In its third year, Music Tastes Good presents a cool, confident array of music that signals its a focus and growth from its founding.
The arrival of the New Order on stage as headliner of Day 1 of Music Tastes Good on Saturday not only delivered a thrilling set of electronic rock from the beloved British band, it signaled that the Long Beach festival had stepped up a new level in this its third year.
Past headliners such as Ween and Sleater-Kinney a year ago, and the Specials a year before that, were solid if a bit more cult faves in 2017, and nostalgic in 2016.
But New Order, despite having been around since the early ’80s when it formed out of the ashes of Joy Division, is a band of a different magnitude, which was clear not only in the strength of its music over 11 songs in 70 minutes, but also in its production, the most advanced visuals and lighting ever on a Music Tastes Good stage.
The band opened with “Singularity” off its strong 2015 album “Music Complete,” but most of the set was pulled from albums across its 30-year history. “Your Silent Face” and Bizarre Love Triangle” showed up early, earning huge cheers from the crowd, while “Blue Monday” and “Temptation” closed out the main set.
Original members Bernard Sumner, Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert and newer additions Tom Chapman and Phil Cunningham returned for an encore of Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” which capped a set you wished were longer with the biggest sing-along of the night.
Other highlights of Day 1 included:
A rare full album set: The Canadian collective Broken Social Scene played before New Order, performing its 2002 indie rock classic “You Forgot It In People” from front to back. “We were asked to play it, and that’s what we’re going to do, but what a weird set list,” said co-founder Kevin Drew early in the set.
Songs such as “Almost Crimes” and “Anthems For a Seventeen Year-Old Girl,” both of which featured sometime member Emily Haines of Metric, were highlights, and OK, it wound down oddly, almost petering out, but that’s the way the album was sequenced so you’re cool, BSS.
A dance party: Singer Santigold arrived on stage as usual with her two deadpan dancers beside her but her infectious blend of new wave, reggae, and electro-pop kept a smile on her face throughout her performance. And the sense of fun only increased when her crew threw not just beach balls but pool-float-sized inflatable slices of pizza, watermelon, donuts and pretzels into the crowd (though you did have to avoid getting bonked in the head for the next 30 minutes). When Santigold invited fans to crash the stage to dance with her at least 75 or 100 took her up on it, only adding to the madness of it all.
Lots of hip-hop: Princess Nokia had a raucous crowd dancing to her hip-hop including a toddler on her dad’s shoulders who I’m hopeful does not sing the lyrics to “Tomboy” when she returns to preschool on Monday. Elsewhere the Bay Area oddball Lil B the Based God was his usual entertaining self, and Joey BadA$$ served as co-headliner on the second stage though I missed him for New Order.
More rock than Coachella: Given that the desert classic doesn’t have a lot of rock it’s easy to estimate that there was a greater percentage of the bill at Music Tastes Good working in this vein. Cherry Glazerr, the L.A. trio fronted by the charismatic Clementine Creevy, works in a punkish style, while Shame, a young U. K. punk act,offers a harder, more traditionally British take on that genre.
My favorite, though, was Big Thief, a folk-tinged rock group whose singer Adrianne Lenker has one of those voices that can break your heart no matter the words she’s singing. That the songs are in fact often melancholy only added to the beauty of its set.
Lots of weirdos: Quintron and Miss Pussycat did something I’d never before seen on a rock festival stage: They opened their set with a 10-minute puppet show, the demented kind, a kissing cousin of stuff you might have seen on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse before he was on TV. The fact that the husband-and-wife team from New Orleans can also play catchy off-kilter music — “Why’d You Make It Weird?” says everything you need to know about them — only added to the fun.
On the second stage, Oliver Tree, a singer who blends indie-pop with hip-hop, is an oddball from his extreme bowl cut to the world’s biggest-legged jeans to the teal-and-purple clothing he and the band wore that was drawn from the Jazz design for Dixie Cups in the ’90s. “Alien Boy” was one of his highlights, and I highly recommend you go watch the video for that now.
Also on the smaller stage was Los Master Plus, a trio from Guadalajara, Mexico, who have played all three years of Music Tastes Good, blending cumbia with “Creep,” the Radiohead song, and mashing up other cross-culture, cross-genre music all while wearing colorfully patterned shirts, tight pants, boots, and doing sexy dancin’ as they perform.
With: New Order, Broken Social Scene, Santigold, Princess Nokia, others
Where: Marina Green Park, Long Beach
When: Saturday, Sept. 29
