Re-Cap: Sweetlife Festival 2013
Shark Week opens up Sweetlife Festival 2013.
There is an unwirtten law of the universe somewhere that says every time we go to a show at Merriweather Post Pavilion, it has to rain for at least 40-percent of the time we are there. Not just sprinkle either, like at least one extended period of monsoon-esque conditions is required.
Despite the weather being a schizophrenic asshole (we came home sunburned AND soaked), it was a pretty good time. This was our first foray into the salad-centric world of the Sweetlife Festival and the quality of the whole production was quite astounding.
This festival makes much better use of the space at Merriweather than the larger–also freer– Virgin Mobile FreeFest. There was a coherent, whimsical theme all throughout the festival grounds Saturday. The whole place felt like a big, loud farmer’s market. There was an emphasis on local vendors (food trucks, DC Brau and Chocolate City beer vendors) and everything just seemed to work better.
As for the music, here’s a blow-by-blow of our day at Sweetlife:
- The very first band of the day was D.C. garage rockers, Shark Week. Much like the last time we saw Shark Week, the band was stuck with a short, oddly placed time slot playing to a mostly uninitiated audience. Nevertheless, Shark Week rocked everyone’s face off and let us hear some new songs. Solid start to the day.
- After wandering around the grounds for some time, we moseyed on over to the lawn and caught the end of Lindsey Stirling’s set. The violin virtuoso made a good opening act for the main stage, but the whole show seemed a little too America’s Got Talent for our tastes.
- Next up on the main stage was Solange. Her show at 9:30 Club last month blew us away. Her set at Sweetlife seemed lack the same energy, but that is to be expected when comparing a small club show to a large outdoor festival. It was still a great set, we’re probably just being spoiled little shitheads.
- At the very top of our list of “Artists we really want to see live but we fuck it up every time they are in town” is Gary Clark, Jr. He did not disappoint. Clark is definitely an artist whose music is better played live. His self-titled studio debut was somewhat of a letdown, but the songs have a lot more edge to them when he plays live.
- Because we try not to bash artists whenever possible, we will say this about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs set: The people watching Robert DeLong/Foxygen on the Treehouse Stage got it right.
- Kendrick Lamar’s set was a small personal victory. After being prematurely dismissed from his show at SXSW, this hour-long set felt like vindication. Watching artists from the lawn in a pavilion setting makes it hard to really get into a show, but we really like dude’s music. It was not the best set of the night, but it was probably our favorite.
- This is the point where shit started getting weird and we began to notice a few things about the youths at Sweetlife Festival. For instance, the new thing for young women is to steal their mother’s jeans and make them into inappropriately short, high-wasted cut-offs. Also, electro-pop rock makes the kids really horny these days. During Passion Pit, we watched as one young lady and her male friend engaged in some strange combination of a dry-humping/make-out sesh and a mud wrestling match. Mad awkward, yo.
- Phoenix followed up with another great set to close out the festival. Being stylistically similar to Passion Pit, the pseudo-sexual interactions of America’s youth continued. The band played “1901” toward the end of its set and it really drove home how much the criteria for make-out music has changed since R. Kelly guided us through adolescence.
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