Grizzly Bear’s Tour Blog: Grilling Burgers for Radiohead and All Points West

All Points West festival had been getting tons of bad press about it being a dressed up Radiohead show, or overpriced, and aside from a crew member carelessly destroying Dan’s amp (the festival reimbursed us for it), I had a really great time there. The setting was gorgeous with the NYC skyline behind us. The grounds were clean. People seemed relatively sober thanks to a five-beer maximum policy and the shows and sound were on point. Highlights for me were watching pieces of Andrew Bird and CSS and the raucous party set by Girl Talk, complete with toilet paper guns (not very green of them, but we’ll just look past that). A special treat for me was getting to see Underworld whom I’ve loved for a good decade or so but never seen perform. They were quite the amazing band to come on before the main event of Radiohead, who played one of my favorite tracks “You and Whose Army.” During that song there was a great fish eye lens directly on Thom’s face while he played the piano that was edited and modulated across dozens of screens. Have I mentioned how insanely amazing their light show is? I was talking to some of the band about it and they said this is definitely their biggest production yet and they were really happy to hear how enamored we were with the lights (and music of course). Our own set at APW was surprisingly great. As I’ve mentioned before we aren’t exactly a festival band, and so when it was raining during the Mates of State who played right before us we all got a bit doomed about the prospect of playing to a wet crowd (having just done so in Montreal) but the sun cleared right before our set and a gorgeous dusk light came out and we plowed through our new songs to a really really great crowd. Probably one of the better festival experiences we’ve had. Of course I can’t not mention our hometown show the following night at the Williamsburg Hall of Music, which was truly incredible for us. We’ve never been the type of band to sell out a show in a few hours but t
	Published: 2008-08-13 Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Rock News