Bumbershoot: the reckoning

It's Labor Day, the fourth and final day of Bumbershoot, Seattle's annual summer-end buffet of arbitrary musical acts, mostly local and more often than not described in the media as being "thoughtful bedroom pop." Tiny dog is on the scene to bring you the people's eye-view of events.

First stop, The Decemberists, high noon, main stage. The tiny dog contingent fails to show, however, waylaid by Tasha dog bladder capacity concerns, as our trio agrees that we refuse to miss Tegan & Sara, slated to go on at the ungodly hour of 8:45 pm. (Regrettably, it appears that The Decemberists were as cute as a basket of kittens during their performance.)

Metro bus #16 dumps us outside of the Seattle center around 2:30, where we then join our original itinerary in progress: Aqueduct is up, at a venue succinctly known as "The 107.7 The End What's Next Stage sponsored by Xbox at the Exhibition Hall." It's a dark, gymlike venue with Disneylandian lines peopled by teenagers inexplicably coiffed in mohawks: is there an 80's throwback hair booth nearby?

The ladies line up

Inside, Aqueduct's lead man David Terry bursts onstage in Izod polo. Clearly, he is from the Jack Black school of sweaty zaftig frontmen in need of a haircut, with all of the infectious irreverence there implied, as he launches into the opening song, first verse of which bullishly proclaims: "the ladies line up / for Aqueduct."

"It's sort of, well, 'They Might Be Guided By Flaming Lips,'" sums up a member of our group most familiar with the band. Aqueduct definitely has the ragamuffin Seattle teens waving their cell phones to their rendition of the Geto Boy's "Damn It Feels Good to be a Gangster." Hell, yeah.

Boyfriend

Turns out that the next show in our plans will be here in this same auditorium, from which we are unceremoniously ejected after Aqueduct, necessitating another wait in line with the mohawks.

We enter the show late due to the mandatory strip search of all stadium entrants packing Aquafina water bottles. Safely relieved of all hydration, we arrive to the sensitive sounds of Earlimart, a band that, through an accident of mis-heard sentence construction, suddenly becomes inagurated as a member of a just-invented genre: "Boyfriend." Although there appears to be two women in the band, Earlimart is squarely Boyfriend, offering up a dreamy and slightly aging indie front-dude with bed hair and a button down shirt. From limited personal experience, we know Earlimart is far too exquisitely Boyfriend for the conch shell acoustics and jittery teen gangs of the What's Next stage, but they give it their all, even breaking out a song that we tentatively identify as "their big KEXP hit single."

Toast

Now, I'm kind of wanting to follow this with the next act playing here in this venue, Ted Leo + Pharmacists, a band who wins tiny dog's official lyric-of-last-year award with "I'm a ghost, and I wanted you to know / that it's taking all my strength to make this toast," but I can no longer tolerate the dark school-dance atmosphere, with its slack-jawed teensters in Tigger backpacks camped out in packs on the concrete floor, and so I agree to accompany my companions to see Kinski at EMP's Sky Church.

On the way we stop to ponder a spray-painted performance artist in angel wings and white sheets, doing the statuette-for-cash routine. "Is it a woman?" I ask, unsure. "Both of us got the guy vibe," I am told definitively by my two male companions.

The Kinski line is forboding, approaching EMP like a row of ants headed for an aluminum recycling plant. While waiting amidst the Fun Forest midway attractions, we watch The Twirl and Hurl spin screaming, regretful passengers backwards at mach speeds, 100 feet into the air. Suddenly in the distance, someone brandishes a VENUE AT CAPACITY sign, dashing the hopes of those lined up for lyric-free nu-hippie rock. Whatever, Kinski. All their songs sound like Spinal Tap's jazz odyssey anyway, the one they did at the theme park after Nigel ditched the band.

The Clownge

Nothing to do now but eat. I've never had a piroshky, and I now realize why. They are giant doughnuts, full of shredded foodstuff remainders. We then set up camp inside the beer garden at "The Sound Transit Backyard Stage on the Broad Street Lawn" to kill time before Tegan & Sara. The beer garden is immediately deemed The Clownge, due to the presence of two 10-foot fiberglass clowns at the entrance.

Momentarily crowd-barriered from packs of teens in studded belts and black halter tops, we are surrounded instead by our own kind, vaguely worn-out early middle agers in non-statement-making Eddie Bauer fashions, guzzling $6 northwestern microbrews. Okkervil River emotes onstage nearby in unstable, wavering tones, a sort of edgy Boyfriend on meth. As soon as they clear away we geekishly set up camp in the grass below the Space Needle to await Tegan & Sara.

There's something happening somewhere

While waiting for T+S, festival denizens repeatedly puzzle over signs for one of the Backyard Stage sponsors, No Depression magazine. Is it some sort of feel good affirmation sponsored by the band(s), they repeatedly ask one another?

Tegan & Sara eventually launch into a song, after meticulously tuning their guitars and sound checking for 30 minutes (TeganTeganTegan Checkcheckcheckcheck). T+S are definitely not Boyfriend. They don't even have boyfriends. They are awesome Canadian twins who sing in strange strangled harmonies and play giant shiny guitars with capos on the fifth fret, and tell affable, rambling anecdotes between songs ("I kind of get along with our mom better than Sara, cause Sara's the bitchy one. I'm more of the geeky, awkward one... Sara is secretly paranoid, like all cool people are, that suddenly, she won't be cool anymore"). Their melodies are clear and unambiguous and non-tentative, and make you want to hop around. After playing most of their latest album, So Jealous, along with a few older songs, they pull out a lovely and non-sneering cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark."

Step off, boyfriend.