Pitchfork Music Festival 2009

The Pitchfork Festival promises to "do things right". Treating audience members to a comfortable, enjoyable all round experience that extends far beyond the day's musical performances is a mantra that is admittedly echoed by many fledgling events, supposedly in contrast to the more "corporate" gatherings.

Attending this weekend - run by the notorious, often vexing Pitchfork Media Inc - one comes expecting something a little special, and aspects to divide opinion. In both these respects, the festival does not disappoint. There are plenty of refreshing factors that make this festival so good. A plethora of vegan-friendly vendors offer a wide selection of high quality food, often run by local business. One such is the Chicago-based brewing company Goose Island, who are on hand to provide alcoholic refreshments. Two tents of label stalls - including world famous independents like Sub Pop, Drag City and Touch & Go - also shelter independent t-shirt sellers and poster stalls that provide a considerable distraction from the music. And a certain hipster penchant for European soccer shirts does comfort any expatriates missing the neds of T in the Park.

Friday night introduces Pitchfork's "Write the Night" format, where upon purchasing tickets, fans are able to vote for what songs the four groups will perform. Tortoise, Yo La Tengo and the reformed Jesus Lizard all star in a slightly upside down looking lineup, with Idaho's Built To Spill headlining the main stage. Theirs is a solid set of crowd pleasers which flirts with jamming out to kill a bit of time, culminating quite brilliantly with Carry the Zero. However, it's David Yow and the Jesus Lizard who deliver the most frantic and rapturously received set of the night, demanding Friday's only encore.

The majority of the acts perform alternately on the two main stages, which are set adjacent to each other, creating a swirling mass of people between the two. Enjoying the confident and charismatic Grizzly Bear on Sunday night is hardly a chore, but their set is intermittently spoiled by the sounds of the Flaming Lips sound checking on the stage to their left. The close proximity does result in the opportunity so see many more bands with less waiting time between times, but then again, making sacrifices is as much a part of the festival experience as sunburn and trying not to breathe in the toilets.

If anything, it's this year's line up that threatens to be the downfall, and in the end, produces varying results. For such a critically eclectic website, one that has a considerable pop and hip-hop presence in its reviews, and runs regular grime, dubstep and noise columns, this festival line up is a tad tame. The now famous Onion parody of Pitchfork Media's reviewing style threw up the classic line "though music can be brilliant at times, the whole medium comes off as derivative of Pavement". This infatuation with white males with guitars appears to have unduly influenced this year's line up. Two rap artists, DOOM (formerly MF) and Pharoahe Monch, alongside a few electronic and hip-hop groups in Lindstrøm, DJ/Rupture and The Very Best, do little to assuage the overwhelmingly six stringed squalls of Saturday's headliners, The National, alongside Built To Spill, The Walkmen and Vivian Girls, to name a few.

Taking a visit to the third stage, burrowed away at the other end of the site, proves a welcome relief from this, and here, some of the weekend's gems are to be found. Recently, Ponytail have been riding a growing wave of success that their sophomore effort Ice Cream Spiritual so deserves, and their set is simply buzzing. With two guitar heroes at their most ridiculous - imagine Battles coated in cotton candy and bubble bath - their Ari Up-esque front woman Molly Seigel gurns, shrieks and cries "AWESOME" at every opportunity, as their music perpetually climaxes with enthusiastic abandon. Quite irrepressible.

Not to be outdone, Matt and Kim make every effort to bring the fun only a few hours later with their cheery synth pop. Most of their songs tend to follow the classic song structure of "1-2-3-4 YEAH YEAH YEAH", and you can't imagine enjoying this sugar rush alone in your room, but their gushing and energetic manner inspires more cross gender crowd surfing than any other set of the weekend, and for that alone, they must be considered a success.

True potential for disaster arrives in the shape of the aforementioned DOOM's appearance on the main stage. This is the Super Villain's first live appearance since his notorious lip synced misadventures back in 2007, and with his new album, Born Like This, receiving a warm critical welcome, it's a chance to ingratiate himself once again with his audience. An hour of sharply delivered greatest hits follows, with his trademark flow so dextrous it makes his larger-than-life hype man sound simply foolish. Each of his aliases are well represented, and he even cheekily drops Batty Boyz, a satirically homophobic tirade against Chicago's own superhero Batman, but it is the Madlib-produced Madvillain material that shines through in the sun. Aloof and somewhat detached behind his mask, leaving all banter to his accomplices, and often taking leave of the stage between tracks, Daniel Dumile makes no attempt to convince us that he isn't once again taking his fans for a ride. What more could you expect from a man who takes such pleasure in keeping his audience at arm's length?

The mixed success of the festival is encapsulated in the weekend's closing set from the Flaming Lips. Intended to be part of the Write the Night format, Wayne Coyne openly sneers in the face of our choice of greatest hits, as they perform, seemingly at random, from across their back catalogue alongside some distinctly average new material. Theirs has been one of the world's most flamboyant rock shows for some 7 years now, and it's apparent that the group are tiring of it a little. Upon emerging, both heroically and humourously, from a screen projecting a vagina, the Lips play Race For The Prize with all the gusto they can, but this is one scant moment of reward for the audience, who remain on the verge of frustration, prompted by Coyne's chastising and minimal versions of the tunes they really want to hear. The biggest cheers of the night are reserved for his urging calls of "c'mon motherfuckers!", but really, it's as though Wayne Coyne's simply reading the collective mind of his audience.