Athens Popfest 2006: Night OneAthens Popfest 2006: Night One
Kicking off Athens Popfest 2006 was Gordon Lamb, writer for the Athens art/music rag, Flagpole, who played a dichotomous set: first ballads, then upbeat pop. He seemed to know everyone in the room which helped kickstart the crowd. Following Lamb, Fabulous Bird played a full set of riff rock anchored by a tight rhythm section. Then Vietnam, a band that has been on a 20-plus-year hiatus from Athens, played what I can only guess was a reunion set. Their sound struck me as a mash of Pylon and the B-52's, which I really found as a nice bienvenue, being a newbie to the Athens music scene.
The rest of the evening was one solid set after the next.
To stay true to their name, I imagined Russian Spy Camera as maybe Boris and Natasha in a LOMO photograph, but these guys, led by singer/guitarist Ryan White, brought it and brought it hard. If Madison Avenue got ahold of Russian Spy Camera, they might give them a tagline something like, "Russian Spy Camera: Music To Kick A Hole In The Floor To." Okay, maybe not, but every song had me playing my boot and I wasn't the only one.
Sleepy Horses took the stage just after midnight and laid out a marathon 11-minute-long first song. Their psych-rock voyage was a nice change of pace after the hard-driving Russian Spy Camera set. The self-proclaimed "newbies in the Athens circuit" had a full and mature sound, which made me all the more surprised when a local beside me mentioned, "I saw them a couple months ago and they were nowhere near this good."
The Visitations, a three-piece that shared a guitarist with Sleepy Horses, have a straight-forward, lo-fi style of storytelling that reminds me a lot of Midlake. Given the Jerry Falwell and Ehud Barak references, something tells me they're a bit more overtly political, though.
I can't add much to Taylor's post on Summer Hymns, but to say that I truly love their name in that it is descriptive of their product: tunes perfect for a leisurely drive to the beach or ol' swimmin' hole.
Though Col. Knowledge took the stage after 2 a.m., they immediately had what crowd was left dancing and were, simply, the perfect way to cap off the evening. Col. Knowledge & The Lickity Splits do for 50's doo-wop what Old Crow Medicine Show have done for old-timey string bands: dusted off a genre and made it their own with an infusion of youthful energy and a fire that can only come from a respect of the vinyl from whence it came.
Thus ends night one of Athens Popfest 2006. As the faithful filed out of Little Kings at 2:40 a.m., I mentioned to a guy who had been rocking out all night that I really enjoyed the first night. He grinned and replied, "It's only gonna get progressively krunker."
Progressively krunker, indeed. Krunker, indeed.
