I’m not going to comprehensively blog the 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival; instead I’ll point you here and here and here (and I’m sure you’ll find others, if you’re interested). Rather, I’m just going to focus on one artist from each day.
Unsurprisingly, Mission of Burma was my personal highlight from Friday, playing their album Vs as part of the All Tomorrow’s Parties ‘Don’t Look Back’ series. The played a few non-Vs tracks to start (so that fans would have the ‘definitive edition’) and, as always, they were ferocious and compelling live. As that comment suggests, they also had a signal sense of humour about the artificiality of playing an entire album, in order, including starting each ‘side’ with the sounds of crackly vinyl.
The YouTube link above is of a live performance of the last track on the album, “That’s How I Escaped My Certain Fate.” I don’t know yet if Pitchfork is archiving the live video; stay tuned.
