The term music festival can mean different things to different people. For those who make it their business to stay hip to what’s new and what’s hot, many major cities offer a Music Festival Experience™ with a household name. For patrons of the jam band scene, it means a multi-day campout on the side of a mountain or in the middle of remote nature, hosted by a resident band and stacked with days of touring bands, each with their own respective campout. For those looking to rage to their pounding hearts’ delight, there are sprawling EDM and trance extravaganzas and the PLUR community that surrounds them. Jazz festivals are cauldrons of consistent surprises, in many ways easier to slip into and take in, provided you can find one.
The format of these specific festivals as day-long events, as opposed to multi-day affairs, creates several key differences in the Festival Experience. You don’t need to worry about your shelter and provisions, since you just drive home once it’s over. You don’t really get the interaction with the all-in-this-together community vibe that forms within a prolonged festival. Perhaps this Festival Lite, as it were, is telling of a collective shortening of attention span.
The music, however, doesn’t lose quality just because it’s one day instead of three; some of the best live acts to be found anywhere can be found at places like the Silopanna Music Festival, created by the good people at Ram’s Head out of Baltimore, returning to its backwards namesake Annapolis, MD, for its third year.
As festivals go, Silopanna was extremely well organized. The bands started on time, the vendors were numerous without being in your face, the food trucks were on point; with a cozy 5,000 attendees, the venue didn’t feel crowded at all. For some of the bigger names like The Flaming Lips and Matt & Kim, who routinely play shows in front of crowds dozens of times that size, it was an intimate experience that allowed them to interact with the entire crowd, making the festival feel like a very well-orchestrated secret. There were free yoga classes, an abundance of cleaner-than-expected porta-potties, and a truck giving out Monster drinks to fuel the 12-hour vibes. You could hear the bands on the Main Stage from the shaded area further away. It was good.
Let’s talk about the music.
Bands started playing across the three stages at 11am, with members of the Annapolis School of Rock kicking off the day. Local Groove-funkers Little Bird lit the dancing fire at the Pavilion Stage, sending wailing sax into the air across the fairgrounds. Alt-rock group Chappo delivered the first dose of serious indie weirdness with their radio-ready anthems and glitter-throwing sirens, holding down that corner of the genre blanket along with the supermelodic Colony House from Tennessee.
By 2pm, the sun was beating down hard, but that didn’t stop fans from dancing with nostalgic abandon to Hellogoodbye’s album-spanning set. The dance-rock band has progressed with grace, alternating between newer, more organic cuts from their recent albums and favorites from Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!, their 2006 synth-rock debut with irresistible pop hooks and playfully earnest autotuned vocals. In between songs, they joked about shooting rolling papers into the crowd as confetti, and were clearly having a blast playing together. One highlight was their fantastic expanded version of their first hit “Here (In Your Arms)”, which left the crowd jumping high despite the temperature hitting the high 80s.
Many had come to see the newly reunited Dashboard Confessional, so between them and the folk fans, a strong crowd had gathered for one of the best acts of the day: Twin Forks, Dashboard frontman Chris Carrabba’s folkier project. In the context of bouncy acoustic melodies and tumbling clap-along rhythms like “Back To You”, Carrabba’s voice worked wonders on an entirely different plane from his rock songwriting. It was lively and earnestly touching.
Kentucky sextet Sleeper Agent delivered their southern-tinged brand of stomp rock with a perfectly mixed set, including many songs from their unabashed latest release, About Last Night. Frontwoman Alex Kandel is a transfixing performer, and her smoky voice interlaced with retro-distorted guitars and drums for a lusty blast of garage rock that was impossible to ignore, even for those concertgoers stretching out in the shade under the sparse trees. The band dedicated the powerful “Good Job” to the late Robin Williams, and at the end of their set, they walked off to fervent applause.
Matt & Kim are, of course, ridiculously fun. They’re an ideal festival band, bringing a high-energy dance party and comic relief to a late afternoon slot that might otherwise mean a dip in crowd energy. The Brooklyn indie-dance duo were constantly jumping, dancing, and playing with all their energy. The crowd was their friend, and responded with roaring approval when Kim got up on her drum set and twerk to clips of “Turn Down For What?” It was an act built on the antics as much as the music, coming together to spread pure joy throughout the audience. They ended with their hit “Daylight”, leaving the crowd pumped and giddy for the headlining bands to come.
Cult grunge oddballs Jimmie’s Chicken Shack are Annapolis natives, and filled Silopanna’s “noisy rock band that’s been around since the ‘90s that isn’t the Flaming Lips” slot most excellently. They brought a riotous, raucous set of power rock to the Lawn Stage, and gave DC hardcore some love with their explosive cover of Fugazi’s “Waiting Room”.
One of the biggest names on the bill was a beloved emo band that many fans thought they might never see again. After two years without so much as seeing each other, Dashboard Confessional reunited to play at Silopanna. Chris Carraba’s warm, grateful words to the roaring crowd were as sincere as his angelic voice, as powerful as it was when he began with “Screaming Infidelities” in 2000. For many, Dashboard’s set was a walk down memory lane, with every soul-baring lyric sounding even better with the live rawness of Carrabba’s delivery.
Their performance hit peak intimacy after they played intense and beautiful “Hands Down” – Carrabba wanted to play one more, but the festival staff said he needed to say goodnight so they could set up for the Flaming Lips. Stage crew began breaking down the set, but as the crowd chanted “one more song!” Carrabba came down to the front of the stage and played through the end of “Hands Down” once more. His guitar wasn’t plugged in, he wasn’t singing into a mic, and the crowd was singing as one, louder than he was. It was intensely personal, and the perfect ending to a remarkable performance, just as the sun finally set.
Headliners The Flaming Lips were the festival royalty. Before their set, bandleader and international superweirdo Wayne Coyne could be seen walking around backstage in his fleshtone bodysuit, complete with a tasseled silver wand as his Biblical fig leaf. All the other bands came out to watch the Lips’ set from the VIP section of the crowd; this was where the party was.
In the shows following the Flaming Lips latest album The Terror, Coyne exuded a darker, sadder presence, and the rest of the band amplified his emotional state, the way they always have. It was a depressing time to see the Flaming Lips perform, especially in contrast to their hyperjoyous shows of the Soft Bulletin era. Coyne seems to have moved past that stage, for the most part, with his newfound enthusiasm with his collaborative cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and his proggy side project Electric Würms. Their set at Silopanna seemed to confirm this step back towards the radiant positivity of previous Lips eras, with a setlist that drew heavily upon their older albums.
Opener “The Abandoned Hospital Ship,” from 1995‘s Clouds Taste Metallic, provided a moment of intimacy before exploding into an insane amount of light and confetti, filling the sky with color. Giant mushrooms, rainbows, and aliens danced onstage as the band played perfect and exuberant renditions of “She Don’t Use Jelly” and “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots,” two fan favorites. We got an extra dose of psychedelia in an extended “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate,” and an unexpected half-cover in the form of The Golden Brothers’ collaboration song with Coyne, “The Golden Path”.
The light show was otherworldly. During the penultimate song, “The WAND”, they were operating at full-force insanity, to such an extent that afterwards, the show had to be paused so an ambulance could come pick up someone who had, unfortunately, had a seizure. Coyne waited respectfully for the situation to clear, thanking the crowd for moving so quickly to allow the medical staff to get to the front right away.
Once it was deemed safe to continue, The Lips finished the show with their beloved cosmic ballad, “Do You Realize??” It was an especially significant moment, with the blinking red lights of the nearby ambulance basking Coyne’s trembling voice, asking the huddled crowd if they realized that everyone they know, someday, will die. The song ends on a note of final positivity in the face of death and human insignificance; gathered together in the woods, with the final tones of the Lips in our ears, it felt like we had done the same.
—Asher Meerovich (@Bummertime)