Flute.
That’s poppycock, you’re probably thinking. There’s no way that forward-thinking bands of the sort that played the Pitchfork Music Festival would ever consider introducing an instrument so prim, so saccharine, so shrill into their music. Didn’t New Age kill off the flute? Or Jethro Tull?
And yet there it was, twice, during performances by the purposefully and precisely schlocky soft-rock revivalists Destroyer and the angelically pleasant and soulless Fleet Foxes. It wasn’t much more than an accent piece, but possibly it augured things to come. In an era of voracious music makers everything old or tacky or obscure will be made new again.
These life cycles are played out in real time on Pitchfork, the music news and criticism Web site that, since it was established in 1995, has been a committed outlet for indie rock and its many tributaries, real and imagined. The Pitchfork Music Festival, which has been held in Union Park here each summer since 2006, is part of the site’s continuing quest to document and capitalize on artists looking for the next history to reclaim, and also a decent roundup of those acts from generations past: sometimes influencer and influenced perform just hours apart.
The 45 acts spread over Friday, Saturday and Sunday only partly encapsulated the Web site’s taste, or the movements more broadly in the music world. But several individual acts told bigger stories. Animal Collective, the Friday night headliner, performed on a stage decorated like a huge Etsy sale, with cloudlike stalactites and crustaceanlike cutouts hanging from the sky.
Its show was alternately psychedelic and straightforward, and sometimes majestic, a wonder of accrued small details filling up the air. Whether it wants it or not, Animal Collective could have a long afterlife on the jam band circuit; same goes for the festival performers Battles and Gang Gang Dance, acts that stretch their songs out past melodic relevance into rhythmic trance.
TV on the Radio, the Sunday night headliner, has inadvertently become the most exciting funk band of our time, and its show was searing, a precise collection of art-soul songs by a band that’s happy to appear sloppy from a distance but knows exactly how all its parts are moving.
Trombone was important to TV on the Radio’s set — another unlikely instrument, in the context of the weekend, but seemingly more of an isolated case than the emergent flute infestation. The flutemongers here were among the more adult-contemporary acts on offer. But still, maybe flute will become the new saxophone, which just two years ago was an outcast instrument but is now used in Lady Gaga songs and was deployed by at least four bands here. Sax has become the new cowbell, and there was some vestigial cowbell here too, in Cut Copy’s wildly popular, overlong set of slack-muscled almost-disco almost-rock.
More interesting than instrument revivals were other budding strategies. Connoisseur hip-hop was well received here — from the South there was Currensy, whose weed rhymes were more lucid than usual, and the excellent G-Side, a duo that delivered one of the festival’s high points with a crisp performance that bridged the space between moralist gangsta rap and spacey soul and gospel.
And there were several impressive D.I.Y.-minded women at the festival. Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards and Julianna Barwick built their songs from scratch, recording themselves live and looping and sampling the result. EMA — a k a Erika Anderson — had serrate vocals over gloomy, lonely backing that dispersed ineffectively into the air; she’s one good producer away from something magical. And Zola Jesus played manic goth-pop that was too large for her stage, the festival’s smallest.
She was one of a few artists who embraced the dark side here. Others included the morbid and clean-cut Sun Airway; Gatekeeper, with its brooding ‘80s-influenced club music; and Cold Cave, dressed in all black and playing fluent Depeche Mode-isms, for what appeared to be a site-specific art piece as much as a concert.
