Say you like the Coachella music festival a lot and you want to go to a slightly smaller, edgier version of the multi-stage concert. Where could you go that’s even more deserted than a polo field in the middle of nowhere? Why, downtown Los Angeles, of course. And so, Saturday saw the streets around L.A.’s City Hall fill with hipsters and music for the second annual L.A. Weekly Detour festival.
Downtown Los Angeles provided the perfect setting for a festival bent on indie music and amazing dance acts. Its skyscrapers crowded around everyone and provided many different backdrops for amazing light grafitti and crowd-projected artwork.
This year’s Detour-goers got a head-scratching mix of vaguely popular indie-rock bands, aggressively chic DJ sets from hot-to-trot newcomers Ed Banger Records and Perry Farrell’s latest misguided project, Satellite Party.
First, Chicago’s Cool Kids tested the limits of the sound system with some bass-heavy ’80s-inflected beats. With their cardigans and Beastie Boys references, they’re not only a throwback to a kinder, gentler era of hip-hop, but perhaps approach a new level of M.I.A.-style cultural (re-) appropriation.
Detour’s most out-there act, the Mexican techno-punk-samba quintet Kinky, actually best embodied the festival’s genre-exoticism, pulling it off with grinning enthusiasm. These musicians also nodded to their status as the sonic “immigrant aliens” of the festival, as the audience didn’t quite know how to process a band that beat them at their own game of style-mashing.
You can’t see everything at the L.A. Weekly Detour Festival. But in an event with four stages, participants must decide on their festival philosophy: to float carelessly from stage to stage, or to commit to one stage. Those who decided on the former – which I did – missed some bands they probably should have seen, but were less stressed about it in the end.
In what should be required attire at all festival performances, one member of The Deadly Syndrome was wearing a white T-shirt with three simple words on it: “The Deadly Syndrome.” It was incredibly considerate, and saved people the confusion that accompanies four stages’ worth of mussy-headed indie boys – or, as comedian Patton Oswalt described the crowd before him, “stinky hipsters.”
Clearly, the night belonged to French coke-house duo Justice, as fans literally sprinted down Main Street to get prime dancing spots (and scenesters run about as often as rappers smile on album covers). The band has a merciless attention deficit for any sound snippet longer than a few seconds. Justice bashes disco sing-alongs, gut-rumbling bass lines and squealing siren wails together so quickly that they eventually add up to a cohesive, singular sound.
Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé radiated goofy metal-head charm (De Rosnay took the stage on a skateboard and smoked throughout the set), and it’s no surprise that of all the blog-house acts to break in 2007, this one is fast becoming the genre’s biggest star. Justice still needs to decide how to put on a visually interesting live show, but playful gestures such as splicing the bawdy chorus from 20 Fingers’ “Short Short Man” over devil-horned synth riffs suggest this group is smart enough to figure it out soon.
Where Justice drew a mass of sweaty fans, Bloc Party, while much more lively and interactive onstage, was unable to transfer that energy into the crowd. A different festival at a different moment, and the tables could have been turned.
But in the here-and-now, in that remarkable feat of aural magic that carries a song from a beatbox through a cord into an amplifier that’s hooked into a monster soundsystem that delivers music across the whole of downtown Los Angeles – and into thousands of heads – it was Justice.
