Chad Batka for The New York Times From left, Alexander “Chilli†Jenson and Samuel Thomas Fryer of the British band Palma Violets.Coachella has become one of the primary American summer music institutions, not from a loyalty to domestic acts, but because it is warm to an idea that arose around the indie-mainstream collapse of the 1990s: subcultures can be mainstreamed too. The festival, one of the primary American summer music institutions with its 90,000 or so attendees this weekend and next, relies on that.
This year the festival is leaning heavily on British indie rock fandom, highlighting the sorts of acts loved by people who think adventure has been disproportionately distributed across the pond. Four straight British acts were booked in the Mojave tent on Friday afternoon â€" three young, one established â€" as if to demonstrate the potency of the British model.
Chad Batka for The New York Times The singer-songwriter Jake Bugg.The earliest was the rising singer-songwriter Jake Bugg, who has listened to enough Dylan to excite people who complain that young musicians don’t listen to enough Dylan. He’s a committed stylist, an intense singer and the sort of nostalgist that plays well both to Coachella’s fetishizers of the new and to its champions of the old. For that second group, there was also Johnny Marr, who sweated through his shirt in an intense set of his solo material and old Smiths songs. After him came Palma Violets, who just released their raggedly charming debut album, and who played an angsty set in front of not nearly enough people. (The fourth in the group was the highly lauded and utterly toothless band Alt-J, inexplicable winners of Britain’s prestigious Mercury Music Prize.)
Later tonight on the main Coachella stage, the two closing bands together recapture a moment that many of these younger artists are hoping to recreate, when bands could be major stars in England, but here still carried a bit of subcultural cachet: the Stone Roses and Blur. All day, it’s been easy for nostalgists to feel old. A few hours from now, certainly they’ll feel young again.
