Fun Fun Fun Fest Preview: Orange Stage

Nobody's really sure what "indie" means anymore, but seeing as the boundaries of the genre have expanded to include the highly bloggable likes of knob-twiddlers, resurgent proto-punks, fuzz-smearing kids, and other assorted freaks, it's safe to say that the Orange Stage is Fun Fun Fun Fest's requisite home for "indie," whatever that means. As the first part of our stage-by-stage guide to the festival, here's a rundown of all the acts you'll find there both Saturday and Sunday.

SATURDAY

Royal Bangs, 1:10 p.m.
Knoxville’s energetic, synth-flavored funksters Royal Bangs take a decidedly Lower East Side route to late-night lasciviousness on recent sophomore effort Let It Beep, marrying fuzzed-out garage-pop clangor to the gritty dance-floor grind of TV On The Radio. "My Car Is Haunted" is a telling glimpse at Royal Bangs' neon-lit world: clanging cowbell, synth sounds rescued from Invisible Touch-era Genesis, and a glam-rock stomp of a chorus that explodes into nonsensical verses about losing your shit in "the age of lasers." 

The Laughing, 12:35 p.m.
Elevated by insistent beats and the quivering vocals of frontman Logan Middleton, The Laughing's recent debut LP, Fever, signals the band's boldest experiment since it officially retired those white denim vests and stuffed tigers. There's plenty of splashes of modern psychedelia in Fever's art-pop, whether it's the Animal Collective harmonies on "Elevators" or the double-time dub that breaks out in the middle of "Runner."

Crystal Antlers, 1:45 p.m.
When a record hits with aggressive, primitive garage grooves on one end and a psychedelic smear of hyper keyboards and noisy guitars on the other, it can take quite a few spins to get oriented. Fortunately, Crystal Antlers’ first full-length, Tentacles, has enough sonic smarts to let all the elements of the California band’s sound expand and mesh together in its own time. Its over-stimulated flurries of organ and catchy-yet-hoarse vocal melodies predict an energetic live show, to be sure.

Times New Viking, 2:40 p.m.
If Lou Barlow and Sebadoh’s output in the '80s made horribly hissy lo-fi production on cassettes seem warm and inviting, aesthetic scions Times New Viking have bridged the gap in bringing charmingly dissonant storms of static plied with melodies onto compact disc. The new Born Again Revisited finds the band turning its clumsy sonic thwack into something much more propulsive and unabashedly fun. It might sound cleaner live, but that lack of fuzz doesn’t mean a lack of fun.

Shonen Knife, 3:30 p.m.
Shonen Knife shot out of Osaka in the early ‘80s as an all-girl punk group with earnestness to match its infectious melodies and three-minutes-or-less songs. The band eventually came to the attention of the taste-making K Records, and by the mid-‘90s, Shonen Knife had obtained any number of era-appropriate status symbols—a tour slot with Nirvana, appearances at Lollapalooza, and a featured music video on Beavis And Butt-head. Super Group, released Stateside this year, is the band’s most recent work, and despite some lineup changes, it’s pretty much exactly what fans can (and should) expect.

Red Sparowes, 4:20 p.m.
Having culled current and former members from the likes of Isis and Neurosis, Red Sparowes goes to great pains to distance itself from those popular merchants of doom. And for the most part, it’s right to disassociate itself from the propulsive assault—the post-rock band’s most dramatic moments arrive in undulating waves rather than crashing full bore on the listener’s head. The band takes a page from Explosions In The Sky and Godspeed You! Black Emperor's epic soundtracks and marries them to the sinister buzz of early Sonic Youth for a uniquely disquieting sound: new-age music for metalheads.

No Age, 5:10 p.m.
Sporting just as much pop as arty distortion, No Age’s music has attracted a lot of different ears since the duo started making an attractive racket four years ago. Last month's Losing Feeling is a shimmering return to the band's EP-loving early days as well as a logical extension of 2009's Nouns, which found drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall playing strongly sticky songs that have earned comparisons to Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, and the like. It’s one thing to hear No Age on record, but another thing altogether to take in the volume live.

Death, 6 p.m.
How different would the history of rock music be if Clive Davis hadn't balked when Detroit's Hackney brothers refused to change the name of their Hendrix-by-way-of-MC5 power trio to something more radio-friendly than Death? For starters, Bad Brains probably wouldn't be everyone's go-to example of a kick-ass, all-black punk band (and H.R. and company would have a touchstone for its explorations in dub textures in Death's "Let The World Turn.") Drag City's issue of the band's aborted 1975 studio sessions, …For The Whole World To See, has been widely praised—sadly, eldest Hackney David didn't live to see that acknowledgment, but his brothers carry Death's shoulda-been legacy with this extremely rare live appearance.

Yeasayer, 6:45 p.m.
Yeasayer’s debut, All Hour Cymbals, marked a watershed moment for the fledgling psychedelic revival. The record didn’t just boast a unique sound—an all-over combination of Eastern music and psychedelic rock, tribal chants and soaring harmonies—but it seemed to propose an entirely new syntax, as if the Brooklyn band had discovered a previously unknown musical language. A new album called Odd Blood is due is due out in February.

Les Savy Fav, 7:35 p.m.
A hammy band big into indie-rock slop, Les Savy Fav hit its prime in the late ’90s, when bands and audiences were content to stand around looking bored at shows. Leader Tim Harrington and his man-kissing, mattress-surfing antics changed all that—not to give short shrift to the rest of the group, which dishes out devilishly catchy post-punk that laid the groundwork for thousands to follow. Les Savy Fav takes notoriously long hiatuses between records, and after six years, the band returned in 2007 with Let’s Stay Friends. The record was a big leap forward, but it’s still on-stage that Les Savy Fav matters most. 

Ratatat, 8:30 p.m.
Ethereal rock-tronica duo Ratatat was forged in 2001 out of a common disinterest between guitarist Mike Stroud and multi-instrumentalist/producer Evan Mast: They’re both bored by music with lyrics. The laid-back, upbeat pop-electronic outfit effortlessly cranks out imaginative hip-hop remixes and original songs with persistent beats, odd sound effects, and spacey guitar riffs. Having recently contributed to Kid Cudi's debut album, the duo is currently putting the finishing touches on its fourth long-player, the aptly named LP4.

SUNDAY

Growing, 12:30 p.m.
Growing is a trio devoted—with an awful lot of patience and a good amount of faith— to drones. The group’s sound is all about texture, which figures heavily in extended tracks that space out somewhere between ambient music and the kind of crinkly noise-baths poured by Black Dice. Growing has made a couple good records for notable Brooklyn label The Social Registry, including the more rhythmically minded 2008 album All The Way. 

The Black And White Years, 1:05 p.m.
True to their name, Austin’s The Black And White Years tread a fine line between soulful funk and reggae (the black) and twitchy art-rock (the white), much like their obvious forebears in Talking Heads. Of course, no band that gets compared to Talking Heads these days actually sounds like Talking Heads, but TB&WY’s reggae stabs of guitar, sinewy bass grooves, and anxious art-rock yelps thrum with their own dance-party-at-the-end-of-the-world energy.

This Will Destroy You, 1:40 p.m.
This Will Destroy You makes spacey, guitar-driven post-rock with an obvious nod to Explosions In The Sky, but with tight, economical arrangements that keep wankery to a minimum. Its well-received, 2008 self-titled CD is as much of a comfort as it is an anomaly: Free of gimmicks or orchestral pretension, it’s the type of album that almost demands dimmed lights and at least one form of chemical enhancement. That said, it’s also somber, direct, and overwhelmingly emotive—a rare accomplishment for a band without vocals or brainlessly gratifying pop hooks.

Fuck Buttons, 2:15 p.m.
With suitcases full of cheap electronics, mouths crammed with toy microphones, and an air of giddy nihilism, Bristol duo Fuck Buttons comes off like Mad Max’s Junkyard Gang, building towering sheets of droning, doomsayer static out of whatever’s lying around. On the 2008 album Street Horrrsing, warm keyboards create coronas of blissful melody that peek around the black hole of industrial wreckage, while pulsating tribal rhythms suggest the apocalypse has a beat you can dance to. And now comes Tarot Sport, a more refined album produced with help from dance-music whiz Andrew Weatherall. 

Atlas Sound, 3 p.m.
Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox's beautifully ethereal solo side project Atlas Sound trades his main gig’s noisier tendencies for gauzy sighs and small, captivating moments. Those moments get less small on the recent Logos, which finds Cox bursting out of the bedroom to skip across the beach hand-in-hand with Animal Collective's Panda Bear ("Walkabout") and barrel down the Autobahn with Stereolab's Laetitia Sadler ("Quick Canal"). Cox's live shows—like the shambling solo set that opened the last night of Spoon's three-night stand at Stubb's this summer—carry the air of someone still adjusting to sunlight, but his self-aware sense of humor keeps even the clumsier moments entertaining.      

Broadcast, 4:45 p.m.
Broadcast has wavered in and out of the spotlight throughout the past decade, weathering several lineup changes and a dry recording spell since 2005's Tender Buttons. But the electro-driven dream-pop outfit—now consisting only of founding members Trish Keenan and James Cargill—continues to seek out new psychedelic avenues. October's Broadcast And The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults Of The Radio Age is a throwback mini-album made in collaboration with The Focus Group—a.k.a. graphic artist and Ghost Box label co-owner Julian House—which should prime fans eagerly awaiting next year's promised full-length.

Lucero, 5:40 p.m.
Genre associations are tricky to make, and one of the most slippery is "alt-country," which covers folky Dust Bowl honky-tonk to Replacements-esque roots rock and all points in between. No one who starts out as an alt-country band seems to stay there, and Memphis group Lucero offers more proof of that in its major-label debut, 1372 Overton Park, released in early October. Gone are the blatant Son Volt-isms of its early work, and in their place is more nuanced and compelling roots rock that never loses sight of its punk roots.

Mission Of Burma, 6:35 p.m.
Mission Of Burma's influence on American post-punk would be hard to overstate. In only four years together in the early ’80s, the original iteration of the Boston band perfected a wiry, nervous style of art-rock that would inspire legions to give their raw punk crunch a tight, cerebral squeeze. Going strong since returning with a 2004 comeback album, the group explores a more atmospheric space on the recent The Sound The Speed The Light.

Crystal Castles, 7:30 p.m.
Often bratty, occasionally beautiful, Toronto-based boy-girl electro duo Crystal Castles deconstructs dance hits and rebuilds them to the circuit-bent 8-bit beat of ancient game consoles. (After all, they share their moniker with a 1983 Atari hit.) While lead programmer Ethan Kath and singer Alice Glass have earned most of their acclaim as a remix act (Bloc Party, Klaxons, Uffie), their solo output has its own unique, rip-it-up-and-hotwire-it-again impact that volleys wildly between deafening cyberpunk bombast and oscillating waves of cold, futurist dystopia.

Of Montreal, 8:30 p.m.
Listening to Of Montreal’s shimmering electro-pop, there would be no way of knowing that shows can involve live horses onstage, body paint, and full-frontal nudity. That’s because the band has managed to simultaneously straddle the more experimental scene it grew out of (the Elephant 6 collective that also spawned Neutral Milk Hotel and Elf Power) and the warm embrace of the quasi-mainstream (*cough*OutbackSteakhousecommercial*cough*). Of Montreal has earned a rep for turning out easy-to-enjoy records, like 2008’s bit-of-a-grower Skeletal Lamping, while cranking up the weird factor onstage—especially since frontman Kevin Barnes discovered his black, transsexual alter ego, George Fruit.