Festival Preview: Ironing Out Schedule Conflicts at Forecastle 2017
While the Pitchfork Music Festival, a festival favorite among music nerds, is going on up in Chicago, the Forecastle festival will be going on down South in Louisville, KY boasting a great lineup this year featuring headliners Odesza, LCD Soundsystem, and Weezer. Even with music festival competition only four and a half hours away, Forecastle holds their ground as a excellent medium-tier festival that has one of their best lineups this year since their legendary 2014 lineup featuring Jack White, Beck, Outkast, and The Replacements. This year marks the festival’s sixteenth birthday and has a beautiful location at Waterfront Park right on the Ohio River on the Indiana-Kentucky border.
But while an incredible, varied, and plentiful music festival line is always ideal for maximum bliss, it just means that there will be more tough schedule conflicts you will have to choose between dozens of acts. Luckily WIUX will be covering the festival this weekend and is here to offer an opinion about what are the best choices for the toughest conflicts.
Friday: Run the Jewels vs. GRiZ vs. Teddy Abrams & Friends
Honestly most conflicts that will be talked about will just be a matter of musical taste and opinion. In this case, if you’re a hip-hop fan, RtJ, EDM? GRiZ. Avant-garde or classical? Teddy Abrams & Friends. But in my personal opinion RtJ is one of the best live rap acts on the planet and have a few of the best hip-hop albums of the past decade. Killer Mike and El-P are a couple of the most affable but hardcore, political, and poetic MCs in the rap world today, and you owe it to yourself to see them in the flesh.
Saturday: Phantogram vs. Vince Staples vs. Beach Slang
Oof. What a hit. If you’re a electronica geek of course Phantogram is the obvious choice but otherwise Beach Slang and Vince Staples is the big conflict for me personally. As a big follower and fan of punk, Beach Slang should be a shoe-in but with Staples’ new album Big Fish Theory being released a couple of weeks ago and coming out of the gate of one of 2017’s best rap albums, Staples would be a hard set to miss. I’ve seen Staples a couple of times in the past, but hearing the Big Fish Theory tracks live is a good reason to catch Staples this weekend.
Sunday: Spoon vs. Tycho vs. Rayland Baxter
Yet again, Tycho for the electronica geeks so that puts consistent rock mainstay Spoon against blooming singer-songwriter Rayland Baxter. If you want to see an extraordinary alt-country singer-songwriter getting bigger every year that he’s around, definitely consider Rayland Baxter but otherwise get your rock on and see Spoon. Spoon are currently touring Hot Thoughts, their excellent take on psych-rock that they released this year and they proved that they are still as relevant and full of ideas as when the Austin, TX band first formed. Rock acts keep on dwindling off of music festival lineups and Spoon is a great example that rock music is alive and well and can still be exciting.
