- If I had to make an educated guess, "Coachella" is a Spanish word meaning "17-year-old girl in a skimpy Pocahontas outfit." It's a weird Venn diagram where nubiles swigging Bacardi concealed in sunscreen bottles, aging big-pants ravers, vegan nerdcore boys and Earthmama hippies get together to get skin cancer.
It's an even weirder place to go specifically to see electronic music, since it's mostly daylight, 900 degrees Fahrenheit and any act with a breakbeat and an air-raid siren will inevitably fall short of M.I.A.'s performance in the eyes of most attendees.
That said, Day 1 in the desert kicked off with a lukewarm set from DJ Switch in the Sahara (read: electronic-oriented) tent. Switch drizzled '80s sampler love into a kiddie pool of Nightrider fart bass and tribal percussion, to modest effect. He got the bikini-strung tweensters hopping, but that's some pretty low-hanging fruit, nah'mean?
Photo credit: Andy Vermeulen
Things really kicked into full impulse power when Kompakt darling Gui Boratto took the stage. He was painting with big, broad strokes from Chromophobia, working his way nearly through the album in approximate track order. Predictably, the sun-dappled joygasm that is "Beautiful Life" made us beg through an extended intro tease and then brought the house/tent down. The boy from Brazil was repping a straw panama hat with a necktie hatband and bug-eyed sunnies and smiling at the crowd, blowing earnest kisses and such.
When he cut into the eponymous jam off Take My Breath Away, he had like 5,000 people (who probably had no idea who he was) with their hands in the air, and it seemed likely that they just didn't care. Gui found another winner in the set (page obviously torn from "Beautiful Life") in "No Turning Back," a song that seems a little clinical on the LP, but was bursting in the heat like an overripe pomegranate full of bittersweet symphony.
Photo credit: Andy Vermeulen
Divisive chiptune thieves Crystal Castles drew a crowd of rapscallions that fit the music perfectly: arch, freaky, good looking, kind of assholish. Noisemeister Ethan Kath laid down a minefield of art-damaged distortion while bansheebabe Alice Glass shredded ears and hearts with her cat-in-a-blender voice. The Sahara tent was too damn crowded and downright scary at times, as I'm sure C.C. wanted it. I caught an elbow to the face a couple times during "Crimewave" but that's what it's all about, right? It's not Coachella if you leave unscarred.
Other highlights of the day included a tight, mannered performance from Echo and the Bunnymen-soundalikes White Lies and a glamtronic facemelter from Austin, TX-based duo Ghostland Observatory. The former affected just the right amount of reserved musicianship and New Wavey gestures to please the crowd and the latter unleashed a tornado powered by goofball laser funk and the unselfconscious vamping of frontman Aaron Behrens.
It was a day that will be remembered by most for like three hours of spooky Paul McCartney cooing and a frustratingly limp performance by a pissy Morrissey. But for those willing to blow off the big names, the small stages yielded a trick-or-treat candy bucket filled with mostly full-sized techno chocolate and hardly any of that shitty old people toffee.
Read the RA review: Coachella 2009 - Day 2
Read the RA review: Coachella 2009 - Day 3