My first official act of 2016’s MidPoint Music Festival was something I had never done for any of my previous MPMF excursions. I spent five minutes lathering my increasingly expansive forehead, rapidly descending face and wobbly wings with sunscreen. MidPoint has always taken place in the early evening and vampiric night so Old Sol was never an issue. With the festival’s shift to a Bunburyesque set-up and time frame, protection from the sun’s rays and respite from the broiling heat were integral parts of this year’s MidPoint planning.
Truth be told, I was not entirely convinced of the wisdom of this move to an outdoor festival. Eliminating the venue aspect of MidPoint seemed counterproductive, and dispatched with one of my favorite parts of the event, namely going to see a band that I knew would be lightly attended with the inherent bonuses of grabbing a beer without a line, having a possible opportunity to sit and give my aging legs and feet a much needed rest and peeing in a clean and more or less unoccupied bathroom. All these heavens were to be replaced by long food lines, longer beer lines, no seating in two parking lots, kiln-fired heat and the always delightful Port-o-let experience. Combined with my natural old-guy resistance to change and the knowledge that a lot of the people I looked forward to seeing at MidPoint were boycotting the event, I was not as tweaked about this year’s MidPoint as in years past.
Things began inauspiciously as the gate to the paid stages didn’t open until well past the starting time of the day’s first band, Philadelphia’s Darla, and by the time patrons were admitted and sounds were checked, the main, side-by-side Skyline and YMCA stages were 45 minutes behind schedule. For a festival that now had to wrap up at a specific, noise-ordinance mandated time, that was a fair chunk of time that had to be made up. On the plus side, the free midway area was pretty well stocked with a variety of food, beer and merch vendors, not to mention a water refill station, so there wasn’t too much waiting for anything, and the free Eli’s Stage was situated at the end of the midway in the middle of Sycamore Street, and not tucked in the more remote corner of the Lightborne parking lot as indicated on the event map.
When things finally got settled, Darla took the Skyline Stage with a frenetic Funk/Jazz punch. With a tight approach that touched on a wide range of like-minded provocateurs like Phish, Frank Zappa and the old British Jazz Rock band If, Darla shifted gears from new-school Funk to stuttering Jazz time signatures without missing the ever present beat. It was a great start to the festivities; after cranking out a tune from its debut, Let Darla Be Darla, bassist Michael Morrongiello noted, “You can buy it from us direct, cut out the middleman. We’ll be behind the stage, it’ll be real sketchy. Let’s hang out.” Sounds like a T-shirt/bumper sticker campaign in the making.
Next up, it was Cincinnati’s own Joesph on the YMCA Stage. You can’t swing a crippled cat without hitting a similarly named artist these days, but this is the band fronted by former Pomegranates guitarist Joey Cook, who played all the instruments on his solo debut, There Comes the Lord. Cook has assembled a formidable live band, including former Pomegranates bassist Pierce Geary and former Kickaways guitarist Devyn Glista on drums, an absolute dervish of restrained power. For Joesph’s MidPoint debut, Cook added keyboardist/vocalist Stephanie Kodakya Phillips, whose tremulous vocals and ethereal fills reinforced the band’s ’60s AM Pop architecture, particularly on a new song that Cook admitted with a laugh that they had learned the previous night. The psychedelic Pop gentility of the studio versions of the songs from There Comes the Lord, like “Jesus” and “My Master’s House,” gives way to acid-stripped sheets of spiritual sound and fury in the live context. Cook and his spare but powerful band present lysergically-infused ’60s Pop mixed with today’s Indie Rock, revisiting the Summer of Love in kaleidoscopic shades of blue cheerfulness, a humid purplish haze and a dozen strawberried alarm clocks. Cook is reportedly just about ready to release a new Joesph EP, as well as a new album; watch this space.
Then it was a time-warp step to the left for the raging madness that is Injecting Strangers on the Skyline Stage. And speaking of madness, if anyone is planning to film a documentary on clinically functional insanity, they might want to consider Injecting Strangers for the soundtrack to score that project. The quartet has been perfecting its pinwheeling Glam Surf Pop sound since bassist Dylan Oseas and guitarist Peter Foley defected from Automagik, teamed up with hammer-and-tong drummer Chase Leonard and found the perfect front foil in vocalist/lyricist Richard Ringer, whose Alice Cooper-meets-Danny Elfman sense of storytelling and vocal presentation has helped make Injecting Strangers one of the most unexpectedly compelling delights in local music.
The band’s MidPoint set was a prime example of the ingenious way they dance on the very precipice of becoming completely unglued on stage while somehow remaining in a sort of imperfect control. Injecting Strangers are masters of Rocks both Indie and Glam, Pops both Art and Surf, seasoned with a healthy pinch of the two fucks they absolutely do not give. It’s all over their debut full-length, 2014’s Patience, Child, but the proof is definitely in the live setting, where songs like “Lucky” and “Detroit” become anthemic cloudbusters. We can but hope that Injecting Strangers’ sophomore album is in the works somewhere in their creative catacombs.
With the Strangers’ concluding crescendo, it was a shift to the right (I’m rather liking this asphalt square dance) for the Down Under wonder of Julia Jacklin, the Australian singer/songwriter who famously talked her mother into signing her up for piano lessons at age 10 because Jacklin felt she was lagging behind Britney Spears’ career timeline. Thankfully, Jacklin didn’t follow Spears’ celebrity playbook down the head-shaving/no-undies-in-public path, choosing instead to study like-minded musicians such as Fiona Apple and Suzanne Vega, and make similarly observant and emotional Folk Pop music rooted in the ’60s and ’70s but blooming in the new millennium. Jacklin’s electrically acoustic style has also been yardsticked up against Angel Olson, and that’s a fair comparison, but her laconic delivery and arrangements bear some resemblance to Lana Del Rey as well. Jacklin’s live presentation retains the quietly charged melancholy of her debut album, Don’t Let the Kids Win; her shimmering spin through the album’s energetic “Coming of Age” gave me a distinct sense of the work of Miranda Lee Richards (and if you don’t know that name, Google her now, we’ll wait) and her set, like the album, was strong, varied and well paced. With the sun blazing straight onto the west-facing stage, Jacklin made a mid-set observation — “We’re Australian and we’re still hot, so it must be hot.” It was indeed, but even in her coolest moments, Julia Jacklin was causing a significant rise in the mercury without any help from the sun.
I ducked out of the end of Jacklin’s set to make my first visit to the WNKU Stage to see Ona, which was rightfully featured on the station as its Local Discovery of the Month in August. The band was just finishing soundcheck as I arrived; frontman Bradley Jenkins was testing his mic level by alternating between the “flat tire on my Cadillac” line from the album’s title track and “the convenient stores of Speedway,” and I knew these guys would be among my favorites. Musically, Ona offers a rootsy sound that evokes the psych jangle of the Gin Blossoms with a West Virginia twang, the atmospheric and cerebral Indie Rock balladry of Wilco and the muscular intelligence of Dawes with a heartland sunburn. Highlights of the set included “American Fiction” and “Sleep, Rinse, Repeat,” but they were, much like their placement on the American Fiction album, gems in a bag of jewels.
A quick jog back to the Skyline Stage put me right in front of Molly Sullivan where, as usual, her ethereal Art Pop brilliance was cranked to an emotional 11. Although some of her quieter moments were slightly overshadowed by the raucous conclusion of Ona’s set across the street (despite assurances to the contrary, there was definitely bleed between the three paying stages), Sullivan maintained her concentration and projected her soothing Ambient Cowboy Junkies vibe without giving into the temptation to fight volume with volume. A siren blared toward the end of her last song and as her always excellent band’s last chords were ringing in the air, Sullivan thanked the crowd and noted, “Say a prayer that whoever that ambulance is for is OK.” Molly Sullivan’s music is a serene and beautiful presence in the local music scene and if you walk away from one of her gigs without falling at least a little bit in love with her, you should see a heart specialist and schedule your three-size Grinch upgrade.
The next two bands on my MidPoint agenda share similar structures and energy levels but differ greatly in execution. Both Public, on the YMCA Stage, and Leggy, at the Eli’s BBQ-sponsored free stage at the midway, are guitar/bass/drum trios that play with gale force abandon and intensity, and both have Cincinnati Entertainment Award nominations for Best New Artist, but their styles are diametrically opposed. Public works the contemporary Pop/Rock angle to near perfection; the combination of John Vaughn’s blistering guitar attack, Matt Alvarado’s thunderous bass and Ben Lapps’ viking tubthumping is captivatingly loud and their boy-band good looks guarantee an audience filled with screaming teenage girls. But if you’ve ever heard Public’s full-bore Rock take on Britney Spears’ “Toxic,” which the trio uncorked during its MidPoint set, or anything from its EPs — 2012’s Red (with the Pop crush of “Birdie”) and 2015’s Let’s Remake It (featuring the exuberant “Pretty Face”) — you know that the threesome is anything but typical. Public has grown its fanbase exponentially with well-fitted opening slots for Walk the Moon and Twenty One Pilots, and its Friday set was further evidence of its maturation over the past six years.
Leggy, on the other hand, brings a similarly visceral vibe to its raw and raucous Garage-Surf-meets-’60s-girl-group-meets-Punk-Rock meets-Dance-Pop gumbo, and its recent shows have proven conclusively that, like Public, the band has grown immeasurably over the past three years. Claiming influences as broad as The Strokes, the Vines, Lana Del Rey and St. Vincent, guitarist/vocalist Véronique, bassist Kerstin Bladh and drummer Chris Campbell have scored a ton of cool opening slots in the States and abroad, and released a series of propulsive EPs, capped with the recent eponymous full-length compilation released in the U.K. by Damnably Records.
Leggy’s fabulous MidPoint set was a lot like its appearance at last summer’s Bunbury Music Festival, albeit on a much smaller stage. Allaer’s swaggering vocal sashay and crackling power chords are the fuel for the powerful engine that is Bladh’s pummeling bass and Campbell’s Punk-rooted powder-keg drumming. The trio’s constant touring has honed its performance to a razor’s edge and its shambling Punk groove is always completely within its laser focused control. Hey, isn’t it just about time for an actual new Leggy album? I thought so, too.
After Leggy’s triumphant set on the Eli’s Stage, it was time for a brisk walk back to the Skyline stage for The James Hunter Six, the London-based Soul/Blues outfit. Hunter’s musical history dates back to the ’80s but his most recent work with the Six has brought him the recognition and fame that eluded him three decades ago. Hunter’s band consists of two saxophones, an organ, a bass and drums, and it sounds like a driving Soul orchestra with Hunter serving as conductor and guitar hero all in one. As his five bandmates work out a smoky Blues riff, Hunter, as lone guitarist, alternately chunks out blistering rhythms or cranky solos that revel in the complex simplicity of Chuck Berry and the unadorned proficiency of George Thorogood. While Hunter’s thick Essex accent could be slightly hard to follow with the counterpoint of MidPoint’s general festivities and the overlap from the WNKU Stage (compounded by my inevitable Rock-bludgeoned hearing loss), there was no mistaking the intention of the music, which was to get you right and a little closer to the night.
At the raucous finish of The James Hunter Six, I sauntered over the the YMCA Stage (this could only be easier if I had a Rascal scooter) where Knoxville, Tenn.’s Cereus Bright was running through a last-minute soundcheck. Yet another WNKU discovery, the rootsy Americana band began with the core duo of Tyler Anthony and Evan Ford, and swelled to a quintet with the addition of a trio of players with Jazz credentials. The resultant quintet found its new sound in the members’ differences as well as their commonalities and ultimately gelled in a full-length debut, the recently-released Excuses. Cereus Bright, in studio and on stage, hew in the direction of Chicago’s Poi Dog Pondering with more than a hint of Avett Brothers and a dash of Mumford and Sons/Lumineers yo-ho-ho Folk rockateering, and the band’s MidPoint set exhibited a perfect blend of passion as well as expertise.
After a stroll down the midway, I headed back to the Skyline Stage for the Afrobeat miracle of Antibalas. The 12-piece band has an incredible back story (look it up, we’ll wait) and I was intrigued by everything I heard online, but the YouTube videos and SoundCloud postings don’t provide even a fraction of the musical and spiritual power that the nearly 20-year-old Brooklyn collective displays in the live arena. Originally patterned after Nigerian Afropop superstar Fela Kuti’s Afrika 70 and Jazz pianist Eddie Palmieri’s Harlem River Drive Orchestra, Antibalas evolved into something much greater than a simple hero-worship band. In concert, Antibalas is a churning, roiling, snarling mass of music, like charmed snakes dancing to a polyrhythmic beat and the sonic effect is similar to dipping peyote buttons in liquified black tar hash and eating them like psychedelic bon bons. For just about an hour, MidPoint was transformed into an enormous outdoor electric church, and we swayed to the hymns, and ate of the body and drank of the blood and if it had gone on much longer, we would have shed our clothes and painted our bodies and danced naked under the stars. And it would have been better than all right, and Antibalas would have led the way.
On the YMCA Stage, Tokyo Police Club followed Antibalas with a contemporary Indie Pop/Rock sound that was diametrically opposed to the Afrobeat provocateurs, but no less energetic or inspired. The Canadian quartet has been together with the same members for the last 11 years and in that time, TPC has produced four excellent albums and an equal number of EPs, including two this year, the irresistibly titled Melon Collie and the Infinite Radness, Parts One and Two, the latter released on the Friday of the band’s MidPoint appearance. The group’s effervescent set, particularly “My House” from Melon Collie Part Two, gave off rippling sheets of Weezer goodness and they were subsequently rewarded with unabashed adoration from the MidPoint multitude.
With a bowl of Chicken Mac Trucks’ finest fare in hand — for me, the Buffalo Chicken Mac and a square of cornbread — I headed to the picnic tables across the street from the Skyline Stage to witness the weird, wild psychosonic world of Future Islands. As the experience unfolded in front of me, like an intricate origami swan deconstructed into a treasure map where everything is written in musical notation, the sound and fury of Future Islands became simultaneously more compelling and more baffling, which led to a series of unanswerable questions. What if Ian Curtis had been happy? What if he’d been around long enough to experience New Wave in the ’80s? What if he’d translated Joy Division into carnival/tribal Electro Pop and sang with primal scream therapy ferocity? What if the new millennium brought him to a futurist retro manifesto that included quick strokes of XTC, Gary Numan and Gang of Four, and was punctuated with occasional Death Metal bellows that rattled the window casings of the old School for the Creative and Performing Arts behind us? It would be pretty bloody awesome, that’s what. And with that, the first day of MidPoint’s new era was in the books.
Friday Night Non-MidPoint B-Sides
One of the challenges of moving MidPoint to an outdoor setting naturally means that the festival must now adhere to the city’s noise ordinance and wrap things up by 11 p.m. each night. And one of the interesting by-products of that reality is that MidPoint attendees still have a lot of entertainment available to them in the post-MidPoint glow.
On Friday night, I bailed toward the end of Future Islands, which was, as noted, exceptionally cool and original, in order to catch at least a little of Lemon Sky at the nearby MOTR Pub. Due to a scheduling snafu, soundman Steve Schmoll didn’t arrive until 10:15 p.m., so the band went on at 10:30, meaning I was just in time to witness the quintet’s complete set. And what a set it was. There is little doubt in any mind that Lemon Sky is one of the area’s most accomplished and tightly prepared outfits. In the studio, the band effectively translates their musical expertise, first by writing compelling songs and arranging them to showcase their individual strengths without pretense or cloying creative ego and further by absorbing and translating their numerous influences in original and engaging ways. On stage, the band invests those same songs with a stratospheric power that approximates Hard Rock density without ever losing the melodic Pop soul that made it so deeply appealing in the first place.
In a shortened 50-minute opening set for L.A.’s Mystic Braves and the Dream Ride, Lemon Sky blew through songs from its eponymous debut and its stunning follow-up Dos, injecting a show stopping favorite, its white-hot cover of The Beatles’ “She’s So Heavy (I Want You),” which magnificently spotlights the hair-raising vocal acrobatics of frontman Aaron Madrigal, the masterful guitar interplay between Madrigal, Eric Cronstein and Ed Bruker and the heaven-sent, hell-scorched heartbeat rhythm section of bassist Steve Korfhagan and drummer Eric Keyes. In a very real sense, to see Lemon Sky, in a small club packed with fervent fans, singing along and screaming their lungs out after every song, seems reminiscent of fan-told tales from another era of seeing Led Zeppelin in an English pub or The Doors at the Whiskey, well before destiny came knocking. Lemon Sky is currently in the midst of completing their third album, and given the advances on Dos, largely due to the solidification of the new lineup and the band’s continued growth and evolution, the next one might just be the charm that attracts destiny to its front porch with flowers, a box of candy and a whispered invitation to the big time. And the band will be ready for its close-up.
More Friday Notes
Although I was not particularly jazzed about this year’s MidPoint, due to the elimination of the pub crawl aspect and the boycott, at least a little of the old excitement crept in as I walked down 12th Street toward the gate. As it happened, there would be more than one way to attend MidPoint this year.
Almost immediately, I ran into the King of Event Volunteers and former Buckra guitarist Jacob Heintz, easily one of the planet’s best people. That’s the only way to launch a MidPoint. After a quick tutorial from Jacob on the Midway layout, I headed down to the gated entrance and waited in line for the official opening.
Once inside, I made my way to the YMCA Stage where my Class X radio pal/producer/all round good guy Eddy Mullet and his daughter Jess were chatting up Joey Cook before his set, which was well on its way to eventually being 45 minutes late. I also ran into Stu, who generally wolf-packs with the estimable Paul Roberts and Big Jim but was on his own since they were among the absent protesters. The proximity of the wristbanded stages meant that we’d be crossing paths a lot over the next three days.
At the Injecting Strangers show, I chanced into the boss, music editor Mike Breen, and his daughter, sporting oh-so-important noise cancelling headphones. I also ran into the Japanese businessman who discovered MidPoint while in town several years ago and has made the annual pilgrimage to Cincinnati every year since then to enjoy the festival. We’d met last year at MOTR but I was fairly certain he didn’t remember; people were buying him drinks and he was pretty loaded. I reintroduced myself and he smiled and said hello; he looked like he was enjoying the music but he also seemed slightly disoriented by the new set-up.
At the James Hunter show, I spotted former CityBeat co-publisher and Beer Buying Hall of Foam enshrinee Dan Bockrath. He backslapped me and said, “I feel like you should be buying me a beer.” I acknowledged that I should — not that I would, but I should. We talked about the new MPMF arrangement and headmitted that changes to the festival had been discussed in the recent past but it had never gotten farther than a discussion. After a few minutes, Dan excused himself and disappeared, probably into the VIP tent, where they have spotters to keep out the riff raff, namely me. When he returned, he slipped a chilled can of Goose 312 into my sweaty hand and said, “It pains me to see you drinking bottled water.” And with that exchange, at least something of the old festival was brought into the new, and the world seemed somehow right again. “I don’t want to pay to get into the Friday night write-up,” Dan noted. Oddly enough, it seems to have worked.
Heading over to the Midway after Cereus Bright, I ran into former CityBeat photographer Jesse Fox, who’s in the process of moving to New York to try her hand at freelancing and possibly scoring an actual job. I hadn’t seen her since she’d left the paper and announced her relocation and I was glad to get the opportunity to say goodbye and good luck. Of course, Jesse doesn’t need luck; she’s got her cameras, a flawless eye and a boundless imagination. Our loss, their gain.
At Tokyo Police Club, former Enquirer writer Gil Kaufman and I had a nice conversation comparing tales of getting fired; his were excellent, but I think I’d have to call it a draw. Besides, my wife has the best story. She was fired 12 years ago on the first day of our vacation by way of a message on our answering machine. Heartless, gutless, brainless — the –less trifecta.
This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 5, 2016.