Through the entirety of ACL Weekend Two, no set I saw moved with the lightning speed of the one I anticipated more than any other.
Yes, 16 years after I last saw them on a hot, un-air conditioned night in a medium-small club on the Show Your Bones tour, Yeah Yeah Yeahs are highlighting our fast-heating world with their new music while their own fire — the one in their eyes and their souls — hasn’t cooled.
Small spoiler alert that will be evident once you keep reading, if it’s not already: You’ll see more on them in my full festival recap to come, when I list my top shows of the weekend. But anyway, for now … they were the highlight of Sunday’s Day 3 activity, playing a delicious hour that felt about two-thirds that long, if not less.
Karen O, one of the greatest rock vocalists and natural performers of this century, twirled, smiled, kneeled and — most memorably — tilted her face skyward, head of the microphone inside her mouth. Guitarist Nick Zinner, drummer Brian Chase and touring guitarist Imaad Wasif offered the standout backing that’s always been a hallmark of the band’s versatile, art-and-grit, garage-and-ColecoVision catalogue.
“Spitting Off the Edge of the World,” last year’s majestic anthem on the climate crisis that marked their dramatic return, was the opener. From there, the set was career-spanning and thoroughly satisfying, with few words from Karen to the large crowd but plenty of unspoken connection. Their best-known song, “Maps” — that transcendent love song with the crashing guitar riff — was everything the crowd was clearly hoping for. “Heads Will Roll,” their shimmering and irresistible disco-punk masterstroke, simply set off a frenzy, one that eclipsed even closer “Date With the Night” and perhaps any other song performance I saw all weekend.
YYY are an all-time great outfit of this century and, really, of American rock history, perhaps destined to be somewhat underrated forever. My guess is that on Sunday, a few more people might have realized it.
Other quick thoughts
Both Yves Tumor (top photo) and Labrinth, I’m confident in saying, offered marriages of sound and vibe that were unlike anything I’ve really seen before in all my years of show-hounding. In both cases, that was a great thing.
Start with Tumor, a wiry, wild experimental rock performer who uses the whole stage and beyond, while their band — look-wise, a collective archetype of about every quintessential rock-star look ever — supplies heavy darkness, dissonance and soaring guitar work. Full-bore, off-center songs like “Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood” and “Parody” pushed hard against the sound confines of the tented Tito’s stage. Tumor — who eschews any real preference on gender pronouns but apparently accepts either masculine or they/them — looks like a ’90s rapper from the neck up (baseball cap and Oakley-ish sunglasses), and like Gumby from the neck down. They wore scarcely more clothes than Gumby, too, spending most of the set in only skimpy, loose black shorts that slid down to reveal butt crack repeatedly, which seemed to be of only minimal concern to Tumor. Ultimately, the show was a weird, blasting, atmospheric revelation, proof that it’s still possible to see something new.
That evening, English electro-pop maestro Labrinth — well-known as the musical mastermind behind HBO’s arty teen melodrama “Euphoria” — was performing head to head against a fellow band that relies on a different flavor of smoky atmospherics: El Paso natives Cigarettes After Sex. For me, CAS are best for drinking in the dark or for bedtime, and since I wasn’t in the middle of either, Labrinth was the pick. He proceeded to give a large audience, presumably filled with “Euphoria” fans like myself, one of the most badass endings to an ACL set I can remember.
As the hypnotizingly moody “Mount Everest” boiled to its conclusion, Labrinth stumbled from the back center of the T-Mobile stage into darkness … then reappeared on the stage’s highest tiered platform, above his backup singers, mic stand in front of him. Finishing the song on high with its signature line — “Mount Everest ain’t got shit on me/I’m on top of the world” — Labrinth did a full-ass mic drop — mic stand and all thunking to the platform floor — and stalked off for good. No parting words. Lights off. Show over.
Talk about actions matching one’s words. That’s a showman, and one who doesn’t have a lot of similar performers in his lane.