Detroit’s Echo Fest sets lineup for 2016.

echofest

One night only!  Detroit’s Echo Fest has announced another great lineup for the psychedelic rock festival.  Returning to the newly renovated Magic Stick, Echo Fest boasts Nik Turner’s Hawkwind, Holy Wave, Wolf Eyes, Rogue Satellites, Heaven’s Gateway Drugs, Nest Egg, festival curators Sisters of Your Sunshine Vapor, and many more cool bands.

It’s a great way to spend the day, so get your tickets now.

Keep your mind open.

The inaugural Middle Waves festival was an inside-the-park home run.

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Fort Wayne’s first “destination” music festival, Middle Waves, was last weekend and a big hit with the crowd.  Future festivals will only be better judging by how well the first one went.

I knew it was going to be at least an interesting festival when I walked into “The Village” area (where all the vendors were) looking for my press pass and saw this.

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Deep fried chicken on a stick.  I didn’t eat there.  For my money, the best deal and food there was from the Vietnummy food truck.  A bahn mi lemongrass chicken slider for only five bucks?  I’m in.  I’m in all day long.

Bahn mi slider in hand and press pass around my neck, I went to check out my first band of the festival – Nashville’s Bully.  I’d only heard a couple tracks, and I liked their mix of heavy rock and post-punk.

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Bully

They killed the Maumee Stage with a fierce performance that won over the crowd within minutes.  Seeing them might be the closest I get to seeing X-Ray Spex in concert.  It was full of wild guitar and drums, Cure-like bass, and frantic vocals.  People were still talking about them the next day.

I finished Friday night like many others – by seeing Best Coast on the main (St. Mary’s) stage.  I’ll admit that I hadn’t heard a lot of their material before this, but there were many in the crowd who sang to everything they played.  I liked the blend of surf-psych with dream pop.  The gay man going nuts next to me when they played “Boyfriend” was one of the highlights of the crowd for me.

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Best Coast

 

Heavy rain hit the area overnight and through most of Saturday morning.  I hoped it wouldn’t keep the crowds away, and I’m sure the Middle Waves staff was watching local weather radar like a hawk the entire day.  One band was playing on a makeshift stage in the covered food vendor area when I got there due to the Maumee Stage being rained out that morning.

Luckily for all, however, the rain cleared around 3:00 and the sun came out bright and happy.  The St. Mary’s stage field had straw scattered all over it to prevent massive mud pits from forming, so it soon smelled like a wet barn out there.  You didn’t notice the smell once Jeff the Brotherhood began playing, because their sonic assault almost knocked us flat.

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Jeff the Brotherhood

They played several tracks from their new album, Zone, which I need to get soon. A lot of it has a great stoner rock vibe that borders a bit on doom metal.  It seems heavier than some of their previous stuff, which is fine by me.

I took a break after their set to drive down to Neat Neat Neat Records (profile coming soon), and they were playing Bully.  The clerk and I raved about their set and I was soon walking out with three used CDs.  I made it back in time to see Ft. Wayne’s hometown psychedelic heroes – Heaven’s Gateway Drugs.  They put on a fine set of their sun-soaked psych on the bank of the Maumee River to a welcoming crowd.  I hadn’t realized until this set how some of their stuff sounds like early New Pornographers (which is a good thing).

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Heaven’s Gateway Drugs

I took an extra long break to get in a full meal (Smoked pulled chicken, cole slaw, and potato chips for eight bucks?  Sold!) before seeing The Flaming Lips.  People had been camped out all day to claim spots for the show.  My favorite ones were these two.

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I thought, “That’s my wife and I in twenty years.”

The Flaming Lips didn’t disappoint.  It was a party from the very first song.

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The confetti came from cannons, but I still don’t know from where the giant balloons emerged.

The crowd was jumping, singing, smacking around balloons, and cheering for lizards in yellow suits and boat captain catfish.

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That’s an inflatable Santa Claus in the background.

Their light / stage show is something you have to see to fully appreciate.  Strings of lights, kaleidoscopic gongs, confetti cannons, and glitter are all thrown into the mix.

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Everyone loved the rainbow. Who wouldn’t?

Lead singer Wayne Coyne kept the crowd cheering and moving, especially when he came out in a giant bubble during the band’s cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.”

img_3644It was a great performance under a full moon, and a good omen for future festivals.  The early afternoon rain was the only thing keeping the first Middle Waves festival from being an out-of-the-park home run, but that’s nothing the promoters and staff could control.

I’m sure the number of national touring acts will grow in the future, as all of the ones there this year praised the festival and the crowds.  A master stroke by the festival is having two free stages.  The Maumee and St. Joseph stages were free for everyone.  The St. Mary’s main stage was the only one with paid admission.  Anyone could’ve come to the festival with no money and still have seen twenty bands (including that jaw-dropping set by Bully, mind you).

Here’s to the future, Middle Waves.  It looks good for you.

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Keep your mind open.

[Many thanks to the Middle Waves staff and crew, and especially to Emma and Maggie for setting up my press credentials for the festival.]

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Dizzybird Records Summer Sampler 2016

DBSS

Dizzybird Records has put out a fine mix album of seven of their artists to get us through the last weeks of summer.

The Harlequins have three good, weird surf-psych tracks – “Fair Shake” opens the sampler on a good note with plenty of loud twisting sounds and trippy vocals, “Hear Me Out” is Mersey Beat garage rock with fuzzed-out vocals, and “Over a Hill” is a Kaiser Chiefs track if the Kaiser Chiefs decided to record a song after they’d just realized they’d accidentally eaten peyote jam on their morning toast.

Heaven’s Gateway Drugs, who seem to be playing everywhere all the time, also give us two tracks – the sharp “Copper Hill” with its angular guitars and echoed vocal harmonies, and “War with June” from their upcoming album Rubber Nun, which should be a fine record judging from this tune.  It oozes from your sound system’s speakers.  Ooooozes.

Coffin Problem reminds me of Bauhaus when they still had a punk edge to them.  Their two contributions are the creepy “Child of the Sun” (dig those relentless guitars!) and the sampler’s closer – “Empty” – is so heavy that it almost becomes sludge / doom rock.

Cool Ghouls‘ offering is “Creature that I Am,” a fun classic-sounding psychedelic track with slight Americana and garage touches.  They sound like a band that might’ve opened for Jefferson Airplane back in the day.

Gringo Star‘s “Long Time Gone” is full of peppy piano, what sounds like a mandolin, and reverbed, crunchy guitar.  It’s an interesting mix that’s hard to describe, but please know I mean that in a good way.

Las Rosas give us an appropriately titled song as far as their name is concerned – “Sensitive Flower.”  The song’s no shrinking violet, however.  It’s a slightly dark track about a somewhat dysfunctional relationship.

Heaters‘ two tracks, “Lowlife” and “Solstice,” are lush and bold.  “Lowlife” has room-filling guitars and a great entry by their drummer into the song.  “Solstice” has great cosmic-psych guitar work throughout it that trips along a surf edge.

It’s a good compilation, and Dizzybird offers free listens on the Soundcloud page for it.  Give it a spin.

Keep your mind open.

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Live: Heaven’s Gateway Drugs, Pleasures, Sisters of Your Sunshine Vapor, & Slug Love – August 14, 2016 – Ft. Wayne, IN

There was a nice psychedelic rock show at Fort Wayne’s Brass Rail last week.  First up was Slug Love – a local act who played a good set of punk-psych.  They have some stuff on Soundcloud right now and hope to have more material out soon.  I look forward to it.

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Slug Love

Detroit’s Sisters of Your Sunshine Vapor were up next and they played only one previously released song (“Desert Brain”).  Everything else was entirely new material, and all of it sounded great.  The new material has a bit of a cosmic vibe.  Guitarist and singer Sean Morrow mentioned Hawkwind to me when discussing the new stuff, so I’m hoping their upcoming album will be a spacey trip.

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Sisters of Your Sunshine Vapor

Pleasures came all the way from Florida to play their wild electro-psych full of distorted robot vocals, throbbing synths, and even a weird collection of film clips projected on their kick drum head (a genius idea, by the way).

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Pleasures

Ft. Wayne’s Heaven’s Gateway Drugs closed the night with a lot of material I hadn’t heard before either.  I’d learned earlier from SOYSV that this was a challenge they’d made to HGD to play new material (The two bands are all pals, by the way.).  HGD played their usual sharp psych layered with almost meditative beats.

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Heaven’s Gateway Drugs

It was a fun show for a cheap price.  Don’t miss the next one.

Keep your mind open.

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