With mid-2000s rock bands like Phoenix, Beach House and the Rapture, Long Beach’s Just Like Heaven festival felt like a response to what’s become known online as Gen X erasure.
Provided you were standing in the right spot, there was a moment Friday evening when you could hear MGMT’s “Electric Feel” and Louis XIV’s “Finding Out True Love Is Blind” ringing out at the same time over the waterside grounds of the Queen Mary Events Park in Long Beach.
The spontaneous mid-2000s mash-up was one indication of the “early-onset nostalgia” — as another veteran of that period, Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste, described it — thick in the air at Just Like Heaven, an all-day music festival designed to satisfy a longing for the era before rock gave way to hip-hop and downloading was replaced by streaming.
Presented by Goldenvoice, the Los Angeles-based company that also puts on Coachella and Stagecoach, Just Like Heaven assembled more than a dozen bands that came up back when music blogs competed to anoint the latest indie-guitar sensation. In addition to the acts named above — each once hyped by the likes of Pitchfork and Stereogum — Phoenix, Beach House and the Yeah Yeahs were on the bill; the Rapture performed as part of a reunion tour, while Passion Pit made a show of marking the 10th anniversary of its debut album. (The festival was due to repeat Saturday with the same lineup.)
For the promoter, the concert — call it Aughtchella — was a clear business opportunity to attract fans who think they’ve aged out of Coachella, which has turned increasingly to pop and rap in recent years.
