Photo: Flanigan/FilmMagic
After 36 hours of wet, discouraging weather, Bumbershoot saw its biggest crowds on Monday for final-day headliners Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand and Black Eyed Peas. Props to the young music fans of the Pacific Northwest: without enthusiastic teens and 20-somethings braving the dreary conditions, this year’s festival would’ve been a literal washout.
Bumbershoot in photos: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Modest Mouse and more.
Semi-locals Modest Mouse — they’re from Issaquah, a former mining town 20 minutes east of Seattle — characterized the indigenous breed of suburban alienation during a 75-minute, festival-closing set at Memorial Stadium. Six musicians rotated through a Guitar Center’s-worth of instruments, whittling their wall of noise into layers of little melodies and familiar that still came off really weird. Isaac Brock barked through the band’s catalog, from set-opening “Gravity Rides Everything” and “Education” to a sprawling “King Rat,” with Brock on banjo, and “Lives/Your Life,” a medley-crescendo turned hoedown with upright bass and fiddle.
Leading into “Blue Sedan,” Brock told the crowd he was performing with what he believed was a cracked rib. “Fuckin’ sucks, but I did it to myself,” he said without further explanation. Later in the set, “Float On” was a humongous, mosh-pit-swelling sing-along — humongous enough to keep Modest Mouse onstage til the cusp of 11 p.m. curfew, encoring with old fave “Paper Thin Walls” and “Bury Me With It” from 2004’s Good News for People Who Love Bad News.
Just prior on the same stage, Franz Ferdinand played a fitting prelude. The foursome from Glasgow, Scotland, stayed rakishly casual under even the most frenzied circu...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily