I'd been in pretty high gear for the majority of Friday and Saturday so it shouldn't have been too surprising I hit a wall early Sunday afternoon, but somehow the Big Ears folks even seemed to factor festival fatigue into the schedule: I heard more than a few people talk about how the third day of the festival was kind of an anticlimax (to be fair they said this before having seen The National, which I didn't see the end of but can only imagine that "climactic" would be fairly applied) but to me it seemed much more of a welcome cool-down.
Still pissed at myself for missing Adrian Belew's guest spot at Old City Java's Ampient sub-event, especially since it was probably a little more up my alley than the solo set (which I also skipped but am less so kicking myself about) but Tim Hecker's pitch black wall of noise wasn't a bad way to start the day off in decompression mode. Following Hecker and leading in to Bang On A Can All-Stars' impressive-enough Music For Airports were The Books, whose performance seemed to be an early-afternoon favorite and remained the highlight of my Sunday. I'd seen them at the Bijou last year but had forgotten just how well they come across live, with a series of top-notch video art pieces timed out to their playful chamber compositions. There's were several acts at Big Ears supplementing their live shows with video elements, and each of them could stand to take some cues from the Books.
Dashed across the street during Music For Airports in an effort to nail down a seat for St. Vincent, which didn't end up being too much of an issue. (A big gripe of mine with last year's festival was the assigned seating at theater shows, and ACE went out on kind of a limb in embracing general admission, which seemed to pay off really well for them. I've rarely seen the Bijou or Tennessee Theatres as packed as they were for some of these Big Ears shows, but I never encountered a truly unmanageable crowd, and never failed to find an open seat when I wanted one.) Nico Muhly & Doveman's piano set was lovely and occasionally surprising but St. VIncent's band and their downgrade of Actor's adventurousness couldn't help but suffer among a weekend's worth of boundary-pushing.
Didn't buy what little I saw of the Shaking Ray Levis but I don't suppose I saw enough to really judge. Tim Hecker & Ben Frost sounded like their respective solo shows played at once from the same stage (don't get me wrong, it was still pretty keen) so I crossed over to Kno Ears @ the Pilot Light, which was hosting its own free Knoxville Marathon all afternoon: Ascension Party, New Madrid, Double Muslims, Dirty Knees, The Sniff and hours of others on the tightest set-to-set turnaround I've ever seen them run.
Gave My Brightest Diamond a second chance, didn't take. And then The National, about whom I've never been able to make up my mind. They write a lot of good songs (it was nice to hear "Slow Show" and "Mistaken For Strangers") but the acoustics of the Tennessee Theatre seemed to pull Matt Beringer's voice too far from the band, and it kept the music from really hitting. Still, it was a fitting final blowout for what really asserted itself as a top-notch music festival. Thanks to AC Entertainment, all the bands, all the venues, all the staffers, all the attendees, and all the Knoxvillians that may not have known what the hell was going on but really ended up putting Knoxville's best face on this weekend.
