Arcade Fire at Panorama Fest 2016 - Friday
photo by Amanda Hatfield

Panorama 2016, more day 1 pics & review (Arcade Fire, Alabama Shakes, Broken Social Scene, more)

photos by Amanda Hatfield

NYC’s inaugural Panorama music festival on Randall’s Island is a wrap. We already posted some day 1 pics, day 2 pics, day 3 pics, day 2 review and more pics, video of Arcade Fire, and Schoolboy Q and Joey Bada$$ reviews, and now here’s more pictures and review of day 1 (Friday, July 22).

Friday got the momentum rolling with a performance from hip hop DJ and producer Madlib, who’s worked with MF Doom, Kanye West, Freddie Gibbs, and countless others. He of course had plenty of material to pull from on Friday, and the crowd was excited to hear all of it.

Following their MHOW show on Thursday (7/21) (their first NYC show in five years), Broken Social Scene played the fest on Friday. Amy Milan of Stars took the stage with them, and BSS reminisced about NYC, saying “New York has always been nice to us, since the first time we performed in 2003.” The Canadian supergroup captivated the audience, talked politics between songs and played crowd favorites, such as “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl.”

Major Lazer performed early Friday evening at the main Panorama stage to an extremely rowdy, sweaty crowd. The electronic group put out all the stops with flames, smoke machines and other over-the-top stage explosions. The set was filled with remixes and samples of current popular songs along with Major Lazer music. The group closed out their performance with their uber popular song from last year with MO, “Lean On”.

After Major Lazer, soulful rockers Alabama Shakes took the the stage. Lead singer Brittany Howard sounded amazing and apologized in between songs for not talking to the audience much. Brittany said “it’s not that I don’t love y’all, I’m just a little bashful”. The group played a good mix of songs off their two albums Sound & Color and Boys & Girls.

Schoolboy Q was up next. Review of that HERE.

Closing out the night was Arcade Fire, who played a politically fueled spectacle of a show and paid homage to David Bowie. Images of Bowie became the backdrop of the stage and Win Butler claimed that NYC will always be Bowie’s city. The group gave an emotional performance of their song “Afterlife” after showing the pictures. In reference to the upcoming election, Win went on a rant about how “Donald Trump will never be the fucking president of America.” The band played music from all four of their albums, closing the show with confetti canons and a massive sing-along to their song “Wake Up”. The whole band jumped into the audience at the end of their show, along with Preservation Hall Jazz Band and continued to play an extended version of “Wake Up” while parading through the crowd.

Pictures of the above-mentioned artists, plus FKA twigs, Here We Go Magic, DJ Khaled, Algiers and more, in the gallery above,