands on the bill. Rather than “yuck” any of your “yums” of the acts on this bill, I’m not going to tell you what I thought of every act. Anyone can grab a soapbox and complain on the internet about a piece of art that didn’t speak to them or that they didn’t understand & I am not here to do that. If I skip a band that you’re interested in, I’m not going to preach to you about why they’re not my thing. I’m glad you enjoy that artist, and I’m happy that that artist is there for you. If we all liked the same things, we’d all be living in a different hellscape than the current one we’re in, and we’d all be listening to John Tesh and eating at McDonald’s. I’m choosing to tell you about the bands that I got into and report on the ones that blew me away.
The first band of the festival was Nasalrod. Based out of Portland, this quartet is high energy and super tight. Ripping through incredibly complicated songs steeped in texture and technique. Songs rang out with slap bass and metal guitars woven over intense polyrhythm drum beats, at times they sounded like the best parts of early Mr Bungle. Their harmonies were spot on, their stage presence was delightful, with band members’ faces beaming as frontman “Chairman” ran all over the stage, doling out giant flying jump kicks to the sparse but attentive first through the gate festival attendees. I will never know how people working on a festival lineup can hear a band this deserving of attention and bury them at the top of day one, but inevitably, the local bands (no matter how wonderful or jaw-dropping) usually end up in the first of the daytime slots.
Portland via Florida band Gouge Away features intense, belted female vocals from Christine Michelle over a hardcore punk assault from her atypical but grounded punk outfit she fronts. In between songs, she would sometimes say “Thank you!” in a charming, almost Dot Warner-type way, cartoonish in its cuteness. “You must be someone who likes to have fun. We’re Gouge Away. We also like to have fun.“ Dark, heavy, dissonant 90s-infused psychedelic leaning screamo. Amazing stage presence from Michelle, the microphone in her hand at times an extension of her body. Intense blasts of energy, Metric-like in its catchiness, with dark ambient interludes triggered by the drummer between songs, while guitar and bass are tuned up for the next number. The guitar player was not playing so much riff rock as psychedelic passages over a bass player and a drummer who were creating an assault of different rhythms. Psychedelic mellow passages, noise, rock samples, and no guitar solos to speak of. All of the interesting guitar parts were woven into the songs—a very cool act.
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NYC’s Gustaf is, without a doubt, my favorite band of the entire weekend. I’ve never seen stage energy like this before. Lead singer Lydia slunk across the stage, like a woman possessed, sometimes hitting herself in the face while she danced on her heels and careened from one end to the other. They have kind of a B-52‘s vibe only via the funnier, dancing parts of Sweet Charity and Cabaret. There’s almost something Bob Fosse-like about them. Like they’re performance art-based approach, as they are musically inclined. I got to talk to Lydia before the weekend was over for a brief moment, and I asked her how long they had been together. She told me that they got a record deal in 2018, just before the pandemic happened, and that they stayed together because “we just love to play music.” The music reminded me of a blend between the B-52s’ Mesopotamia album and the Brian Eno and David Byrne album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Incredibly danceable, grooves, drummer Melissa Lucciola, and bass player Tine Hill as a rhythm section, one of the coolest duos I’ve seen in a long time, smiling from ear to ear at one another and grooving all over the stage. Guitarist Vram Kherlopian, the lone male member of the band, was stoic and straight-faced in his corner of the stage. Tarra Thiessen on persuasion and backing vocals, filling gaps with “Pig Percussion” pitch-shifted Ween-like vocals and responses to Lydia’s calls. They seemed goofy during certain moments and deadly serious at others. Sometimes the songs seemed like the choruses were mantras. The words would be repeated a few times. Then new lyrics would come in, giving the chorus some sort of a new context when they came back in and meant something different based on the new information presented in the second verse. The chorus repeated a little bit more information via new lyrics, and then the mantra repeated it again, twisting and turning, changing the meaning to what you thought the song was about in the first place. This was the most fun I’ve had seeing a band in a really long time. Lydia’s presence is unbelievable. She used her sunglasses as a prop, pulling them on and off again over and over throughout the set to accentuate the things that she was singing about. From the first to the last song, she got too excited and they went flying off her head, unfazed, she went on with the rest of the performance. I will see Gustaf every single time they come to town from now on. I had never heard of them before I saw their name on the bill, and they made a lifelong fan out of me. This is why I go to music festivals.no images were found
The Chats from The Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia, are a punchy and high-energy, no-frills, meat-and-potatoes punk band. These dudes do not fuck around. This was the first set of the weekend in which I noticed any technical difficulties that were audible to the audience. For the first couple of songs, you could barely hear the bass guitar, which was frustrating to hear, but it was corrected very quickly by the more than competent audio staff at the festival. My first impression was “what a relief that a band making rock music can still do something stripped down and not seem like they’re about the clothes or the tattoos or just trying to look cool on stage.” They’re a tight band with incredible punk songs, good energy, and a brilliant sense of humor. Lead singer and bassist Eamon Sandwith introduced practically every song of the set in between the songs that didn’t seamlessly segue into one another. Within the first few songs, crowd surfing was starting to take place, and stage crashers made their way onto the stage. At one point, a woman jumped on stage dancing, and Eamon responded to her presence by saying “get off the stage, you fucking hippie!’, much to the delight of the audience. The Chats waste little time on stage and were transitioning between songs and a break at that speed, segueing while shifting energies and vibes. That goes a long way in a sea of punk bands that often suffer from their songs all sounding exactly the same. At times, they sounded a little bit like AC/DC, and we’re leaning into the more hard rock elements of their songs, and other times, they sounded like they were emulating slow Sex Pistol songs. While all of this was transpiring, they never sounded derivative of something else, which is saying something considering just how many bands this weekend felt derivative of something else. I was obsessed with their song Smoko last year, and it wasn’t even one of the top 10 most interesting parts of the set. The Chats are three-chord rock at its best. They are at times sloppy, always full of energy, and a sterling example of why sometimes a perfectly played song can be boring, and a song played with reckless abandon can make you feel a range of emotions in two minutes. The audience responded to this apparent energy and had a pit going for most of their set. Don’t miss The Chats the next time they come to a town near you.no images were found
Devo started their set with a video presentation that hyped up the audience so by the time the band came out on stage, all wearing jumpsuits with “reverse evolution” printed on the back, they had all of us thoroughly hyped up. They’re still incredibly high energy. Current touring nostalgic acts could take a page from Mark Mothersbaugh’s awesome stage presence and ability to hit all of the notes on the old records. Devo or masters at what they do. The couch of he guitars, the stiff rigidity of the drums, and the punchiness of the bass and the swirling synths pulsating in stereo through the PA, are bold, intense, and vibrant.The video components to the set seemed unnecessary, but we were flexible and allowed for the costume changes the band made. Devo historically has always been an incredibly visual band, and in this era where every stage has a giant screen, that can easily be taken for granted.
When they left the stage for the second video component of the show and returned wearing the iconic red Devo hats and performed “Girl U Want”, I closed my eyes and as I heard Mark’s voice, I was transported to being six years old and hearing it for my first time. I’m not ashamed to admit that I got a little choked up experiencing hearing Devo live for the first time.
A pitch-perfect rendition of “Whip It” was preceded by an introduction, “Hey, beautiful mutants of the Northwest! In these trying times, now more than ever, it’s important for you to whip it.” After the third video package, they came back to the stage in their iconic yellow jumpsuits, performing covers of The Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” and Johnny Rivers’ “Secret Agent Man” complete with Henry Mancini’s “Theme from Peter Gunn” interpolated within the guitar solo. Raucous renditions of their own “Uncontrollable Urge” and “Mongoloid” followed. At this point, I had to leave to make sure that I could get close enough to Iggy Pop, starting soon on the main stage. This was the most challenging part of the entire weekend. Seeing Devo for my first time felt like a borderline religious experience, and I had to step out early to make sure that I was as close as I could get to the main event of night one. When I looked at the set list later that night to see what I missed, I was incredibly relieved that they didn’t play “Gut Feeling”. I don’t know if I could’ve taken finding out that I missed them playing that particular song.
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I purposefully didn’t listen to any Iggy Pop after I found out that I would be seeing him. I figured there would be a couple of moments during the set where he’d play a song that maybe I wouldn’t recognize that was from the darker recesses of his catalog that I’m not super familiar with. I was wrong. I recognized every song, and it was the only set of the weekend where I could write out a full setlist without any help. Iggy’s band came out on stage without him and began to play, two guitars, bass, drums, a keyboard player with a full Hammond B-3 organ setup, and two horn players who also doubled as backing vocals from time to time during the set. Wasting no time, they launched into “Mr Nobody” and Iggy took the stage clad in an iconic leather vest, which was removed and tossed into the audience before the first number was through.Iggy’s career is well over 50 years long now, and his show doesn’t come across as a best of. Whether he’s tearing through “Raw Power” or “Gimme Danger,” he’s a consummate showman and delightfully charming entertainer. Iggy mused between songs “I’m lost!!! Can I get a ride?”, just before his band launched into an extended version of “Passenger”, a song off of his 1977 David Bowie produced album Lust For Life, complete with large breaks for the audience to sing along to the “la-la-la”s of the chorus. This was Iggy’s second time playing Pabst’s Fest, his first being back in 2017, and he played an incredibly different set list this go around. During “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” he came down off the stage. He ran through the barriers that extended through the middle of the audience to the sound board, shaking hands and giving high-fives to people lucky enough to be on the rail, as he encouraged them to tell him that they wanted to be his dog by sticking the microphone in their faces.
After returning to the stage, during the Stooges song “Loose,” he came down the stairs off the stage yet again this time mid chorus he fell over, staff members rushed to his aid, helped him up, and without missing a beat, he kept singing the chorus to “Loose” as he climbed back up on stage, gained his composure and finished out the song. The end of the set that followed was performed by a man who you would never guess was 78 years old and had just fallen over.
At the very end of the set, after performing “Fun Time,” much to the audience’s delight, Iggy left the stage, only to be wheeled back on an anvil case being steered by one of his roadies. “This was supposed to be the end of the show that we had planned for you.” He said, out of breath after just finishing their usual closer. “ But then something else happened. This one is dedicated to Superman.” The band then launched into Iggy’s live debut of the Swedish alt-rock band Teddybear’s song “Punkrocker”: a song Iggy guested on in 2006, but which was just prominently featured in the new Superman movie, which had only come out a couple of weeks before.
Full of energy and emotion with great control over his instrument, belting and growling, crooning and snarling through an unbelievable set. He is still a phenomenal performer. His band missed no beats, and there wasn’t a teleprompter in sight. Iggy Pop is a master class on how to put on a rock show in your old age. 10/10. I’ll be thinking about this set until the end of my days.
Brooklyn, New York’s Say She She named their band as a reference to Nile Rodgers’ Chic, and since forming in 2019, have garnered his blessing in their carrying on of his particular brand of funk and disco pop. But they are far more than just a pop funk disco band. As soon as they began playing, the funky way wah guitar, clarinet, and funk drumming and bass figures with three-part female harmony rang out from the stage, letting everyone in earshot know that this was going to be different from anything that had been played the day before. Steeped in the language of 70s funk and disco, each vocalist took turns taking on lead vocal duties while sharing the heavy lifting of backing vocals as well. Belting songs while sounding like the best Donna Summer and Mini Ripperton songs you didn’t know existed because they’re not covers, they’re Say She She originals that you are hearing for the first time. They are writing songs that sound like they want to be sampled by 1990s Death Row Records artists. At times, the groove sounded like something from a Luther Vandross single, or the energy from the guitar and keys would be in place on the 1970s For You era Prince.
Before their set was over, Say She She played a couple of new songs from their upcoming album, due out in October. There aren’t a lot of bands playing festivals that decide to get a jump on their new unreleased material and play it for fresh ears, and it’s applaudable. The three front women were performing different choreographies and dancing together during guitar solos that sounded like equal parts Carlos Santana and Eddie Hazel. They ended their set with an outstanding and interesting original rearrangement of the Talking Heads song “Slippery People”. Tina Weymouth would’ve been proud to have this band playing with her and Chris Frantz in the Tom Tom Club. A little bit of musical diversity goes a long way, and having a band play disco-centric music after a full day of almost nonstop punkish and alt-rock music was a giant breath of fresh air and a great way to start day two.
I was told by many friends to see Buffalo Grove, Illinois’ Cap’n Jazz. I didn’t know what to expect, and I’m still not exactly sure if I saw a real band. Lead singer Tim Kinsella sings hard. He’s aggressive in his delivery until suddenly he’s not. At one point, he picked up a French horn and treated it like a prop for several minutes before playing it. It didn’t seem totally out of place, yet it was also slightly comical. Like he was holding it like it was a threat that would soon come to pass, or like a hostage. The band plays complicated music that would be easy to call math rock, but it’s a lot more interesting than most math rock. At one point, I felt like they sounded like what would happen if the Mighty Mighty Bosstones decided to become a Dillinger Escape Plan cover band. Kinsella seemed to be channeling stream-of-consciousness vocal improvisations. Late in their set, he picked up a page of lyrics, and while the band played a groove that was abstract in its repetition, he recited a full page poem while the bass player took an extended solo. Maybe the ‘Cap’ in Cap’n Jazz has to do with Captain Beefheart. If 1980s King Crimson, without any gain on their instruments, decided to play a set at a festival with Captain Beefheart on vocals, I imagine it would be this band. Maybe this was a fever dream. I felt sick all day Sunday, and as a result, some of my takeaways are slightly more left of center than they usually are.
Multiple people on Sunday thanked Doug Martsch for his contribution to music and for inspiring them to make their music. I’m not exactly qualified to speak about Boise, Idaho’s Built to Spill. I’m not as wildly familiar with them as many people in my spare time, and my understanding is that their catalogue and history are so dense and complicated that if I want to speak about them with any real, educated terminology, I might have to listen to them all day, every day, for several months. My impressions as a novice are that Built to Spill is an incredibly interesting band with gorgeous songs and a knack for improvisation. The bass player, Melissa Radford, and drummer, Teresa Esguerra, both grew up listening to BTS, and you can tell by the looks on their faces on stage that they are completely and totally over the moon about getting to play with band architect Martsch. They provided more than ample room for the guitar to stretch out without the sound becoming too thin. Something that anyone who has ever played in a trio before understands is just how incredibly difficult it is that when a guitar player stops playing rhythm guitar and starts taking a solo, the bass and the drums need to fill out the rest of the sound so it doesn’t become tinny and thin. They are an incredible power trio, and I was in awe watching them perform. The stretching out with only three band members is a sort of high-wire act that requires everyone to be on board to be able to create a tapestry that is worth listening to, and BTS has a real grasp on how to do that.
I understand why Ween and Dinosaur Jr fans alike love them. Many of the vocals are very Neil Young-like, and Doug’s solos at times also resemble Neil’s in a very ephemeral sort of way. I thought to myself, if Billy Corgan had learned to improvise, this could’ve been him. Doug’s right hand knows how to articulate chords that open up their sound and fill space in a way that most singers who sling a guitar don’t. A lot of the bands that I saw during the course of the weekend seemed like they were playing sets for an audience that maybe hadn’t seen them before, and Built to Spill seemed like they were swinging for the fences and playing an interesting and challenging set for themselves because they trust the audience to understand. When I see bands play shows like this, I come away with nothing short of complete and total admiration.
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It’s refreshing that Philadelphia’s Japanese Breakfast is as big as they are. The noise rock slowness of the opening song “Orlando in Love” is a giant paintbrush of sound, almost shoegaze, but more than that. Spiritual Jazz albums often begin with a salutation song, like a flower opening, greeting you with beauty and warmth so you feel welcome to experience what’s to come. That’s how frontwoman and band leader Michelle Zauner made me feel. With an electric guitar slung over her shoulder, she shred and bombarded the early evening crowd with whammy bar feedback that could’ve been confused with a 1982 Frank Zappa guitar workout. I instantly felt on board and excited to see what would happen next.Michelle’s vocals are impeccable, her lyrics gorgeous and refined. The band consists of drums, bass, guitar, and two keyboardists and multi-instrumentalists who double on percussion, sax, and violin, respectively, which makes for arrangements and colors that everyday touring acts just don’t have. There’s a sophistication to Japanese Breakfast’s sound that I didn’t realize I had been craving all weekend. Zauner writes pop music but in a way that pop musicians don’t anymore. Modern songwriters rarely allow long instrumental passages like she does. Her songs are long and complicated progressions like Paul Simon’s were in the 70’s.
These are gorgeous, almost ethereal songs, with a great balance of sounds. Sometimes meditative and serene, and others danceable and bombastic, with Michelle bounding around the stage dancing joyfully to her joyous songs. With comical and fun intros to songs, “this song is about doing mushrooms in the woods,” or preceding a song she contributed to the soundtrack from this Summer’s A24 movie The Materialists, “…something I know, know something about, falling in love with someone who has no money.” Japanese Breakfast is wonderful all around, and a band that gives you an experience. It’s well-shaped with peaks and valleys in all of the right places.
My takeaway from seeing a Japanese breakfast is that I want to hear everything that Michelle Zauner has ever done. I want to listen to her entire career from now on, and I’m going to do my very best to go see her when she comes to Seattle in October. I’m completely and totally on board. This is one of the most interesting things that I’ve seen in a really, really long time, and I hope to see her every chance that I’ve got for the rest of her career. I don’t exactly know how to explain what it was about her. Her set list construction, or the way that she played, but in context to the rest of the music that happened throughout the entire festival, Japanese Breakfast had peaks and valleys in a way that other sets didn’t spell to me. Except for Gustaf, the other musicians didn’t contain the range of emotions that Japanese Breakfast did. Elements of joy, freedom, and pure self-expression, both planned and improvisational, that made me happy about the sheer existence of us being lucky enough to exist in a universe with music. I would be hard pressed to think of many musicians who have ever done for me before. I had heard Japanese Breakfast before, but was never particularly bowled over, but at Pabst Fest, something different happened. This is why I go to music festivals with open ears. Not every band is going to grab you the way a new favorite band is going to grab you. There are bands out there where you need to do serious work to learn to be able to appreciate them, but the bands that usually end up meaning the most to you are often the ones who instantly make you feel welcome, seen, comfortable, heard, and excited to find out what happens next.
Hearing this set of music felt like finding a glass of water in the desert. I am in awe of watching Michelle Zauner’s Japanese Breakfast play and hope to see much, much more.
