Review: On the Ground at Levitation 2024
Gang of Four, Swirlies, Slowdive, and more highlights from the four-day fest
Reviewed by Carys Anderson, Raoul Hernandez, and Genevieve Wood, Fri., Nov. 8, 2024
A Changing of the Alt-Rock Guard
Some festivals pander to older audiences by relying heavily on music veterans; others push modern talent with a lineup so cutting-edge it feels alienating. For me, the bill for Levitation 2024 was so exciting because it found a middle ground. Individual shows, hosted at multiple venues, felt like genre showcases, where legendary artists played alongside contemporaries who clearly follow in their footsteps, but also bring something new to the table. I’m glad I sought out both sides of the spectrum.
Joyful and political, Gang of Four’s Friday sunset slot at Far Out Lounge was a hopeful reminder that not every leftist punk loses their convictions – or their energy – as they age. Founding vocalist Jon King and drummer Hugo Burnham, alongside Slint guitarist David Pajo and Belly bassist Gail Greenwood, played fan favorites from defining post-punk document Entertainment! and more, while the screen behind them projected flags aligned with the Pride, Black Lives Matter, and Woman Life Freedom (a Kurdish women’s rights slogan) movements. “Make America Shit Again,” King quipped, referencing the large-looming election. Jumping and jerking, hopping the length of the stage in a squat like a cymbal-bashing monkey, and at one point beating a microwave with a baseball bat, King was visibly thrilled to be performing – a sight especially nice to see ahead of GoF’s 2025 farewell tour. The bandmates fell out of time with each other a handful of times, but the admiring, age-diverse crowd let it slide and moshed anyway. After all, how lucky were we to hear “Damaged Goods” live in the first place?
At Parish later that evening, Swirlies offered a different kind of legacy set. Though singer-guitarist Damon Tutunjian told the Chronicle he wasn’t sure the Boston-launched Nineties band still counted as shoegaze, the fivepiece’s tinnitus-inducing performance – where Tutunjian and Elliott Malvas’ guitars completely drowned out Tutunjian and singer Deborah Warfield’s voices – proved the genre tag’s accuracy. Though they played from essential LPs Blonder Tongue Audio Baton and They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days in the Glittering World of Salons, the group didn’t prioritize fan service; tuning breaks often took several minutes, and Tutunjian seemed determined to triple-check every tone before starting, even if his bandmates were long ready to go. The omission of “Pancake,” Swirlies’ biggest song, and “Wrong Tube,” a fan favorite, from the set list underscored this unbothered quality, but audience members flooded the camera, projecting psychedelic images of the band on the screen behind them with heart-hands.
Sunday at Mohawk, 29-year-old British singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya wrapped Levitation with the tightest set of the weekend – even though, she revealed, the show marked the first time she, bassist Eli Smart, drummer Vishal Nayak, and multi-instrumentalist Jazzi Bobbi played together. Highlighting this year’s My Method Actor and 2022’s PAINLESS, the quartet managed to translate Yanya’s moody, heavily produced compositions in a live setting. Apart from the singer’s skillful guitar playing and husky voice – she masterfully switched between her lower and upper registers from one line to the next – Bobbi did the heavy lifting on synths, backup vocals, and, most notably, saxophone. The woodwind doesn’t even appear on Yanya’s studio recordings, but when she imitated the E-bow guitar solo on “Call It Love,” it felt essential. Before wrapping her encore with PAINLESS highlight “midnight sun,” Yanya covered PJ Harvey’s 1993 classic “Rid of Me.” Chugging along solo before her band crashed in for the song’s anthemic chorus, the artist commanded the stage as much as the inimitable Polly Jean first did 30 years ago. The kids are alright, indeed. – Carys Anderson
Japanese Noise, English EBM, and Austin Post-Punk Levitate Homegrown Halloween Binge
One day, like Led Zeppelin, Rush, Can, Motörhead, Stooges, and Sonic Youth, Boris will cross over through history into the Halls of Valhalla as musical gods. Even their most ardent fans, and for locals that now stretches back well over double-digit decades, might not be able to name a single song from the Japanese noise sovereigns, but to have experienced the Tokyo trio and touring quartet’s event horizon live is to have lived rock & roll’s oldest testament. Inside the tent extending the Empire Garage stage Halloween night, a lysergic visual landscape unfolded on its canvas underbelly as the sonic boom bomb squad – augmented by a drummer so lion king Atsuo can conduct Kabuki death-psych – wound down their extensive Amplifier Worship Service tour by beginning at feedback worship from Wata and double-neck axe fiend Takeshi, exploding through Dead-like double drumming, and peaking on quasar sludge at minute 70. Crack the Bible black next time Boris levitates your town.
While Boris blasted us over Halloween’s international dateline Thursday, ceasing at 12:05am, industrial UK dance brand Nitzer Ebb touched its electrodes to our Frankenstein onesie’s neck bolts at 12:18 and thumped, jolted, and chanted us into a bacchanalian bliss until only muscle memory got us home. “I waited a long time to get them here,” enthused Elysium owner John Wickham beforehand, and Bon Harris as backed by local darkwave dom Rona Rougeheart delivered. Cut-and-pasted anthems including “Join in the Chant” and “Murderous” galloped laptop beats and girder bass as the full house got a satisfying glimpse at the early-Eighties pioneers at the best haunt in town to host them.
At The Jesus Lizard’s Far Out Lounge headliner mass Friday night, Duane Denison’s white hair, David Sims’ distinguished gray hair and beard, Mac McNeilly’s headphones, and frontman David Yow’s gnarly Rumpelstiltskiness greeted the crowd. “They’re old,” chuckled a veteran post-punk behind me, who like the rest of us in the general vicinity looked exactly like the reunited genre heroes onstage. And sure enough, The Jesus Lizard awoke once again to stomp its live musical capital of origin like clubs Cave and Cavity still gestated local, national, and global music legends-to-be. “Fuck you and your stupid fucking family,” began Yow at the tip of 70 grim and grinning minutes. “I mean that in the nicest way possible.” Denison’s avalanche riffing, Sims’ four-string hemorrhaging, McNeilly’s scarecrow bash, and Yow’s deranged vocal and physical contortions spat out tarpit classics including early-set punishers “Seasick,” “Mouth Breather,” and a Steve Albini shout-out. McNeilly’s cymbal napalm on “Nub” reanimated the foursome’s Nineties heyday like Godzilla emerging from the Gulf. New fossil fuels “Alexis Feels Sick” and “What If?” helped christen TJL’s first full-length in 26 years, September’s Rack, into the fold. A four-song encore buzzed an apt but gratifying “Fly on the Wall” lyric upon exit: “I can never get any rest ....”
Destroy Boys’ bus broke down, so instead of slack Cali alt-pop topping Day 3’s Mohawk bill, sub-headlining locals Die Spitz stepped up and leveled the club on a warm, blustery, still Halloween-hungover Saturday night. Dressed for the holiday – birthday guitarist/drummer Ava Schrobilgen sporting horns, drummer/guitarist Chloe Andrews in clown makeup and bunny ears, bassist Kate Halter painted green of face, and frontwoman Ellie Livingston as Carrie – threw down and ultimately stamped out the torch once passed to them by L7 at the same venue. Seething and heaving, a full outdoors floor lurched to the quartet’s explosive grunge – ultra Bleach-y and In Utero heavy. Schrobilgen received a “bisexual banana” with candles and a chorus of jolly good fellow, while we got “Big Boots” to the face from every crowd surfer and mosh pit refugee in town. – Raoul Hernandez
New-Gen Talent Shares Space With Shoegaze Greats
Shuffling through Mohawk’s queue on Halloween night, this writer battled a serious case of the pre-show scaries. Staring down the barrel of four dizzying Levitation Fest days – and noting the spry youthfulness of my fellow showgoers – I couldn’t help but wonder if I was up to the challenge.
Luckily, the live-wire energy of Frost Children’s opening-night set left little room for such concerns. The sold-out show represented a sort of homecoming for Moonbby, the alias of DIY booker/Levitation co-presenter Cristina Mauri. Despite a recent NYC relocation, her ability to draw scores of Austin’s hippest young concertgoers remains a force to be reckoned with.
Onstage, real-life Frost Children siblings Lulu and Angel were tornadic forces of nature, flooring the gas on their high-energy brand of electroclash early and never slowing down. Costumed as tortured grunge greats Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, the duo struck an immaculate balance between glitched-out futurism and old-school punk sensibilities, unleashing two rapid-fire covers of “Drain You” and “Celebrity Skin.” Each successive beat drop of “SHAKE IT LIKE A” landed like a sonic slap to the face, while the crackling synth surges of “FLATLINE” saw the blue-haired Lulu dive headfirst into the crowd. Their breakneck set felt syrupy sweet and abrasive in equal measure – a toothache I wouldn’t trade for the world.
On Saturday night at Stubb’s, looming storm clouds struck an eerie setting for Wisp, the well-streamed shoegaze project of 20-year-old San Franciscan Natalie R. Lu. Drenched in thick swathes of reverb, Lu’s sway-inducing performance delivered an entirely different energy than that of Frost Children, but equally flexed the strength of the Levitation lineup’s young talent. From the fuzzed-out first chords of opener “Pandora,” a magnetic juxtaposition coursed through the set, the gentle rasp of Lu’s dream-pop vocals set atop a harsh, confrontational wall of guitar.
Between songs, the viral performer proved a charming host, chatting with her audience (“I usually bring out the Hello Kitty guitar, but she’s broken”) and laughing off a slight technical issue during slow-burning yearner “See you soon.” The crowd, mostly composed of her age peers, especially appreciated comparatively uptempo 2023 drop “Once then we’ll be free,” happily obeying Lu’s polite request to “move around for this one, please.” I left impressed at the up-and-comer’s clear scholarship of the greats of the genre.
At the top of this list of greats, of course, is UK fivepiece Slowdive, who graced Far Out Lounge’s stage Sunday night. In some ways, their Levitation presence felt like a focal point of the festival lineup: Thanks to a recent social media-influenced shoegaze renaissance, the over-three-decades-old group now serves an early alt-rock entry point for many a young music lover. The Austin crowd – a somewhat even mix of their contemporaries and much younger fans – felt like a living embodiment of their cross-generational impact.
The group’s onstage walk-up to Brian Eno’s “Deep Blue Day” quickly morphed into the arpeggiated synth of everything is alive selection “shanty,” which saw founding members Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead harmonize in intoxicating near-whispers. Their 14-song set list served as a best-of-the-discography showcase, gliding through standouts from each of their five full-length releases. Especially popular were selections from magnum opus Souvlaki, as evidenced by audience whoops and cheers upon the bouncy first chords of “Souvlaki Space Station.” Against pulsing backdrops shifting from black and white to Technicolor, Goswell cut a striking figure – queenlike, ethereal, grinning as she observed the rapt crowd. After more than an hour of heavily distorted excellence, the genre greats wrapped with churning closer “40 Days” – an ideal send-off to a long, successful Levitation weekend. – Genevieve Wood
Levitation
October 31-November 3
