AUSTIN — Without enough money to travel all the way to Tallahassee, Fla., for the OU-Florida State game, what better way to spend the weekend than at the largest outdoor music festival within easy driving distance?
The 10th edition of Austin City Limits ran Friday through Sunday at Zilker Park in Austin, featuring big names such as Kanye West and Stevie Wonder while also showcasing lesser-known talents such as James Blake and The Antlers.
Blake played Friday afternoon and was an early highlight of the festival. He entwined beautiful melodies with heavily modified electric sound to produce music that is simultaneously soothing and unnerving.
His three-piece band showed an aptitude and mastery of multiple instruments, most of which were unconventional for a typical indie band. The drummer switched seamlessly between a drum pad and a stripped-down drum set to create a sense of rhythm that was both natural and electronic.
The guitarist frequently filtered his instrument through a modifier with the end result sounding more like a synthesizer than guitar. Blake himself switched between a keyboard and a synthesizer that bent his voice to the tone of his fingers’ choosing.
However, Blake had a very broody stage appearance, consistently withdrawing into his music and only realizing there were people watching him a few times when he popped back into reality.
It was a picture-perfect display of the troubled musician practically thrust before an audience when he seems to prefer to be alone.
The very synthetic feel of Blake was in stark contrast to Friday night co-headliner Coldplay’s more raw performance.
The British pop group’s frontman, Chris Martin, made a concerted effort to connect with the crowd, inviting watchers to sing along, raise their hands and jump around.
The band stuck with traditional instruments with very little modification from their natural sounds.
From familiar tunes of records past to tomorrow’s hits from the band’s upcoming album, Coldplay outplayed the rest of the field on Friday, including co-headliner Kanye West.
Saturday provided just as much excitement as the first day, but from less familiar sources.
Young The Giant, an up-and-coming five-piece from Southern California, set the bar high for the rest of the days’ performers in the early afternoon on Saturday. It’s refreshing to see a band that still soundchecks itself, despite having fully capable roadies.
With the start of a hard rain fall, the band opened with a few exciting songs to get the crowd jumping and enjoying the cool weather.
Sameer Gadhia’s voice was powerful and drove the band’s catchy strains ahead full speed, and Payam Doostzadeh’s melodic, movement-heavy bass lines provided a stable anchor for the songs to get loud without feeling screamo.
On Saturday evening, My Morning Jacket headlined the stage nearest to the TV tent, where several hundred of the nearly 50,000 festival-goers were watching the OU-Florida State, giving the football fans the best mix of music and sports ever attempted.
Sunday finished strong with an enticing lineup from doors open to doors close, featuring Mariachi El Bronx’s latino-California punk fusion, the indie-rock tunes of Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr., Fleet Foxes’ game-changing indie-folk sound and the increasingly popular anthems of Arcade Fire.
A lot has changed for ACL since starting 10 years ago, but the end result is a festival full of different sounds that showcases some of the best musical talent in the world, all without a costly trip to Chicago or Nashville.
James Corley is a journalism senior and the sports editor of The Daily. You can follow him on Twitter at @jamesfcorley.
Editor’s note: The Fleet Foxes and Arcade Fire were scheduled to play after deadline.
