Bonnaroo’s normal Thursday appetizer was a bit light this year. Set times clocked in at 45 minutes, and the music started at dinnertime, leaving only about 8 hours for the festival’s various tents to get their collective roofs blown off. Some of the attendees spent longer than that waiting in line to enter the venue. While the lineup as a whole lacks some of the punch of years past, and the effects of the Live Nation acquisition are possibly already being felt (no Sonic Village? More sponsored stuff?), Bonnaroo is still the most music-focused of the nation’s large festivals. With that in mind, and a long, hot weekend ahead, it’s probably best that everyone start slowly. With the exception of Gramatik’s intense set to end the evening, the day’s music definitely lent itself to acclimation.
The highlight of the first day’s schedule was the intriguing curation of The Other Tent lineup, which featured some of the fastest rising acts on the lineup. 45-minutes set times don’t matter much when the bands only have about that much material in their arsenal to begin with. Sydney, Australia’s DMA’S traffic in a cautiously noisy sort of jangle-pop that won’t make you forget The Shins any time soon. You’ve heard their sound a million times – impassioned vocals, simple song structures, and plenty of strummy, strummy guitar combine to make a standard style of rock that brings too many other bands to mind. LA-based everygirl singer and viral heroine Ryn Weaver also brought little new to the table, and her formulaic modern pop songs didn’t hold up in the Tennessee heat. Despite an excited crowd, her set lost momentum after a few tunes and revealed the lack of depth in her catalog. If she’s going to be the next big female pop star, as many have posited, she’s going to need all the help she can get from her famous friends.
The back-to-back British bands that followed fared far better. Glass Animals’ atmospheric, genre-bending set was rife with hooks bobbing up through mellow yet insistent instrumental murk. Songs ranged from sultry (“Black Mambo”, “Gooey”) to hazily rhythmic (“Pools”, “Walla Walla”) and even downright strange (their cover of Kanye West’s “Love Lockdown”). The track everyone knows – the wryly self-aware “Gooey” – garnered a large reaction from the considerable and female-centric crowd. Their chilled-out songs took on satisfying new life in the live setting and made for one of the highlights of the day. Shortly after, psych-rockers Temples brought things to a more considerable boil, their nostalgia-drenched paeans meshing perfectly with the lysergic buzz of the brightly lit farm. The mighty midtempo mind-crush of “A Question Isn’t Answered” proved to be the high point of their far-too-brief set, and they certainly took the honors for Thursday’s most impressive hair and most incense burned on stage.
The best musician to take the Other Tent stage on Thursday was Benjamin Booker. His gritty punk-blues style flipped a switch in the crowd, and all of a sudden people were ready to rock. Taking the stage to a crackly blues recording, Booker and his band launched nonchalantly into one of the most explosive Bonnaroo sets in recent memory, and the show was clearly the highlight of the day. Booker is as hard to describe as any artist on this year’s bill, folding blues, boogie, garage rock, tuneful punk elements, and old-fashioned bad attitude into a hyper-realistic kind of American music. His powerful band matched his arresting guitar playing at every turn, increasing the impact of this meteoric performance.
The midnight hour offered a buffet of beat-heavy options for those looking to dance and see the pretty colors. Gramatik, Jungle, DJ Quickie Mart, and even a “Tiki Disco” party all popped off as the calendar changed to Friday, while Mac DeMarco kept the songwriter fire burning at This Tent. It may have been a light night by Bonnaroo standards, but tens of thousands of people had their appetites fully whetted for three more huge days of sensory overload.
