Eyedress’ Lo-Fi California Cool
After Caamp dropped out of ACL last month, a schedule shuffle pushed Saturday’s American Express stage acts up. Lola Young played at 2:20pm instead of 12:50pm, and Idris Ennolandy Vicuña, aka Eyedress, moved from the 2 o’clock hour to the folk trio’s vacant 4:20pm slot. More than a fill-in, the switch up felt like kismet; I can’t speak to Eyedress’ smoking habits, but his musical output sure befits a blissed out afternoon. Emphasizing vibes over specific lyrics, the Filipino artist – donning a Sonic Youth shirt and a Supreme guitar strap, which represented a very specific Californian archetype – quietly mumbled atop his five-piece band’s twinkling post-punk. Meanwhile, the screen behind him projected his likeness, black mullet and tiny sunglasses to boot, in animated and claymation-style images, like some kind of meta videogame. Though his lyrics were largely indiscernible, and the singer uttered few words to the crowd apart from a reminder to drink water and a couple of “fuck yeah”s, the Gen Z-heavy audience swayed along. And when they crooned the “prettiest girl I’ve ever seen” refrain of certified gold single “Something About You,” it proved Eyedress offers something concrete after all. – Carys Anderson
Mad About BALTHVS
Donald Draper sits in a Gotham bar, 1960, brooding. In the corner a trio sets up. Under a bolero hat and jacket – no shirt, rail thin – the front slinger plugs in. A bassist in blue chiffon and futuristic white moon shoes hoists an aquamarine Fender bass while the drummer adjusts his sunglasses and ’stache. The Mad Man perks up as the (unbeknownst to him) Bogotá breakouts begin at a ground zero beachhead, The Sufaris’ “Wipe Out.” Santiago Lizcano beats the toms, guitarist Balthazar Aguirre becomes the Poseidon of reverb, and Johanna Mercuriana belies her go-go attire with bleating bass runs straight out of the Pacific. Draper gets a bead on the expressionless bassist, Latin American muse. “It’s a beautiful stage and we got the shade,” intones Aguirre, the only band member that speaks English. Lysergic patterns project behind them. Draper seeps into currents, eddies, and just plain drops of water – simple precipitation – occurring over the next hour in his Tito’s vodka tent. Basslines walk, a Stratocaster spiders narcotically, and every drum hit evokes a spy movie. The ad exec projects astrally. Harvest, a cosmic journey through earthly epochs, buzzes in the background. Draper gets up, pulled toward Mercuriana and the stage. – Raoul Hernandez
Hermanos Gutiérrez’s Solar Energy
Seated onstage atop a wheeled platform, its rug spreading out their guitars and miniature metropolis of pedals, Hermanos Gutiérrez put in the traditionally biggest ask of ACL Fest throughout its 22-year-history: listen under that atomic Texas sun. Eighty-nine degrees at dinnertime on Saturday felt 10 degrees hotter as our atomic star leveled over Zilker oaks surrounding the T-Mobile stage. All in white, Alejandro Gutiérrez looked continually at his younger sibling Estevan – hat, braids, jewelry, tattoos, Gretsch. Out in ATX’s ever chatty receiving line, relative silence. Alejandro fingered bass-like gravitas while Estevan picked subsonic leads. In fact, Hermanos Gutiérrez face off most like a pair of rhythm guitarists finishing each other’s sentences. Pulsing, throbbing, breathing, they hypnotized through sonority. Sonido Cósmico, their latest, projected a spare, hypnotic warmth. Toward the conclusion of the hour-long set, a camera caught the brothers from behind, their lean-to silhouettes elevated to look out over a throng of humanity watching them attentively. As a particularly heroic oak finally blocked out the sun, and with almost none of the overflow audience abating, Hermanos Gutiérrez proved that pick-n-pluck is mightier than the drink-n-schmooze – no small feat. They tamed the land. Sonido Cósmico, indeed. – Raoul Hernandez
Khruangbin Soundtracks a Psychedelic Sunset
How many acts can I describe as “vibey” before it gets redundant? Eyedress’ alternative may have inspired more head bobbing than singing, but AmEx follow-ups Khruangbin – one of Texas’ favorite psych rock exports – have got to have dibs on the term. Vocalists Laura Lee and Mark Speer barely even sang during their sunset set; instead, the Houston artists opted to focus on their pulsing bass and watery guitar while drummer DJ Johnson kept the beat. The vibrant “So We Won’t Forget” and “Time (You and I)” marked pandemic landmark Mordechai, while the exotic “Maria También” went back to 2018’s Con Todo El Mundo. Of course, the trio had to welcome Fort Worth’s Leon Bridges – who played the exact same stage and time slot the night before – to the stage. Up first, the crooner led the melancholy “Mariella,” from 2022’s joint EP Texas Moon, before the artists launched into the title track from their first team-up, Texas Sun. Under that very star, Lone Star pride reverberated. – Carys Anderson
Jungle Feels Love
When Jungle last appeared at ACL Fest in 2018, they played on the satellite stage near the merch hall across the street from the main music grid. Joining the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Lizzo as Miller Lite side stage performers who proved sprawling festival headliners, the English dance collective staged Saturday’s must-see spectacle. On a bare stage set strobe lit and shot in black & white – through a continuous fog of stage smoke – the touring septet wrangled more keyboards than amps in a rave of bouncing, crowding, gawking adulation. Under a moniker logo reminiscent of Seventies television trendsetter Soul Train, production heads Josh Lloyd-Watson and Tom McFarland led the pandemonium with a slew of party-starters off last year’s fourth full-length Volcano, “I’ve Been in Love” grooving much like Donna Summer’s genre starter “I Feel Love.” Lydia Kitto let her siren keen do all the talking, “Let’s Go Back” hitting the ATX throng like ecstasy. In ACL Fests past, Foster the People and Cults rode tsunami surges through Zilker, and Jungle banged the capital’s drum relentlessly. “Us Against the World” photographed the group almost like B&W cut-outs, while “Back in ’74,” complete with Kitto brandishing her flute, hit huge – as if Tom Tom Club transcended off New Wave radio onto today’s festival circuit. – Raoul Hernandez
Reneé Rapp’s a Funny Girl, Not a Mean Girl
A quick scan of the items held up by the wide-spanning crowd at the mid-tier T-Mobile stage explained, without words, the types of people who worship Reneé Rapp. One festivalgoer held a Texas flag adorned with the colors of the rainbow; one held a sign declaring, “Would Top 4 Reneé;” another held a sheet that simply said “CUNT.” Never mind her turn as Regina George on stage and screen – 24, delightfully unfiltered, and openly lesbian, Rapp has amassed strong admiration among queer Gen Zers, who find the singer-actress’ complete lack of media training refreshing, not rude, in the age of polished influencers. Turning to music post-Mean Girls, she treated ACL to both spunky, fuck-you pop and melancholy piano ballads. Those latter tracks, like “The Wedding Song” and “I Hate Boston,” didn’t hit as hard as upbeat numbers like “Poison Poison” (“You’re so fucking annoying, you could poison poison”), but Rapp’s forewarnings – after a “How y’all doing?” elicited a cheer, she quipped, “Good, because you’re about to get real fucking depressed” before that first downer – brought the fun back around. Like Chappell before her, Rapp’s charisma will likely land her at a bigger stage next time she comes to Zilker Park. – Carys Anderson
Dua Lipa Gives Us Something
The last time Dua Lipa played Austin, she told the crowd Saturday, was at South by Southwest in 2016, “when I was just starting up and we were just dragging all our gear and instruments into different bars.” Finally back eight years later to headline our other marquee festival, she said, “This is everything I could’ve ever dreamt of.” Well evolved from the basic choreography that inspired the infamous “Go girl, give us nothing!” meme, the English-Albanian singer delivered a pop set full of showmanship and set design. Strutting around in a leather two-piece set, the singer traversed her three-LP discography, from the minimalist keys of Calvin Harris collab “One Kiss” to Future Nostalgia’s “Your Woman”-sampling “Love Again” to “Houdini” and “Training Season,” off this year’s Radical Optimism. All intrigued, but breakup anthems “New Rules” and “Don’t Start Now” – not coincidentally, some of the artist’s biggest hits – made it clear: Dua’s at her best when she’s singing a disco-tinged kiss-off, inviting a chorus of teens to belt along with her. – Carys Anderson
Keep up with the latest ACL news and follow the Chronicle’s coverage from the fest at austinchronicle.com/acl.
This article appears in October 4 • 2024.