Riot Fest is one of the biggest alternative music festivals in America, with three days of music, and genres across the spectrum. They even have their own alcoholic soda brand and a chapel inside of the festival.

I desperately wanted to go to Riot Fest last year, but the festival was scheduled during Rosh Hashanah so a terrible calendrical accident deprived us of the chance to see The Cure headline, which depressed me and my father for many months. This year, Riot Fest was perfectly timed between birthdays and the beginning of school, so we bought tickets before the lineup came out. 

Mind you, the lineup, when we got it, was strange. NOFX was a headliner for every night. NOFX also had their own stage, which featured an awesome assortment of semi- famous pop-y (but not pop-punk) punk bands, including Circle Jerks, Descendents, The Dead Milkmen, and The Vandals. Apparently, NOFX was planning to publicly atone for the crappiness of their music by inviting their audience to hear some of the greatest OG punk bands on the planet. 

The biggest attraction of this year’s Riot Fest though, was the Slayer reunion. If you’ve ever met a Slayer fan, you know how passionate every single one of them seems to be about their chosen band. If you like Slayer, you LOVE Slayer, and have every single Slayer record and T-shirt ever made. My dad and I were joking about their passionate in-group feelings on our way to Chicago: Little did we know that the actual Slayer fans we were about to meet were even more excited about the band — and being together with other Slayer fans — than we had imagined in our over-the-top caricatures. 

Riot Fest was basically four festivals in one. There was the 2000s pop festival (Taking Back Sunday, Sum 41, The Offspring); the metal festival (Slayer, Gwar, Mastodon); the punk festival (Descendents, Circle Jerks, Sunami); and the alt-rock festival (Beck, Pavement, The Marley Brothers). These categories divided the crowd into roughly equal quadrants of listeners, the vast majority of whom seemed to live in the Chicago suburbs.

It’s kind of sad that the only bands that people like and want to see in large numbers are bands that have already been big for at least 20 years, which inevitably gives festivals like Riot Fest the feeling of a middle-aged oldies tour. The one cool young band that played was Sunami — a hardcore band from Southern California that started as a parody band of all of those crazy violent hardcore bands. Funnily enough, they became popular for perfecting the style that they were mocking. These days, their mosh pits are famously the scariest and most brutal around. 

At first, my alt-rock father was like, “Yeah go ahead, I’ll just hang back here and wait it out.” When I went back to join him, after an awesome 30 minutes of moshing, he had a big smile on his face and was talking about how good they were, and how the lead singer was “the angriest little man” he had ever seen. Since then, he’s been giving them lots of props.

The best band we saw play was, no surprise, Descendents. Their Saturday set at Riot Fest was definitely one of the best shows I’ve ever been to. Hearing them live revised my sense of the SoCal punk hierarchy, and in the Descendents’ favor. Everyone knew every song, as to be expected. The crowd was so happy and excited, and so was the band. Sometimes the band-to-crowd excitement ratio can be off, but this time it was pretty close to even, which is the best.

I should note something non-festival-goers might not be aware of: the sheer volume of dust kicked up by a festival mosh pit. The Descendents show was like a Depression-era dust bowl caught in the middle of a tornado. If you weren’t in the pit, you were packed so tightly against other people that you lost your independent balance; if those around you moved suddenly, you could fall over. At the same time, you were also asphyxiating from the amount of dirt being stomped into the air. People were having coughing fits and putting their shirts over their faces. I had so much dust all over me after the show that when I blew my nose, it was black. I only got in the pit a couple times and got knocked down like eight times. I was so happy doing it.

It's hard to become a die-hard fan of a new band, because usually they don’t have a legacy or an impact yet. With bands like Descendents, you can tell that every single person in that crowd had been impacted by the band in some way. It feels great to feel connected to music that is part of people’s lives. 

The other great show I saw at Riot Fest was Laura Jane Grace (of Against Me!) doing an Operation Ivy set. Op Ivy is another one of those bands with a legacy — in my opinion, they are the best ska-punk band ever, by far. The energy was a little different than the Descendents show, because it felt like we were all making something together in the moment, in the absence of the band itself. Operation Ivy hasn’t played a show in so long, and the band shows no signs of a reunion. 

Although they seem like giants to me, Op Ivy is one of those bands that weren’t so big when they were together, but only got big after their prime. My dad says he remembers seeing them play a community center in Berkeley when they were just a local band that nobody knew about. He didn’t even make the connection that it was the same band until four or five songs into the set. 

Something great about festivals is that they give small acts a big audience, which they can use in different ways. Not many people know Laura Jane Grace or her music, myself included. I went to hear her because it was a chance to hear Operation Ivy at whatever distance. It didn’t feel like she was performing her songs and we had to respect her music; it was more like we were all in a group of people who wanted to hear the same music. It would have almost been the same if they had just played some Operation Ivy records on speakers or had a bad high school band play it. You could barely hear her singing because everybody else was so loudly and joyfully singing along. 

However commercial or annoying the people at Riot Fest might have been, and despite the hours I spent choking on dust, the festival was a great experience. It felt like a celebration of everyone who loves music the way that I do. In the end, Riot Fest felt less like a commercial gimmick than a gift to a community of listeners, participants, and musicians which goes backwards and forwards in time, and which is open and generous enough to include me. I couldn’t help but feel how lucky I was to be able to see so many great bands perform before they retire. I know my future kids probably won’t be able to see the same bands I saw, but I feel that they’ll always be regarded as the greats — and maybe my kids will think that it was cool that I saw them. Just like I think it’s cool that my dad saw them when he was my age.

Pixies, The Night the Zombies Came

I don’t know what you were expecting with all these cool indie-band revivals and albums catering to our collective longing for retro, but this is what I was expecting from the Pixies with The Night the Zombies Came: an incredibly mediocre album, one that feels so separated from the incredible skill and artistry and originality that they built their well-deserved reputation on. My instincts were correct. Bands generally produce their best music within a five-year period. And within that moment, all the people in that band are so connected personally and artistically that they have the ability to create fantastic work together. After that, people go in their own directions, for better or worse, as people and as artists, and their former connection is preserved in the music that they made. Every once and a while you have a band that comes back and does a great album, but that’s a rarity and unfortunately not the case here.

There’s only really one song on this new Pixies album that sounds any good. “Oyster Beds” is the clear standout. Even though it’s more pop-y and glossy than classic Pixies from the late 1980s, I can still hear that Pixies sound coming through — a mix of crunchy riffs and surreal lyrics built around a punk sensibility. I would be much happier if the band had just released an album full of songs like that one. Instead, part of what makes this album strange is that a lot of it seems to be Halloween-themed, which is probably a cool marketing idea. But from a listener’s perspective, like that of a die-hard Pixies fan such as myself, this record sucks.

MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks

Six months ago, I wrote about MJ Lenderman for County Highway, right when he had put out And the Wind (Live and Loose) — his first album after being signed to a legit record label. When I wrote about him, I thought nobody knew or cared who he was. He was just the guitarist from Wednesday who put out a new record that I liked. After that issue came out, I started listening to him a lot, in part because it was cool to have something great that felt like it was mine alone. 

Since then, MJ Lenderman has put out another album, performed on Jimmy Fallon, been profiled in The New Yorker (which is supposedly some kind of big deal for old people), and is now in the middle of a US tour. I’ve met three people who independently knew who he is, which, for stuff I like, is entirely unprecedented. At the same time that it feels weird to have to share MJ Lenderman with others, I’m also weirdly proud of him, like I watched him grow up or something, even though it’s only been a short while.

Manning Fireworks is an incredible accomplishment, and a great album. It has so much variety and cool stuff on it. It’s also really strange to see a record label do its job. They put him out there, had him do shows and PR. His sound became a lot cleaner. They did right by him. 

Last weekend I went to see MJ and his band for a sold-out show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, where I had seen Dinosaur Jr. also play a sold-out show. (Side note: Dinosaur Jr. is now doing a stadium tour with Weezer and The Flaming Lips?!) Anyways, the show was great, and everyone knew the words to nearly all his songs. Though he played a bunch of tracks from Manning Fireworks, he did play some older ones too, which I liked because they felt like him. 

One of my least favorite things about rock ’n’ roll is how musicians like to put on a persona. When it’s done in an exaggerated, cool way with an aesthetic behind it, it’s awesome, like Ziggy Stardust, but a lot of the time it makes musicians seem fake, when music is about being real. MJ feels real. A lot of the songs on his new album are about MJ’s upbringing as a Catholic in North Carolina and his love and appreciation for his faith after becoming a rock musician. In his interview with The New Yorker, he talks about how at first, when writing songs, he felt like he needed to wait for a terrible, life-changing thing to happen to him, but when he figured out that he could write about any kind of thought, or experience, he started doing his best work. That’s what real feels like.

Duster, In Dreams

Duster has recently gained popularity because of the internet’s new obsession with shoegaze. I have a bunch of friends who like them, though generally I don’t find shoegaze to be an interesting genre (I'm so sorry!). I’m not immune to the charms of My Bloody Valentine and noise-rock bands. This new album, though, I do like. It sort of feels like having a lucid dream, or like walking around when it’s sunny but cold out.

A lot of shoegaze isn’t very rhythmic or exciting; it often lacks a solid melody. But most of the songs on In Dreams avoid these pitfalls. In part, that’s because it feels super influenced by psych-pop, with some cool hypnotic sounds in songs like “No Feel,” the third song on the album, which reminded me of one of my favorite bands, The Olivia Tremor Control, which I will never stop talking about.

American Football, a band I’ve been super into recently, releases American Football (Covers), an album with covers of songs from their eponymous album, featuring bands like Iron & Wine and Ethel Cain . . . My old math teacher’s favorite band, whose best attribute is their name, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, releases a new album, Flight b741 . . . one of the most weirdly non-annoying but cool emocore bands Touché Amoré puts out a new album, Spiral in a Straight Line . . . Elliott Smith’s From a Basement on the Hill got remastered in an edition that’s much smoother and hi-fi . . . Silver Patron Saints is released with a bunch of legends like Dinosaur Jr., Agnostic Front, Bruce Springsteen, and Elvis Costello paying tribute to Jesse Malin, who recently suffered a terrible spinal-cord injury . . . The New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble and Stephen Jackson put out another great soulful single, “Mr. Pitiful.”