ACL Day One: After the Fire

Although two concession stand employees were critically injured in this afternoon's fire, there was little evidence of crisis when Kate and I arrived at the ACL Festival around 5pm.

We saw most of LCD Soundsystem's set, which was pretty fun and irreverent, before walking over to see Spoon. The sound for Spoon's show was middling from our vantage point behind the sound booth. They had a four-piece horn section to play "Cherry Bomb," which is my favorite song from the new album, but they were wavering in the mix. The non-horn songs came across a little cleaner.

From there, Kate went to see the Kaiser Chiefs and I went to see the Mighty Clouds of Joy. I found the latter mildly entertaining, but they didn't rock the gospel stage with the intensity of Texas-bred gospel groups like the Mighty Voices of Navasota and the Jones Family Singers. Frankly, they seemed a little too by-the-numbers.

I caught the tail end of the Kaiser Chiefs and they were definitely holding their own with the crowd. Meanwhile, Reverend Horton Heat was engaged in a set of time-traveling covers that went from the Fifties (Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues") through the Seventies (Black Sabbath's "Paranoid"). The latter may have been the single best song I heard all day.