Staff Editor on August 28th, 2022

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By JEFF MILLER

It was clear from the lineup announcement for this weekend’s This Ain’t No Picnic festival — a revival of an indie-leaning festival that ran from 1999-2002, was named after a Minutemen song and featured genre forebears from Sunny Day Real Estate to Sonic Youth to At the Drive-In — was something of a Coachella Jr. It was geared both for those who have graduated out of the desert bash thanks to, well, adulthood, and those who can’t get enough of the music-cum-culture that Coachella has provided for the past two decades. Almost every major act on the bill is an alumni of the desert fest, some as recently as this past year, with decidedly older-generation mainstays LCD Soundsystem and the Strokes the headliners on Saturday and Sunday, respectively.

||| ■ See our Day 2 review and photo gallery

Promoter Goldenvoice and their competitors have long presented these smaller-but-similar festivals locally: The Detour fest ran for three years in the mid-Aughts and featured bands like the Mars Volta and Beck; FYF Fest started as a grassroots event before partnering with Goldenvoice in 2011 and fizzling out in 2018; Beach Goth was presented by Coachella alums the Growlers and included indie stalwarts like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Bon Iver; and the recent second edition of the Just Like Heaven fest included Modest Mouse and Franz Ferdinand.

But This Ain’t No Picnic, held at Brookside at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, felt a bit different from the jump. With currently relevant artists like Jungle and Phoebe Bridgers towards the top of the bill, on paper it looked like the perfect indie-generational bridge, a way for aging hipsters to feel like they’re on top of what’s current while younger concertgoers paid tribute to now-legends. But in practice, well, Day 1 as was sort of a Fuck Meh Fest: a smattering of acts that didn’t seem to really gel until late in the night. Here’s some of what went down:

THE EARLY BIRD (SORTA) GETS THE WORM

It was a hit-and-miss hodgepodge early in the day for concertgoers who braved the heat: Australian R&B-meets-80s-rock-meets-lotsa-other-stuff singer Genesis Owusu projected nothing but confidence in his eclectic set, playing to a track but commanding the stage alongside three sorta-dancers-sorta-backup-singers with an all-encompassing energy; on the other side of the spectrum was Eyedress, whose sloppy (on purpose?) set conjured up Joy Division via Pavement, with all the the tunelessness and lack of dynamic range that suggests.

JUST DANCE, DANCE, DANCE

With LCD Soundsystem at the top of the bill, it’s no surprise that some of the highlights were of the booty-shaking variety: Jungle’s set on the Back Nine stage drew a healthy crowd for uptempo takes on disco-rock, while Kaytranada’s main-stage DJ set included a beat-heavy remix of Janet Jackson’s “If.” The 19th Hole was basically a fill-in for Coachella’s DoLab, with outdoor untziness all day on a checkered dance floor. The best place for beats, though, was LCD frontman James Murphy’s Despacio stage, an air-conditioned tent with dark-lit vibes, killer sound and B2B sets from Murphy and his friends, choosing deep-groove records behind a sign that read “Maybe Don’t Take Pictures/Maybe Don’t Shoot Video/Maybe Just Be Here/Just For Today.”

THE ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

As stated above, the fest’s Coachella DNA was woven throughout the whole day. Alumni included onetime Odd Future rapper Earl Sweatshirt, whose mellow slurs made his mythos seem a bit more grounded, indie songsmith Mac DeMarco, who’s somehow found his way to maturity behind his mischievous smile, and the always-charming Courtney Barnett, who still rides the fine line between Sheryl Crow and Kim Gordon.

OLDIE BUT GOODIE

The return of LGBTQIA+ feminist punk forebears Le Tigre, playing their first show since 2011, was definitely one of the festival’s biggest Day 1 stories, and they certainly seemed psyched to be back. Following a brief false-start mishap, Kathleen Hannah, JD Samson and Johanna Fateman blasted through a set made singalong-friendly with projected lyrics throughout, finding relevance in unexpected places in their back catalog: “One way we didn’t think we’d still be relevant is talking about Rudy Giuliani,” Hannah said at one point just before the 1999 jam “My My Metrocard,” which name-checks the then-mayor of NYC. “But here we are, in 2022.”

WHAT THE WORLD NEEDS NOW IS LCD SOUNDSYSTEM

In their first SoCal performance since lockdown, LCD Soundsystem proved once again that they are the kings and queens of electronic rock music, thanks to meticulous, patient musicianship (it is not easy to play the same single note with rhythmic perfection for minutes on end) and Murphy’s lyrics, which are cathartic, sad and joyous all at once. The 80-minute set was essentially a greatest hits run-through: “Your City’s A Sucker” for the opener, “All My Friends” (of course) for the closer, and “Home,” “Losing My Edge” and “Dance Yrself Clean” somewhere in the middle, each one leading to more and more cathartic dancing, singing and sweating, a real release moment we’ve been waiting on for years.

Photos courtesy of This Ain’t No Picnic