Bumbershoot Dispatch: The Great Mundane's Sprawling Sound, Red Fang Gets Anthemic.

One of the most exciting things for me this year at Bumbershoot was their partnership with Seattle's best purveyors of the beep-boop, Decibel Fest. Seattle's electronic scene is world-class, and I was curious to see how the stage - centered largely in the EMP Sky Church - would fare with the average Bumbershoot goer.

Initially, things didn't look good for Portland-based beatmaker Jeffrey Acciaioli, AKA The Great Mundane. The crowd was sitting on the floor of the Sky Church for the first 20 minutes of his set, and it took a security guard telling everyone they had to stand up to get the crowd on their feet. To be fair, though, that was no fault of the artist: his initial set was chock-full of shimmery, hazy beats that wafted up to the farthest corners of the room - perfect music for laying around.

Acciaoli quickly got things going after the crowd got on their feet, however, condensing those hazy beats into a dense, spawling sound full of Prefuse 73-esque glitch-hop, dubstep wobble, and bouncy synth lines. Combined with the amazing visuals on the Sky Church screen, the whole place felt transported into some sprawling cityscape of the future - Acciaioli's sound would be the perfect soundtrack for Blade Runner, if it had starred Forrest Whitaker instead of Harrison Ford.

For all the momentum Acciaioli's heavier-hitting stuff seemed to gather, however, the highlight of his set for me was his lighter, slower fare. In those moments, he took a lighter touch with his lower-end, laying intricate synth sounds interlaced over string and horn stings. The overall effect was a kind of cosmic beat-jazz, and everyone in the room was floating away right with the music.

Next up was Red Fang. Quick gripe: what's the deal with all the metal bands being in the Exhibition Hall this year? As any long-time Bumbershoot attendees know, Ex Hall is where sound goes to die. The venue's muddled-ass acoustics render any the subtleties of any band's sound into a sludgy wash, and for bands like Red Fang - where dudes shred hard - this hurts extra hard.

Thankfully, though, dudes were up to the task, powering through the sound issues and delivering a bang-over inducing set. You may have initially heard of the band through their stupid-fun music video antics - the Fang are more than just a gimmick band, however, backing up their videos with brutal songs that gloriously distill every classic butt-rock hook into a single guitar line.

Although I've seen Red Fang before, this is the first time I noticed how anthemic their set can really be - as they took to the stage surrounded by lasers and fog machines, the crowd responded like they were seeing Ozzy at an arena somewhere.

The spectacle of it all seemed to underline the perfect balance that Red Fang has between stupid-smart pranksters and dead-serious rock riffers - at times, the band's laser show and classic rock antics seemed to be a joke, a send-up by a band who's clearly happy shotgunning beers in the back of a shitty pick-up. At other times - particularly during closer "Prehistoric Dog", which had the entire crowd thrusting their fists up in a sea of horns - the arena rock set-up seemed like a perfect fit. ƒ