Results tagged “bumbershoot08”

If we were feeling snarky, we'd say it serves them right: after all, the vandalism of the booth is a mini-version of what the GOP leadership has done to the United States' image overseas in the past eight years, right? Poetic justice! But something about setting things on fire in the middle of a notoriously crowded festival strikes us as...well...inexcusably dangerous and short-sighted, even if what you're setting on fire symbolizes foreign and domestic policy of which you are very, very tired after eight years.

As previously mentioned, Monday at Bumbershoot was heavily skewed towards the alt-country side of things. We're not sure if that's good programming or bad programming. On the one hand, if you're way into alt-country, just attend that one day of the festival and you're all set; on the other hand, you've got some tough choices to make among Blitzen Trapper, Langhorne Slim, Two Gallants, the Maldives, and Old 97s. We managed to catch some of all of the above, which ranged from alt-country to straight-up country to country-twinged blues rock. The diversity of sound was overwhelming.

Our Sunday began with deja vu from Saturday, as Shim ended their set at the Sky Church a full twenty minutes early. We don't know about you, but if we were a little band with a big captive festival crowd, we'd take advantage of our hour-long slot by any means necessary. If we didn't have enough original content, we'd fill our set with covers (or "covers"), songs we'd never played for an audience before, spoken word, and/or a straight-up soapbox delineation of our hopes and dreams. But we definitely would not end our set early.

In terms of music, Saturday was definitely our biggest day at Bumbershoot. We spent most of the time running from one partial set to another. Along the way we caught Thao Nguyen and her backing band, the Get Down Stay Down. Thao's breathy voice is much bigger than the tiny girl it comes out of, and with her solid, clap-happy set, she managed to be energetic (for a singer-songwriter) without verging into crazy territory (even if she did almost perform one song twice).