Pitchfork

Photos by Eirik Lande (unless otherwise indicated); text by Stephen M. Deusner

In the middle of Medieval Park are, fittingly, medieval ruins-- the low-lying remains perhaps of a house or public building. They're essentially stone walls forming a layout of rooms, and throughout the festival, people congregate here to find good seats, a place to rest, or just to escape the crowds. Plus, the main ruins allow a pretty good view of the Enga stage. Part of me thinks this is cool, like having an odd, old installation in the middle of your festival. Another part of me-- the American part of me that rarely sees any building more than 100 years old-- is horrified.

"They're not special ruins," an Oslo friend assures me. Besides, they've been here for nearly a millennium, so I don't think a few Tool fans are going to damage them.

Gogol Bordello

It's from this unique vantage point that I watch the first part of Gogol Bordello's show. They take the stage to rapturous applause, and immediately women begin dancing like Stevie Nicks and guys start doing high kicks, which seems like a new, slightly more involved version of pogoing. It proves especially tricky for the shirtless backpacker with a beer in each hand, who merrily sloshes suds in every direction.

The band's self-described "immigrant punk" plays well in this setting. Tall and lanky, Eugene Hutz is a magnetic personality onstage, sporting blue-suede ankle boots and an open red shirt that he eventually rips off to play the cymbals with. Despite the band's exaggerated movements, the show seems tame at first; there's a security area in front of the stage (flanked by signs that read "No Crowd-Surfing"), so Hutz won't be riding a drum into the audience today. But things pick up considerably once the cheerleaders emerge. Ultimately, theirs is an endearingly homemade show, held together by scarves and personality.

Malajube



Photos by Stephen M. Deusner

That Balkan backbeat still reverberates as I hoof down to the Vika stage for Malajube. The cultural contrast between the acts is immediate and immense. Where Gogol Bordello are colorful, multilingual, and manic as they retool rock tropes, the Quebecois quintet are much more reserved. They sing in French, sport drab indie t-shirts, stand intently in their places. Their songs mix Queen-style drama with ambitious post-rock noise, and in the open air and with the sun in the eyes, they sound lusher and larger than on record. It feels somewhat appropriate that the fans watch from beneath convenient trees or from within kiosks, finding shade wherever they can. In this environment, Malajube sound fairly cerebral, playing from the head instead of the gut and best absorbed while sitting in the grass and nursing a beer.

CocoRosie

CocoRosie would seem like one of the more divisive bands at Øya, but every Norwegian I've talked to loves the Casady sisters. Sure enough, when I give up the shade of the Malajube show, there is already a crowd watching intently as the band members do their soundcheck. One woman even shouts, "We love you, CocoRosie," which prompts an ambiguously slight wave from Bianca Casady.

There's an arsenal of instruments on stage, from Sierra Casady's harp to Bianca's table of toys. Re-entering the stage dressed as construction workers, complete with hard hats and reflector vests, they work a determinedly catch-all aesthetic, contrasting beauty with ugliness, high-brow operatics with pop-culture toy instruments. Over a black t-shirt Sierra wears a gold one-piece swimsuit that looks like a valkyrie breastplate; Bianca is decked out in B-boy attire: a sideways Yankees hat, billowy Pit Bull t-shirt, and baggy denim. These hip-hop elements bring them dangerously close to minstrelsy, but it's not Bianca's rapping that's the problem, just her appropriated outfit and gestures.

Their unconventional beatmaking may be the most compelling aspect of the show. They sculpt rhythms from harp, acoustic guitar, and an array of toys and bells, which reverberate into a drone bolstered by a guy beatboxing behind them. Unfortunately, CocoRosie create the same cavernous space for just about every song, which makes their strange set seem a little repetitive. They break the solemnity only with "Japan", which here sounds like a demented "It's a Small World (After All)".

TTC

An interesting counterpoint to CocoRosie is TTC, a Parisian hip-hop crew who are likewise appropriating black American music, but to very different ends. TTC are traditionalists intent on translating the style to their own French concerns. In front of a beer-soaked crowd, they re-create old-school flows and rhythms, down to the technique of ending their lines in unison. Of the three MCs, Teki Latex has the best stage presence, thanks to his hoarsely aggressive voice and hulking charisma.

Justice

I've been warned that the Justice show will essentially be an outdoor rave, and sure enough, the most visually stimulating part of their performance is Xavier de Rosnay's Olivia Newton-John t-shirt. It's essentially two guys standing behind a black table flipping through CDs, which is the first common observation/criticism about electronic acts at festivals. The second is that the show would be better suited to a smoky club at 2 am. I can neither argue with those assertions nor with the overheard remark that they're no Daft Punk.

Nevertheless, de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé work diligently to overcome these limitations, blasting the audience with a continuous volley of bass. They indulge slow fades and triumphant crescendos, and there's a sly wit to the way they tease the audience with snippets of "D.A.N.C.E." long before they actually play the song. The nearly all-female audience responds by singing along when they can. Well, just on "We Are Your Friends", but still. The only egregious element is the heavy-metal riffage on the final song-- showy elements in an unshowy show.

New Young Pony Club

I've missed the midnight sun by a few months, but even in August it doesn't get dark in Oslo until around 10:30 in the evening. 7, 8, and even 9 pm. look the same as 3, only slightly cooler, as if the breeze is timed. The upside is that without the natural stimulus of darkness, your body forgets to be tired and you develop a hardier stamina for the long day of shows. When New Young Pony Club take the Vika stage at 8:40 p.m., it looks and feels like 5.

The band has two guys and three women, but based on stage presence, it might as well be an all-female band. Nothing against guitarist/producer Andy Spence or bass player Igor Volk, but they're immediately upstaged by their bandmates. Keyboardist Lou Hayter, whose entrance in a strapless green dress prompts immediate cheers from the guys in the audience, does a stoic hip-lock dance throughout the show as she adds icy 80s synths to her band's songs. Singer Tahita Bulmer, sporting a half-shaved head that looks like an Annabelle Lwin approximation, performs limb-flinging dance moves that test the strength of her tight purple dress, and her vocals are strong and disco clear, drawing not from punk but from 80s synth goddesses like Madonna and Bananarama.

But any band like this is only going to be as good as its drummer, and Sarah Jones rides her high hat relentlessly, pounding out disco rhythms that propel songs like "The Bomb", "Grey", and "Ice Cream" danceably forward. Onstage as well as on record, New Young Pony Club distill post- and dance-punk sounds into their purest pop forms, and if the teenage girls dancing giddily all around me are any indication, this band will blow up well before !!!.

Tool
Even more than it loves Nine Inch Nails, Norway loves Tool. I watch the show from a hill on the opposite shore of the pond, but from this angled vantage point, I can't even see the band, who stand so far back on the stage that they're out of sight to anyone off to the sides. I'm told that Maynard James Keenan keeps his back to the audience most of the time and that the band don't allow any press photos of live video feeds. So the only people getting shots are those fans holding their cell phones high above their heads, and the only compelling visual element is the crowd itself, which is so impressively dense and sprawling and excited that for a few seconds I wonder if I'm wrong to dismiss the band so cavalierly. Fans even line the bridge that runs parallel to the festival grounds; they didn't have to spring for a day pass but have a better view of Tool's show than many who did. Granted, they also have an unobstructed view of several guys urinating in the pond, backlit by Tool's strobe lights.

Jazkamer




Festival Grounds





Photos by Stephen M. Deusner