Lawnparties 2011: A User's Guide
O, Lawnparties. For the Street-going masses, it's been something of a marathon weekend, but provided you get to Sunday in one piece (and with liver intact), you'll enjoy some solid tunes on Prospect Avenue. You've got your usual slew of heinous cover bands, but there are also few gems. Here are the acts to keep an eye on.
We've already taken a closer look at the USG-sponsored headliners: Wiz and K.R.I.T, those two bastions of Southern rap. They go on at 4 p.m at Quad and should not be missed, but if you find yourself itching for a hiphop fix in the meantime, you've got good options at either end of the Street. Chiddy Bang will be serving up their sugary confection at Charter at 2.p.m. -- their sample-heavy, eminently danceable jams are sure to entertain. If you're looking for someone with more serious rap credentials, you might instead swing by Terrace at 2:30 p.m. for Del the Funkee Homosapien. The geeked-out, polysyllabic force behind Deltron 3030 and the first Gorillaz single, Del put on an amusing (if incoherent) show at Cloister in the fall so I look forward to seeing him spit some rhymes in the daytime. And if its pure unadulterated beats you seek, Cut Chemist will be doing his turntable thing at 1:30 p.m. at Terrace.Meanwhile, Tower delivers on their perennial promise of cutesy, sterile indie pop. This year's iteration is Phantogram, whose muted synthy shimmer will make for unusual daytime listening -- they write nice, clean pop songs, but they seem more suited for a late-night Terrace set than a sun-drenched session out on the Tower lawn at 2:30 p.m. Opening for them at 1:00 p.m. is Hey Champ, a predictably slick electro-pop outfit who graduated from Princeton and seem to love coming back here all the time. They will do their dancey thing and people will dance and it will be good.But the best dancing will probably have already come and gone. Arguably the most entertaining act of the weekend comes a night early: Holy Ghost! will be at Ivy for a 10:30 p.m. set on Saturday night. They've got that faded 80's groove (cf. Cut Copy) down to a science, like they ripped it right off a VHS, and a great remix repertoire to boot. Also, they're on James Murphy's label, which is always a promising sign -- you'll hear slight hints of LCD Soundsystem in their sound.As for Sunday, Ivy and practically everyone else opted for one of many interchangeable cover bands -- I'll let you sort those out for yourselves. But if our pals at the Prince are correct, one of them apparently does a passable Rage Against the Machine impression, which is awesome because, I mean, middle school.