The crowd is bigger than the day before and the skies have cleared from smoke. Lady Lamb, the only(!) female act of the entire festival flirts with the audience and sings, “if you want to die, you don’t live in Portland”. The Portland Maine native makes simple guitar rock with quirky lyrics. In a high school film, Lady Lamb would play the alternative rock chick. Her songs start off sweet and mellow, but only to take a more sinister turn.

Singer-songwriter Lady Lamb aka. Aly Spaltro.

Danny Brown fills the hip hop quota of the otherwise indie savvy festival line-up. It is obvious that this a welcome exception as the crowd thickens. Once again the air is smokey, but the forest fires aren’t to blame this time around.The 34-year old Detroiter has made a name for himself with his drug liberal lyrics and energetic stage performances.

Danny Brown stood out among the indie bands.

The MusicfestNW is a friendly festival with good vibes, but if you are looking to be blown away by new sounds, there might be other options out there for you. Kristian Mattsson aka. The Tallest Man on Earth has been compared to Bob Dylan, not an easy role to fill, but Mattsson seems to have it under control. His set starts off with a Swedish folk sing to accompany his stage entry, a sweet gimmick to show off his heritage. Tallest Man on Earth is a pro and charms the audience, no surprises here, neither good nor bad ones.

Good vibes from Tallest Man on Earth.

As the festival only has two stages and no acts play simultaneously, the audience commutes back and fourth across the festival area. At 8:00 pm we have almost reached the last act of the festival, and judging by the size of the crowd, MusicfestNW sure knew to save the best for last. Portland loves Modest Mouse. And Modest Mouse knows it, the wait for an encore is the longest I have ever experienced and once it is over, a fair amount of fans refuse to leave the stage area, still hoping for a second one.

Thanks MusicfestNW, it was real nice! Almost a little too nice. For next year though, an almost all male line-up is starting to get old, don’t you think?

Not sure what to make of that combination but I was excited to find out. Portland is also a music city which was home to indie darling Elliott Smith in his formative years. To go to a music festival while in Portland seemed like the right thing to do. MusicfestNW is the biggest music happening in Oregon and this year’s line-up included well-known names such as Belle&Sebastian, Modest Mouse and Beirut, as well as less established acts including as SALES, Lady Lamb and Allilujiah Choir.

It is a smoking hot(pun intended) Saturday in Portland and the second day of the MusicfestNW. At 1 pm a decent amount of festival goers have already braved the heatwave. The first show we catch, Florida-based duo SALES, is the first but certainly not last act to jokingly address the smokey skies stemming from the forest fires in Oregon in their in-between-songs talk. SALES, who are just finishing up their West Coast tour, consists of Lauren Morgan and Jordan Shih. The long-time friends and musical partners make light-weight low-fi guitar-pop, which in combination with the smoke-induced dimmed yellow sunlight makes for a smooth start of the day.

SALES play during MusicfestNW

Twin brothers Zach and Ben Yudin make Southern Californian indie pop under the moniker Cayucas and played a fun, easy breezy gig at the MusicfestNW. The band’s sound is beachy and dance-friendly and can best be described as a mix between Beach Boys, a Mexican folk band and shoegaze all at once.

Beachy pop from Cayucas.

Hyped experimental rock band Battles are touring in anticipation of their upcoming album and played in front of an excited crowd. Although Battles are always musically and technically pleasing, there is a slight smugness about them that you will either love or hate. The crowd definitely seemed to love their instrumental set, which indeed stood out from the niceness of the other acts indie pop. Battles will be touring this fall, so plenty of chances to catch them ahead.

Battles

Maybe it is the heat, maybe it’s the smoke, maybe just the time of the day, but the Portlanders seem a bit hard to flirt with. But once Dominican native George Lewis Jr. aka Twin Shadow hits the stage with his band, there seems to be a moment of awakening. The crowd seemed smitten by Lewis energetic bubbly personality and the band’s 80 power synth pop had the audience dancing like there was no tomorrow. A passerby on a bridge behind the stage gave the audience a solo dance show lasting almost the entire set, something that Lewis acknowledged as “only in Portland”.

George Lewis Jr. aka Twin Shadow throws a dance party with the crowd.

Second to last band of the day were indie pop cult band Belle&Sebastian. The crowd was suddenly much bigger, the sudden presence of babies in the audience witnessed of a mid 30s crowd excited to take in some nostalgia from their youth. Last band out for Saturday, Beirut, need no further introduction. The Balkan folk music inspired act never fail to deliver and their complex tunes rounded off the evening. A safe but yet somewhat boring choice for end of play that day.

Belle&Sebastian are back on the road.

The band’s latest offering is a six minute opus named after a place where it all started – Menton, south of France in an old hotel named Palace Winter. By switching the two words around Australian singer-songwriter Carl Coleman and Danish producer and pianist Caspar Hesselager found their identity in it and so the duo Palace Winter was born. “One of the reasons working with Carl is great, is that his background is totally different from mine, yet we still seem to end up musically in a place where we really enjoy being,” explains Caspar.

This musical place has certain ethereality to it; the kind you would find in the music of The War on Drugs and Kurt Vile. It’s the type of indie rock that will calm your nerves, lighten up your car ride and make the sun seem brighter. The lyrics play a secondary role here, since it’s the effortless melody that carries all the weight and paints the narrative. With two strong singles under their belt, the future looks pretty bright for Palace Winter.

Silent Lover is the debut single by HÔN a.k.a. Danish singer-songwriter Jesper Lidang, who is also the latest member of the Tambourhinoceros family. Gone are the folk guitar strings and the indie rock melodies that were distinct in his band The Rumour Said Fire, as Jesper has replaced it all with hip-hop beats and synthesizers. A gentle indie r’n’b that could easily fit in the same category as How to Dress Well and Autre Ne Veut.

“It’s essential to my music and my definition of HÔN that only the strongest of melodies survive. I want it to move you and to stick to your brain,” says Jesper himself. Find this and other catchy pop melodies on his forthcoming debut album White Lion.

You constantly keep changing and evolving your sound. What can we expect from your new album?
I’ve been focussing on honing the Destroyer sound, so hopefully it’ll just be more of the same from the last 20 years. Wait does this mean you haven’t even heard the album? Why am I even writing this? How can you be sure I keep evolving?

What inspired you to write Poison Season?
Death. Jazz. Classical music. Ingeborg Bachman. Boogie shit.

Was there any pressure writing a new album after the success of your previous record Kaputt?
Not at all. The success of Kaputt was a complete illusion. Were it an actual success, I would be crippled with creative paralysis.

Every instrument on Kaputt was played blindly, recorded separately, and revealed only before mixing. What kind of recording and mixing techniques did you use for the new album?
7 men. 24 mics. One expensive room. Later, one man, various woodwind instruments, a couple different mics. One plane ticket back to Toronto! Mostly tried to have it sound living and real. The opposite of Kapput. Which was frozen, or at least cool.

What was the songwriting process like this time?
Same as always. I gotta be me. Though I think I was maybe influenced by pre-pop culture music for the first time ever. By pre-pop culture I mean pre-Beatles. Is that wrong? I mean, not immoral, but incorrect as a definition? Morally, I know it’s wrong.

It’s been almost 20 years since your debut album. How has your approach to music changed throughout the years?
I’ve become a much better singer. Maybe a much worse writer. This is generally the tendency with 98% of all singer-songwriters, so I no different from the rest…

What do you think of Vancouver’s music scene nowadays?
I’m sure it’s really good. Though I have no idea what it is. But Vancouver’s always had the best scene in Canada, no contest. And that must mean something, no?

Who would you like to collaborate with in the future?
Joni Mitchell. Van Morrison. Bob Dylan. Lou Reed. John Cale. John Phillips. Tomas Transtromer. This list never changes…

We’re very happy that you’re going to be playing in Sweden. What can people expect from your live show?
Devastating improvements on the albums Poison Season, Kaputt and others. Jazz-rock of the deepest intensity, with a bewildered lead singer…

Imagine knowing you want to go to music class but instead you end up in natural science class because of an administrative mistake during your application. Well, that happened to Jonas at upper secondary school in Fisksätra outside Stockholm, Sweden. It wasn’t until after graduation that he decided to pick up his dream for real. He moved to Paris with a friend and got very inspired by the city.

Some years later with loads of musical experiments in his head he began working on a record, on his own, determined to keep the result of his recordings as close to the original idea as possible. He spent almost a year looking for someone who could produce the record, but his attempts were fruitless and he decided to do (almost) everything by himself. It took him three years.

Knowing this is the essence of a true DIY project the admiration just gets bigger.

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Judging from the first single Multi-Love, your new album steers even more away from lo-fi. What can we expect from this record?

I suppose it’s a natural thing as you get better and acquire superior equipment the sound will improve. It’s my most ambitious record by far. It’s quite a leap I think. There are a lot of textures in the record. Horns and cellos and old-sounding synthesizers, as well as the guitars. Very aggressive and funky drums and bass. My voice is much louder and more influenced by Stevie Wonder than ever before but still kind of strange and dreamy I suppose.

You’ve collaborated with your brother Kody and bandmate Jake on this album. How has that influenced the new sound?

Having Kody around cheered me up quite a bit, and we had a lot of fun working through the night. Usually I’m by myself and that has a certain effect on the songs. This time Kody spent a month with me recording drums and even helping with some of the songwriting and I think it made the foundation of the record more upbeat spending time with my brother. Jake produced the vocals on Ur Life One Night and The World is Crowded. I was having trouble recording them by myself. Sometimes it’s hard or impossible to be the singer and producer and engineer at the same time. You need another person to help you with the technical side and also to say if something’s good. I can trust Jake because I respect him really highly as a producer. If he says my singing was good, I trust him.

What kind of gear have you used to record the new album?

I got this amazing thing called the Kaimaitron, which is a custom four channel mixer made by this mad electronics genius called Ekadek who lives on a mountain range called the Kaimais in New Zealand (hence the name). My grandmother lived near the Kaimais so I drove through them a lot as a child. I recorded everything through this machine. It has a way to record everything from fat, hi-fi sound to this very Motown kind of distorted sound. The vocals on Acid Rain show this sound really well. I mixed through a Chandler Mini Mixer. It’s a really beautiful sounding piece. Another thing I used a lot was the Retro Instruments Powerstrip. That was really useful.

It’s said that the new album is about the complications of being together. How much of that is your personal experience?

It’s all my experience. All my songs have surreal elements but they all boil down something that really happened.

You’ve studied art. How involved are you in the visuals of your releases and videos?

I try not to interfere too much in the videos. I usually just choose the person I want to work with and let them do whatever they want. I figure that since there isn’t a lot of money in music videos the only thing that makes them appealing to a good director is a level of creative control they can’t get anywhere else. The design of the albums I like to be really involved in because I think continuity in record sleeve design is important. Multi-Love’s cover was shot by Marla Celeste, a photographer that was living in my house for about a year.

You’ve been reading about Biocentrism lately. Is that something that might inspire your fourth album?

Haha, maybe. I think the idea of consciousness as a key element in our universe has already started to influence me.

What kind of music are you listening to right now?

Lately I’ve been listening to Zappa, Bowie, Lindstrom, Bjorn Torske, Harmonia, Sly and the Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Toro Y Moi, Soft Machine, Isotope, Vince Staples, D’Angelo.

Are there any artists you would like to collaborate with?

I’d love to try and do something with Dam Funk.

On the album cover for Multi-Love you can spot album covers from your first two LPs. Was that on purpose?

It wasn’t planned but it was part of what made me love that image so much. It communicates so much about the mood and environment the album was made in.

No Ringer is a new single from Canadian lads Grounders that will also be featured in their self-titled debut LP set to release this summer. It fits in beautifully with the post-punk revival wave that has washed over us this year with such bands like Desperate Journalist, Nite Fields, and fellow Canadians Viet Cong. The heavy bass riff holds the tune steady while a dazed saxophone wobbles around in the background with shimmering sounds and invites listeners to lose themselves in the song. A very promising debut!

The Copenhagen-based project of Esben Svane released its debut album last Monday, and with it comes a new, catchy single Nothing’s Holding You Back, which can be downloaded for free on The Radar Post’s Soundcloud page. It’s a perfect getaway song for a sunny holiday that urges you to „grab your shoes and run away”. If you decide to run away to Copenhagen, you can catch The Radar Post playing at the Jazzhouse on April 30.