Arcade Fire, Pearl Jam, The Hives, Tame Impala, Snoop Dogg, Major Lazer & more played Australia's Big Day Out fest (pics)
photos by Chris Graham
Arcade Fire / Hives / fans at Big Day Out, 1/19/2014
‘Song 2’ by Blur plays loudly over the P.A. right before Arcade Fire starts. Woo-hoo! Oh, how we laugh. Their twilight set is masterful. Ten musicians on stage throughout. A diverse range of material plucked from their four albums. Plenty of shiny stage props to look at. To me they’ve always felt like a band moments away from crashing and burning under the weight of their own pretension but their songs are just too damn good for it to matter. ‘Reflektor’, in particular, is a monster live: dramatic, immersive, surprising. They’re afforded 90 minutes on stage and it’s time well-spent, though newie ‘We Exist’ is pretty dreary. I get the sense that the players love the material as much as the crowd does – which might sound like a weird thing to say. But I find that most bands play to the audience, revelling in the mechanics of the performance itself, rather than playing for the fans and allowing some of that intangible ‘magic’ to rain down like so much glitter fired from cannons – [The Vine]
While we’re in the depths of winter in North America, its prime summer festival season in Australia. The Big Day Out is one of Australia’s premier music fests, and occurs in five cities over two weeks, kicking off at Gold Coast’s Metricon Stadium & Carrara Parklands on January 19, featuring Arcade Fire, Pearl Jam, Snoop Dogg, Deftones, The Hives, Mudhoney, Tame Impala and lots more. We’ve got a set of pictures from the Gold Coast show in this post.
More below…
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Violent Soho
Loon Lake
Blue Juice
Portugal the Man
Toro Y Moi
The Naked and the Famous
Tame Impala
The Drones
The 1975
Primus
The Hives
Mudhoney
Beady Eye
Arcade Fire
Vista Chino
Pearl Jam
Snoop Dogg
Deftones
Major Lazer