Fuji Rock Festival 2019, Day Two

The weather is always an issue at the Fuji Rock Festival and this year was no exception. On Saturday, on our way to catch the festival shuttle that took us from Echigo Yuzawa station to the site every morning, we heard from the hotel owner we stayed at that we needed to be careful because a typhoon was on its way to Niigata and some collateral effects were going to be felt at Naeba, the festival site. That didn’t turn out to be wrong, to the point that at the end of the day we decided to skip one of the acts and head back to the hotel a little earlier than we planned, but this was not due entirely to the weather, I’ll explain later.

After the obligatory tororo we stopped by the Red Marquee to catch the Taiwanese band Sunset Rollercoaster already in progress. We only stayed for about ten minutes. Their music was a bit on the Soft Rock side of things, taking inspiration from acts of the seventies like The Doobie Brothers and Bread. The six-piece band was tight and the arrangements were nice enough, but the singer made things difficult. Their smoothness and his off-key singing were not a good match. Maybe there were technical difficulties? 

At the White stage Gezan gathered a considerable crowd for their set. They’re a local band that’s been active for a while but recently there’s been some buzz about them in the indie scene. I was surprised that psych legends Acid Mothers Temple even opened for them recently. Unlike the aforementioned, Gezan’s approach is a lot more accessible. Some of their songs were pure J-pop-punk ditties that wouldn’t be out of place in an Ellegarden set, if it were not for their vocal delivery. But some others are a lot more interesting. For example, for one of them the bass player stood on top his bass amp playing a didgeridoo as the singer delivered a more or less spoken word tune. In another they were joined by several singers from the Japan noise independent scene who, one by one, shared the mic to deliver a couple of bars in their unique style. I could recognize the lead singer from Endon and I heard that one of them was from the band The Novembers. That was a really cool idea having them to share the stage like that. The audience approved. Theirs’ was an energetic  set that went way beyond my expectations.

Unfortunately expectations were not met with the following act I caught at Field of Heaven. Billed as Shuta Hasunuma Philharmonic Orchestra, it was a large ensemble of musicians lead by Hasunuma himself. The huge number of people on stage worked more as a gimmick in a sense, because the quality of the material was just not there. I did like some nods to Reich, Riley and Glass’ minimalism in some of the arrangements, with repetitive patterns fading in and out with slight differences in the background, but overall it was not a memorable set.

Another somewhat underwhelming set was the next one I checked at the Red Marquee. Jay Som made her Japan debut at that stage and unlike her electrifying set at the NPR Tiny Desk series that convinced me to skip Unknown Mortal Orchestra in her favor, this show didn’t have that spark that made her YouTube turn special. It was an effective fifty minutes set consisting on lots of well crafted songs. It could be argued that it was a straight up performance without any bells and whistles, but to me her subdued disposition along with the unusually long tuning sessions turned this set into a borefest that not even the shoegazy touches could improve. It was a decent show, but for an afternoon Festival set it lacked something.
  

Being there kept me dry, it was bucketing outside. I didn’t stay dry for long as I headed out to the White Stage to wait for Courtney Barnett, another act among my most anticipated ones. She opened with Avant Gardener and those lines in the lyrics about “what exciting things will happen today?” reverberated loud and clear as a call to arms, it was a promising start. I got acquainted with her music recently and I especially liked her vocal delivery which reminds me of Mark E. Smith’s in The Fall, a similar brand of deadpan humor and stream of consciousness poetry with a primal rocking backing. The problem is that there’s a bit of a quality drop between her first and second album that is felt even stronger in a live setting. For this reason I couldn’t enjoy her set as I wish I would. She is an amazing performer and the last three songs, closing with Pedestrian at Best made up for it. I hope to catch her at a better night.

At this point most festival attendees were completely soaked, the rain hit hard but we didn’t know that things were going to get even worst in terms of weather. I waited for about an hour in the dining area between Field of Heaven and Cafe de Paris, there are a few tables under a huge canopy that are very helpful after the long walks around the site. With the torrential rain outside they were extra helpful this time around. When it calmed down a bit, around fifteen minutes before the next act at Field of Heaven, we decided to move there to get a decent spot near the stage. George Porter Jr, founding member of the legendary New Orleans institution The Meters took the stage and he couldn’t have chosen a more fitting tune. His six-piece band, that included a couple of members of the Neville dynasty, opened with Doodle-Oop (The World Is a Bit Under the Weather). The song was not only fitting lyrics-wise, it also established a groove that everyone soaked in, just like the ponchos did the rain. Regardless the weather people stayed and grooved to the New Orleans funk with a set of all Meters song that included the classic Cissy Strut. The band even came back for an encore, and believe me when I say that the rain was hitting hard, because it was. In spite of that people would not leave so the came back for a rendition of the opening track of the Rejuvenation album: People Say. There was no doubt that this was by far the best act of the day. One more time funk, delivered by musicianship of the highest caliber, saved the day.

The plan was to see as much of Sia from the distance as I could stand, but it ended up being not much. Of course the weather was a factor, the rain at that point was pretty much hitting like a typhoon. The walk from Field of Heaven to the Green Stage where she was headlining, felt like walking in the middle of a flood. Two songs were all I could stomach. Personally speaking I think she truly defines a word that I hardly use: pretentiousness. If that word outlines things that pretend to be artistic by ways of tired cliches that take themselves way to seriously, then her wig gimmick combined with the “modern dance” choreography and her cheesy bombastic music is the textbook definition. I could’ve stayed longer if were not for the weather to give a more detailed account, but I had to leave. I couldn’t even grab dinner and had to resolve to a convenience store bento and to just wait for the third and last day of Fuji Rock 2019.

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