Photos by Jim Bricker

Arcade Fire
Bud Light Stage, Austin City Limits Music Festival, Zilker Park
September 18, 2011

Sunday night in a serene Zilker Park, Arcade Fire made an appropriately historic closer for the Austin City Limits Music Festival's 10th anniversary. Although Stevie Wonder's seniority won him the lead spot on this year's lineup card - as well it should have - the Montreal crew with the two transplanted Texans is the first band formed in the 21st century to ascend to the pinnacle of having ACL entirely to itself.

That also means Arcade Fire is the first ACL closer that has the Internet to thank for its popularity rather than widespread radio play, but since their earliest days have delivered the live goods to back up all the blog buzz. (So have the Walkmen, one of Rocks Off's other Sunday favorites alongside Ryan Bingham and Manu Chao.) Each album has risen Arcade Fire a notch or two higher in ACL's pecking order, from Funeral-marching Wilco table-setters in '05 to Neon Bible-thumping Friday-night '07 closers to Sunday stand-alones preaching the gospel of The Suburbs.

They're grateful, too. "We feel like this is our hometown show in the States," Win Butler told the thousands upon thousands spread out before the Bud Light Stage after opener "Ready To Start."

Jim Bricker

No, he didn't just sing about what he was seeing.

We still don't know how a 67-year-old turned in our favorite set of this past weekend's Austin City Limits Festival, but heck if Randy Newman didn't leave us on a musical high last night at Zilker Park. Only My Morning Jacket Saturday night came close for our own personal satisfaction, which has to be saying something about Newman's enduring, compartmentalized appeal. Also, we don't mind spending an hour with the characters that he summons in his songs.

Newman's set was inside the (mostly) genteel Vista Equity tent, a tent that saw Charles Bradley go half-shirtless, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band go atomic, and was witness to our third-favorite show of the weekend, the Barton Hills Choir of elementary-school kids. Somehow across the whole weekend, that was the most engaging venue in the park.

Marco Torres

oh hai Batman!

The widget on our phone says it's only 91 degrees here at Zilker Park but we don't believe that voodoo. The humidity and heat pounding the park reminds us of Houston. We smell Pasadena and our fair city's taco trucks all the way from Austin.

Our day started by walking up on The Head & The Heart on the Google+ stage, and their dear melodies and twee presentation lulled most of the crowd to the ground early Sunday afternoon. Kinda wondering if some of the bands on this stage this year will be remembered next year, or like its namesake, fall victim to public boredom.

We walked up on some friends who were sitting next to a girl who was buried under an umbrella and sipping water. She had just had a delicate female chest-related surgery just a few days back and still elected to take in all three days of ACL, bandages and swelling and all.

Photos by Chris Gray

Yes, that stage is as far away as it looks.

When a bleary Rocks Off arrived at the media area this morning, there was some chatter about Stevie Wonder's supposed sound troubles, and more online, both in our review and the Austin American-Statesman's. (By the way, we've updated our review with a complete set list that we, ahem, "borrowed" from the Statesman's Austin Music Source blog. Thanks, guys.)

Like we said, Rocks Off didn't have much trouble hearing Wonder, definitely not up front, and not much even when we were what felt like miles away from the stag. We took the above photo from the appoximate position where we were standing Saturday night, shortly after Graffiti6 finished playing this afternoon.

It's a long ways off. As enamored of American classic rock and soul as many of their British countrymen, Graffiti6 is already on our short list of ACL discoveries and a group that merits further research once this whole blessed thing is over.

Jim Bricker

Jim James of My Morning Jacket

While one side of Zilker Park was vibing with godhead Stevie Wonder, the other was being bathed in volume and industrial melodies by My Morning Jacket, who continuously make good on their tag as one of the best, if not the best, live American rock bands in the past decade. Opening with "Victory Dance" from this year's recent Circuital, the band was clearly audible to those near the Wonder stage, as the R&B architect's set started late.

It seems to us that confirmed soul devotee and MMJ honcho Jim James was trying to blow one of his idols off his own stage, or at least letting the Wonder crowd know what they were missing.To some people, even the idea of us splitting our time between Wonder and anyone else seemed criminal given our job title.

Marco Torres

Yesterday at about midday at Zilker, a front of dark clouds began drizzling on us during J. Roddy Walston & The Business' set at the ginormo Bud Light, and the rain continues off and on until later in the afternoon. It was a welcome sight and feeling after months now of the jerky-making conditions here in Texas, plunging the Lone Star lands into a drought.

Festival-goers immediately began looking for ponchos and raincoats, with thoughts of 2009's muddy affair coming back to them. Though we could be mistaken and maybe rain preparedness is a trend now. There were wet spots around Zilker, and maybe some muddy puddles, but everyone stayed relatively clean. Except for the guy who looked at our arms and just uttered "Mushrooms?" near sundown.

Photos by Marco Torres

Stevie Wonder
Austin City Limits Music Festival
Bud Light Stage, Zilker Park, Austin
September 17, 2011

Stevie Wonder says we're all part of the same family. Saturday night at Austin City Limits, he had about 45,000 (we're guessing) Jesus children of America in the palms of his well-exercised hands. However many people it was, Wonder's audience took up the radia of the Google+ stage hundreds of yards away, as well as the hordes closer into his own Bud Light Stage.

Wonder came onstage gradually, stealthily emerging with a keytar as his band - which was a small orchestra, really - warmed up and then worked over a cheerful vamp that was part funk lick, part nursery rhyme, and eventually resolved into Wonder's old Motown pal Marvin Gaye's "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)."

Photos by Marco Torres

Phosphorescent

It's been a low-key afternoon. It rained again. Still is.

Rocks Off ate some fried chicken and sat in the Vista Equity tent while the gospel quartet Endurance lifted our spirits. It doesn't matter what your spiritual inclination is - you haven't seen dancing until you've watched people getting down to gospel. Bonus: Endurance is from Houston, which means ACL does know the city exists.

On the Austin Ventures stage, the beardy Phosphorescent came about as close as we figure we'll ever come to seeing The Basement Tapes recreated live: Crunchy (and sometimes twinkling) guitars, high harmonies, pulsing bass, steel, lyrics about difficult topics like a disintegrating marriage ("The Mermaid Parade"). Skynyrd-esque ballad "Wolves" (think "Tuesday's Gone") presented them as thinking-man's Southern rockers, but hardly stuffed shirts.

Craig Hlavaty

We found ourselves in front the Cave Singers on Friday afternoon with a few hundred folks, escaping the Sun and the cheerfulness and pomp of the other bands going at the same time (Big Boi, Foster The People) for some dark art at the Vista Equity Tent.

About halfway through their set we realized that they were our Black Angels surrogates, standing in place of our favorite Austin doom-garage group who aren't playing ACL this year. The Cave Singers, led by Pete Quirk and looking like a classic-era George Carlin impersonator, howled and hissed for an hour.

No bass, just a nasty acoustic/electric guitar backing, and drums.

Marco Torres

For the most part this year's drought and wildfire-related smoking ban at ACL is being followed, but during Friday's festivities it wasn't hard to find fans smoking to their hearts content on the grounds, or in the case above, on the ground.

It seems to be only really deterring those folks who aren't already heavy daily smokers from getting their fix. Tourists to the cigs don't seem to be taking extra steps to smoke. The areas outside the venue which are open to three-day pass holders to smoke aren't full of angry, put-out puffers either.