Blasting Off with Lotus, Tycho and El Ten Eleven
Music for the evening at Red Rocks kicked off with ambient post-rock twosome El Ten Eleven. Drummer Tim Fogarty and guitar player/bassist Kristian Dunn did a great job of keeping the crowd’s attention throughout their set, which is, at times, something of a tall order for openers at Red Rocks. When Dunn wasn’t looping the bass line, he just strummed out. He was swapping his bass guitar for a double-neck, then the double-neck to an eight-string, then back to the double-neck (there’s a musical chairs/instruments joke in there somewhere). The tranquil, melodic nature of the duo’s sound is very much in line with Tycho’s, and with a Tycho set to follow, El Ten Eleven’s set almost felt like a beacon of frequency for the crowd to tune their ears to.
As El Ten Eleven wrapped up, the crowd seemed to vibrate with excitement. Many of the shows I’ve been to on the rocks have been preceded by a general shared feeling of worried anticipation whether or not the main acts would meet expectations, with the stakes being incredibly high at the peak of their tour and performing at one of America’s most iconic venues. Saturday was almost completely devoid of such doubt. Everyone in attendance seemed to be so completely sold on Tycho and Lotus that the usual nervousness was replaced by elated impatience.
It wasn’t long after Scott Hansen, better known as Tycho, stepped on stage with his band before it was clear the crowd’s faith had been well placed, as the four of them proceeded to play one of the most beautiful hour-and-twenty some-odd-minutes sets I have ever seen. To paraphrase a friend during their performance, “This sounds like how a sunrise on the beach in Southern California feels.” To see his music brought to life not only with live instruments but also with the immaculate accompaniment of a backdrop featuring stunning visuals that ranged from desertscapes to psychedelically enhanced pretty ladies was truly a wondrous experience. The set the band played wasn’t one that was meant to leave your feet sore from dancing up a storm. Of course it was groove-able, but there were numerous times where I found myself slowing down so I could really focus on everything happening on stage.
The band started things out with the first single released from the upcoming Tycho album Division, which opened with an almost punk-sounding bass line before the more delicate side of their sound took hold. After “Division,” the band performed the slow and cosmically angelic “A Walk.” From here, it was a seamless blend of new material and tracks from Tycho’s last two efforts, Awake and Dive.
I really cannot stress just how beyond pleased my eyes and ears were for every second of that set, and when it came time to say farewell to Hansen and friends, while it was sad, the impatience from before had not dissipated in the slightest. Tycho alone would have been a hell of a show, but in addition to that little dose of wonderful, those in attendance were blessed with a serious kind of funky get-down orchestrated by the one and only Lotus crew.
Lotus has been a group I’ve wanted to see for a very long time, but seemingly at every festival Lotus and I have co-attended, I always seem to find myself dealing with some random day-three festival drama (so-and-so is lost, campsite is underwater, strange hippie sleeping in friend’s tent, etc.), so I was real eager to find out what I’d been missing out on. As it turns out, what I was missing out on was a whole lot of groovy goodness.
Like Tycho, Lotus also had a heavy visual element to their performance; however the two acts’ visual components were very different. When Lotus stepped on stage, all the wires we’d seen hanging from the rafters over stage throughout the night revealed themselves to be LED wires, sparkling all shades of colors, and the stage lights kicked into full effect.
Lotus set things off in a familiar fashion with “128” before moving through “Cold Facts” and then bringing out live vocalist Rachel Eisenstaedt of Raven Jane to perform one of their new tracks, “Suntan,” featuring a nifty bongo-driven beat that set up a gnarly guitar solo. That was apparently only a taste of what was to come, as the “Norse” into “Hammerstrike” that followed was absurd heat. “Norse” found the bongos again playing a prominent role alongside the guitar, while retro-gaming-style bleep-bloops dropped in the background as the hanging wires across stage appeared to be dripping lights.
These bleeps and bloops accompanied a bongo/vocoder jam that transitioned into “Hammerstrike” which featured what may have been the most ridiculous shred-fest I have ever seen in person; the band absolutely knocked this one out of the park, making it a high point of the evening for many. After “Hammerstrike,” Lotus debuted another song from their new album, this time playing “Anti-gravity” as they were joined onstage by the the vocalist they recorded it with, Oriel Poole. At first it was difficult to make out some of what Poole was singing due to sound/pitch issues, but towards the end that seemed to dissipate, as the lyrics reverberated off and throughout the rocks of the amphitheatre with a far greater clarity.
From here, the band hit on “Livingston Storm” before bringing out yet another vocalist, the very animated Gabe Otto, to help show off some more new tunes from Eat the Light. From the jump Otto had a certain James Brown-esque energy and swagger in his movements on stage, from strutting side to side shaking the tambourine to whipping his jacket off and singing while on his back at times. Otto assisted the band with “Sleep When We Are Dead” and the title track for the new album before fading towards the back while the band worked through ”Spaghetti,” “Nematode,” “Greet the Mind,” and “Behind Midwest Storefronts” before finally closing with a psychedelic guitar solo-laden “What Did I Do Wrong?”
Expectations were high this weekend, but not one of the three acts seemed to falter. By the end of the night an often finicky crowd was sent off to the parking lots to find their cars with big ol’ smiles plastered on their faces. Chatter on the walk out of the venue was as positive and appeased as I can recall in recent shows, and for good reason. People got their money’s worth this weekend, and there is no better way for artists to silence critics than to come out and absolutely crush their sets like all three acts did on Saturday. If you would like to listen to Lotus’ set from Saturday night, a digital download will be available for purchase through the band’s nugs.net account.
Scroll down to see more shots from this weekend:
[huge_it_gallery id=”13″] All pictures courtesy of Madison Backens