Day two of the Governors Ball, and the rain that had marred the first day had disappeared, the sun streaming down on Randall’s Island. Not all kinds of music benefit from exposure to hot sunshine though, and Sharon Van Etten’s subtle, dreamy and slowly unspooling songs seemed to evaporate on contact with daylight.
She had more luck than Björk though, who started strongly, taking to the stage in a mask and extraordinary costume that made her look like an intergalactic spider, but saw the audience drift away during a set that leaned too heavily on the somber, string-laden songs from her current album, Vulnicura. Hits were thin on the ground, with only Army of Me, Bachelorette and the concluding Hyperballad to entice curious onlookers rather than hardcore fans. The sound also did Björk’s white-clad orchestra few favours, though her voice is still a thing of wonder, as piercing and direct as an icepick.
The two headliners also had challenges to overcome. EDM titan Deadmau5 used the occasion to unveil complicated new “mousetrap-inspired” staging including giant domes and cages. Yet he probably wished he hadn’t bothered when the sound cut out repeatedly during the early stages of his set, leading to what looked like an understandably frank exchange of views between the irascible Canadian and the festival’s technical crew, followed by him taking off his mouse mask and doing some press-ups for the entertainment of the crowd. Whatever you think of his lairy take on techno, it was hard not to respect Deadmau5 for battling through and eventually triumphing when his epic song Strobe sent the audience into meltdown.
It was less appreciated on the Honda stage at the other end of the festival, where Ryan Adams’s time-honoured Americana had to compete against Deadmau5’s sonic assault. “This song is not going to match the robot music over there ... It’s like we’re living in a fucking Terminator nightmare!” the songwriter complained, though he has since said that he was joking.
By Sunday, once festivalgoers had survived the queues to get in, Governors Ball was swinging, with a reliable set of crowdpleasers lasting from mid-afternoon to closing time. On the Big Apple Stage, Royal Blood demonstrated that churning blues riffs and battering drums can still be brutally effective, even when played by a band half the size of Led Zeppelin. While bassist/singer Mike Kerr and drummer Ben Thatcher don’t have the playful artiness of the White Stripes, the clear inspiration for their setup, their take on yowling 70s blues/rock is easily as potent as that of their supporters, Arctic Monkeys. Out of the Black inspires mass fist-pumping amongst the audience and the show concludes with Kerr triumphantly jumping on the drum riser and bashing the hell out of it with Thatcher.
More subtle, but arguably not much less retro, Tame Impala draw an enormous teatime crowd on the main stage. With their third album Currents, released next month, expected to push them into rock’s big league, they’ve got confidence and swagger (despite Kevin Parker claiming he’s nervous). While some of their Lonerism material is arguably over-familar by now, Elephant rocks – especially its tricksy, almost techno ending showcasing how tight this band is – and Cause I’m a Man is swoon-inducing, like a sun-kissed Scritti Politti.
What to see next – the War on Drugs or “Weird Al” Yankovich? Weird Al is playing in a tent far too small for the crowd who want to see his venerable music parodies. He plays Fat, his take on Michael Jackson’s Bad, in a Jacko fatsuit to the crowd’s delight, and intersperses the tunes with lengthy faked video “interviews” with pop stars (in order to give him time to change costumes), which are a lot more pointed than the songs themselves. Some of the parodies are of songs which have been near-forgotten – it’s certainly a while since I’d thought of the Presidents of the United States’s song Lump, here repurposed as Dumb – and it’s weird that Yankovich’s lyrics never address the songs or their original singers. Blurred Lines is certainly ripe for satire, so why turn it into Word Crimes, and make it a song about grammar? That said, plenty of the audience seem to find it funny.
Oasis were so massive that it seems strange to see Noel Gallagher play at a festival and not headline. Yet with his solo project, Noel Gallagher’s High-Flying Birds, two albums in and doing nicely, there’s no sense of decline – or even that he’s trading on past glories. Looking sharp in shades, and with the appearance of a brass section proving that this band is at least trying to be more adventurous than Oasis, Gallagher is in good, gracious form. Not all the songs sparkle – The Dying of the Light is dull, and his decision to play the Oasis album track Digsy’s Diner seems not so much perverse as inexplicable – but AKA ... What a Life! is vigorous and there’s a touching, horn-enhanced version of Oasis’s Fade Away. Gallagher’s not afraid to bring out his big guns either – we get a surging Champagne Supernova, Whatever, The Masterplan and, at the show’s conclusion, an absolutely mighty Don’t Look Back in Anger, which provokes the tear-stained singalong of the weekend.
Back at the Big Apple stage, an unexpectedly huge crowd is watching Hot Chip, almost all dressed in white and doing engagingly awkward choreography to Flutes. Their diffident, very English take on house music is still original and potent, and the show demonstrates how many genuine floorfillers they now have in their catalogue, from nagging signature tune Over and Over to the sentimentally blissed-out Ready for the Floor. The audience also allows them the indulgence of playing something from their range of blue-eyed soul ballads, a slinky Look at Who We Are, before they conclude perfectly with a celebratory cover of Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark.
It’s all pointing to a triumphant finale to the weekend by Lana Del Rey (and, on the main stage, the Black Keys, whose singer Dan Auerbach produced much of her album Ultraviolence). Unfortunately, it’s at this point that the sound problems return, meaning that Del Rey is close to inaudible unless you push your way to the front of the enormous audience. The show looks great (give or take two cardboard skyscrapers) with the stars and stripes projected ominously over the stage as Del Rey delivers a dramatic Born to Die. Sound problems aside, her singing also seems impressive, world-weary but compelling. She operates within a very narrow stylistic field, but the show is never boring: the cumulative effect of all the doomed ballads and poisoned pop songs is intoxicating. The show just needed to be whole lot louder. Maybe next year?
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