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Posted by V

(via Bao Nguyen)

I’ve never been so glad for a weekend to be over with. The sun, the crowds, the afterparties, the houseguests and day after day of no iPhone service…it’s nice to finally have some much-earned peace and quiet after the past three days of mayhem.

We started Friday off slow with the intent of arriving late and hitting up the afterparties hard. We arrived at 4pm to check out The Black Keys. It was hot as fuck and I appreciated the effort they put into their performance despite pouring sweat and looking like they had just walked out of a monsoon rain. Their live sound was very true to their recorded material, a claim I unfortunately will not be able to make for many of the other acts.

It was apparent immediately upon entering the gates that 1) Lollapalooza was FAR more crowded than last year 2) Every collegiate ALT BRO within 500 miles was in attendance. It was a truly bronomenol turnout. Due to this, we spent a lot of time on the outskirts of the shows, not wanting to be covered in more beers than necessary. Our main stakeout was the hill across from the Myspace stage and to the right of the AT&T stage. We hid out here for the Bloc Party set. While the sound wasn’t great in our spot, it also wasn’t horrible and from what we heard, Bloc Party also held up to their album hype.

Wanting to get our dance on, we ventured to one of the smaller, shadier stages to check out The Cool Kids. While The Cool Kids are from Chicago and I’ve seen them before, they really haven’t played much here in the past year since they became internet famous and went from playing basement parties to selling out shows as far away as Melbourne, Australia. They did not disappoint and put on one of my favorite shows of Lollapalooza. The Cool Kids have always been an interesting study in a band who almost entirely “made it” via internet hype. However, it’s very different and surreal when you see the effects of this in person. An entire frat danced in front of me, while a girl with braces who couldn’t have been over 15 juked it out to my right. ALL of us knew ALL the lyrics. Perhaps as my out of town guest Brenden of In Search of Arcadia suggested, music bloggers are the new A&R reps. I wonder what kind of people are reading this right now?

I will most likely be permanently banned from hype machine by the Blog Police when I admit that we left after The Cool Kids, choosing to skip Radiohead. I’m a big fan of Pablo Honey, The Bends and OK Computer-era Radiohead, but each subsequent album gets further and further from the moody rock that I always felt was Radiohead’s true talent. I honestly only listen to Radiohead’s older stuff, so two hours of wall-to-wall crowds to hear Thom Yorke’s voice filtered and looped endlessly would have tired me out far too early for my guests’ late night plans. I did hear it was amazing, culminating with fireworks and featuring a good deal of Radiohead’s older material in addition to the new. Perhaps I should have stayed, but this weekend was as much about catching up with friends old and new as it was about seeing the bands.

Below are a few of my favorite tracks from the bands I watched on Day 1 (and my favorite Radiohead track from the bygone “old days” for kicks). Stay tuned the next couple days as I bring you more of my Lollapalooza 2008 round-up.

The Black Keys – No Fun (Stooges Cover) (192 kbps)

Bloc Party – The Present (192 kbps)

The Cool Kids – Box of Rocks (160 kbps)

Radiohead – Black Star (192 kbps)

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