Among the initial list of indie rock acts confirmed for this year’s Musicfest Northwest in Portland, Oregon, are freshly reunited emo OGs Sunny Day Real Estate and the Get Up Kids, two bands that couldn’t help but pop out at us from amongst a heap of wussy no-names like Mudhoney, Explosions In The Sky, Bad Brains, Dirty Three, Twilight Sad, Pink Mountaintops, Amazing Baby, Girl Talk, Beach House, Monotonix, Grouper, Titus Andronicus, The Long Winters and fittingly, Pains of Being Pure At Heart. Good heavens! One of the Pacific Northwest’s largest, the Willamette Week-founded festival will be descending on PDX’s many venues for four days and nights starting on September 16. Stay tuned for additional lineup additions and snag your wristbands right here before they’re all gone and you feel silly.

Photos and words by Rez Avissar

Animal Collective for the first time seem content. With each record having its own distinct sonic palette as well as instrumentation, this band works in eras: a batch of song gets written, toured for months, recorded, released, and then comes back with a new sound and new set of songs. On every tour pre-Merriweather, the majority of material would be new to all ears. Mostly unreleased new material, Avey Tare once explained that the band began doing this because in their formative years they played mostly to the same friends and handful of faces in New York and wasn’t content to play them the same stuff each time. This stuck with the band, and despite sometimes disappointing casual fans by not playing the “hits,” it gave them ample opportunity to explore and flesh out new material (check out the (ongoing) development of a jam like “Fireworks” for instance). This has allowed fans to watch the songs grow and evolve, often changing names several times (…remember when Fireworks was called “Bottle Rocket?”). It also kept things very interesting, part of the reason Animal Collective’s bootlegs get swapped so lovingly by fans.

But now, for the first time, there’s no new batch, and the band isn’t quite ready to move on yet. According to Avey, “we’re not in a new place right now, and I feel like it took a little bit of work to bring us to this point. I think we have a lot of thinking or planning to do to think about, or take the step into, the next direction, whatever that is.”
Read the full story