Pitchfork

The Harvest of Hope Fest is going to be held in northern Florida, and it has a name like a Christian rock festival. The font on the poster makes it look like the Country Bear Jamboree or some shit. The two headliners, Against Me! and the National, seem to both like Bruce Springsteen a lot but otherwise have absolutely nothing in common.

This thing should be a total trainwreck, but actually, no, it looks really fun. Also, it's for a good cause, benefiting the Harvest of Hope Foundation, "a non-profit organization that provides financial, educational, and service oriented aid to migrant farm workers all over the country," according to the fest's website.

Here's the secret: The lineup is equally split between two sides. On the one hand, there's big, pretty, NPR-friendly, vaguely middlebrow indie rock bands like the National, Broken Social Scene, Devotchka, and Ra Ra Riot. On the other, there's moshed-up shout-along Warped Tour fodder like Against Me!, the Bouncing Souls, and Smoke or Fire.

That split makes a lot of sense. For one thing, you'll be able to bring your little brother, and it won't seem all condescending like that one time you made him a mix CD for Christmas and he listened to it once and didn't give a shit. For another, if you've ever been to a Warped Tour, you know that eight straight hours of pop-punk is way, way too much. If you've just sat through Less Than Jake, you don't immediately want to hear another band exactly like Less Than Jake. John Vanderslice might actually go down quite nicely. The schizophrenic lineup here might actually work really well in an alternating-hold-and-cold sort of way. And it certainly helps that they got some of the best trad-punk bands in the country booked for this thing: Strike Anywhere, Propagandhi, Avail's Tim Barry. And they've also got hardcore godfathers Bad Brains on the bill, whose presence should push all the younger punk bands to work that much harder.

Not that the entire bill fits into that punk/indie dichotomy. Plenty of the acts represented here can be enjoyed in equal measure by younger and older siblings alike: Girl Talk, the Faint, HEALTH, King Khan & the Shrines, the Mae Shi, Holy Fuck, Monotonix, the amazingly fun Pittsburgh synth-rap duo Grand Buffet. Also Murs is on the bill, since every rock festival apparently needs some indie rap in there somewhere.

Another good thing: The bottom half of the bill has just an incredible wealth of ridiculously dumb band names: Ninja Gun, Grabass Charlestons, Bomb the Music Industry!, Brainworms, Environmental Youth Crunch, Assassinate the Scientist, Lymbyc Systm, Mumpsy, Blorr, Losfingersfoundhands, Imadethismiskake, Blues Lightning. Really amazing job, everyone. Also: Two bands called the Virgins! Was that name really in such high demand? Really?

The Harvest of Hope Fest will go down March 6-8 at the St. Johns County Fairgrounds in St. Augustine, Florida. This is going to be fun.