Bonnaroo 2010: The Story So Far

Bonnaroo is here, which means it’s once again time to gather an unfathomably large mob of sweaty, dazed-and-confused festivalgoers into a Tennessee farm and set them loose on some of the best live music to hit the festival circuit this year. Your humble Paste correspondent is only too happy to give you a roundup of the excellent acts he’s been privy to thus far:

Neon Indian
Buzzband, no more. After an exhausting check-in process (where the entire Internet went down in Manchester), it was high time to decompress and ride the chillwave. It was somewhat surreal to see a blog-driven act take a festival stage in front of thousands of adoring fans, but Alan Palomo played his part with aplomb. And it was pretty hilarious to bear witness to the ever-increasing overlap between electro-hipsters and the jam band set—that’s what Bonnaroo’s for, after all.

I didn’t stay for the whole set, because it became readily apparent that Palomo was doing an electronica version of a Phish jam-out, since he only has an album’s worth of material to draw on. Still, that didn’t stop the entire audience from bobbing their heads in unison.

The Temper Trap
There’s been plenty of hullaballoo about their live performance, and I’m finally starting to see why. I’m struggling to come up with a better genre descriptor than post-pop-punk, but it’ll have to do. They play fast, furious, and with enough angular guitar-work to slice through concrete. The Harlem Shakes-esque vocals are just the icing on this very, very catchy cake.

Wale
I missed the first 15 minutes of this show, but I managed to stroll by in time to hear the opening notes of "W.A.L.E.D.A.N.C.E., and immediately knew I would be planting myself there for the entirety of his set.

He burned through a good chunk of material from Attention Defecit, and a handful of worthy mixtape tracks, before launching into a super-drawn-out version of “Chillin,” wherein he repeated the track’s titular line (“D.C. chillin’ / P.G. chillin’ / my name’s Wale and I came to get ’em”) for about 15 minutes straight. Is EVERYONE trying to be a jam band these days?