Black Belt Eagle Scout at Pitchfork Music Pageant 2023. Photograph by Julian Bajsel.
Black Belt Eagle Scout’s Head-Thrashing Poetics
At very first, Katherine Paul stored matters rather straightforward for her 1st ever Pitchfork effectiveness she sang swirling indie rock tracks about grief, marginalization, and queer longing with a recognizing gaze and a slight smirk, a couple of blue lights roving in the qualifications. But as the set progressed, the guitars appeared to get wilder and additional loud her black hair totally obscured her encounter as she commenced head-banging. It was bracing and cathartic, and in a excellent minute, tiny raindrops were slipping down as she recurring “the land, the drinking water, the sky” from her track “Don’t Give Up,” as if she experienced willed them. —Cat Zhang
MJ Lenderman at Pitchfork Songs Festival 2023. Photo by Daniel Cavazos.
Hang Time With MJ Lenderman
Fellas rule, and none a lot more so than MJ Lenderman, who rolled up to his set in sunglasses and a t-shirt with a band of dudes that looked like they just emerged from hanging out in the basement. (One of these dudes: Jeff Tweedy’s drummer son Spencer.) Jointly they shipped a rollicking, down-dwelling Southern affair, enjoying tunes from Boat Tunes furthermore Lenderman’s new solitary “Rudolph.” Hearing his wry stories and those people golden, deep fried riffs, I imagined floating down a river on an inner tube, a beer in my hand. But I was grateful to be in the solar, smiling watching a sea of fellas in baseball hats bobbing along. —Cat Zhang
Friday, July 21
The Smile’s Thom Yorke at Pitchfork Tunes Festival 2023. Photograph by Daniel Cavazos.
The Smile’s Large Experiment
The Smile have been on the competition circuit for a although now and they have it down to a science. There’s Jonny Greenwood’s suitable arm, sawing his guitar with a violin bow, or strumming it with the fury of a locomotive coupling rod. Here’s Thom Yorke searching wizardly with his hair down, capable of commanding a crowd just by becoming himself. There is Tom Skinner guiding the kit, specific and reliable even when just about subsumed by Yorke’s wail, and are living saxophonist Robert Stillman, whose exits and entrances are basically invisible. The setlists are reliable far too: Even the latest music initially popped up very last summer months. But if the live generation is a cleanroom setting, that’s mainly because the genuine perform is mental: Examine Greenwood’s classical guitar-inspired solo on that most recent composition, “Under Our Pillows,” or the proggy rendition of Yorke’s solo single “Being Pulled Aside By Horses” that shut the evening. Great experiments are replicable. —Anna Gaca
