Pilcrow

Over this weekend my final post on the 2011 Capitol Hill Block Party went up on the KEXP Blog. I got off to a late start on Sunday and missed out on one of the bands I wanted to check out, Lumerians, but otherwise I only had plans to see Battles. So like Friday, Sunday was a more casual day of just seeing whomever happened to be playing at the time. That led to me discovering two more good bands, Dunes and Lake, both playing at the Vera stage, which really was very well curated this year. Battles of course were in my opinion the best band to play all weekend, but also may have been the loudest band on the main stage. I was overjoyed when they unexpectedly broke out a reworked version of "Atlas", their hit from their first album, and also used an even more radically reworked "Tonto" from that album as a transition piece between two of their newer songs. Compared to the thrill and inventiveness of Battles, Explosions in the Sky were something of a letdown—good, but not as engaging, and not really the right setting for them. And Pink Mountaintops were also good but not really what I wanted to finish out the evening. Still it was definitely a good day, and a very good Block Party overall.

As I mentioned, the full write-up is now up on the KEXP Blog. I also have a small set of photos from Sunday up on Flickr. I'm particularly disappointed that I couldn't get any decent photos of Battles, but I just couldn't get close enough to the stage, and facing the sun also made it worse for me. I actually had the write-up done in time to be posted last Wednesday, but I held off for a couple days hoping that one of the official KEXP photographers would have some better photos for me to use, in particular of Battles but also of the other bands. Unfortunately none were posted, and I didn't want to wait any longer and have the final write-up be too outdated.