Goldenvoice may be best known as the company behind Coachella—and rightfully so, given its growth into the world’s music festival of record since its inception in 1999—but the Southern California-based promoter is far from a one-trick pony. In recent years, Goldenvoice has expanded its catalog of concert properties to include more genre-specific events with lineups curated for and targeted to specific audiences by taste and generation.
There’s Stagecoach in Indio for country music lovers, Splash House in Palm Springs for pool-party electronica, Cali Vibes in Long Beach for reggae and hip-hop, and now Just Like Heaven for indie music.
Six-and-a-half months after bringing LCD Soundsystem, The Strokes, Jungle, Phoebe Bridgers, and many more to Pasadena for two days of This Ain’t No Picnic, Goldenvoice returned to Brookside at the Rose Bowl with a similarly stacked lineup of standouts from the 2000s and 2010s packed into a single day of Just Like Heaven. Attendees needed only to trek across some fairway grass (and dodge the occasional sandtrap) on the stadium-adjacent golf course to catch an impressive collection of acts that defined music for much of the millennial generation.
The Stardust Stage, with the iconic Rose Bowl as a backdrop, hosted most of the more eclectic fare on the bill. Azealia Banks brought a healthy helping of Harlem hip-hop to bear on the largely rock-focused festival. Peaches juiced up the same stage with more than a squeeze of eye-popping, thought-provoking performance art that promoted reproductive and trans rights amid previous decade-defining classics like “F–k the Pain Away” and “Boys Wanna Be Her”.
Hot Chip and Caribou took turns around sundown with their respective brands of expertly produced and instrumented indie EDM. Hot Chip’s cheeky British synthpop had fans dancing and jumping to the anthemic beats of “Huarache Lights”, “Flutes”, “Over and Over”, and “Ready for the Floor”. Caribou, meanwhile, combined emotionally earnest indietronica with minimalistically captivating visuals to get folks into their feelings with mesmerizing standards like “You and I”, “Can’t Do Without You”, “Never Come Back”, and “Sun”.
All of these primers laid the foundation for a high-flying finale on that end of the festival grounds by M83, whose performances of “Midnight City”, “My Tears Are Becoming a Sea”, and “Outro” lent a cinematic quality to the setting primed for drama mere miles away from Hollywood.
Across the way from Stardust, those seeking a more traditional guitar-bass-and-drums approach to turn-of-the-millenium indie music got more than they could’ve bargained for at the Orion Stage. The Hives got ticketholders hopping early and often with cultural punk touchstones like “Hate to Say I Told You So” and “Tick Tock Boom”. The Bravery picked up that baton with its own slate of radio-friendly anthems—including “Believe”, “An Honest Mistake”, and “Time Won’t Let Me Go”—before relaying to the newly reactivated The Walkmen, whose own hard-driving style had audiences crowing to “The Rat” and “In The New Year”.
In between those head bangers and near-moshers came a collection of relatively avante-garde artists at Stardust. STRFKR danced, crowd-surfed, and generally goofed around in silly space suits while jamming out to “Rawnald Gregory Erickson the Second”, “Open Your Eyes”, and a characteristically understated version of Cindy Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”. Metronomy tossed in several dollops of keyboards and dreamy vocals to provoke a bit more dancing under the heat of the Pasadena afternoon sun with “Love Factory”, “405”, “Salted Caramel Ice Cream”, and “The Look”. Ladytron brought the vibes back around to something more industrial with its brand of trippy, female-driven techno rock, courtesy of “Seventeen” and “Destroy Everything You Touch”.
Following another one-two punch of dreamy synth-pop from Future Islands and Empire of the Sun, MGMT commanded the Orion Stage with a theatrical reenactment of its debut album, Oracular Spectacular, that was as silly as it was ambitious. From a dramatic overture featuring a company of interpretive dancers, an interlude of bandmates Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser playing a goofy hockey game, and a children’s choir providing backing vocals on “Pieces of What”, to a slew of seemingly AI-generated elements—including background art and an uproariously generic skit recounting the origins of the iconic song “Kids”—the Wesleyan University-born duo pulled out all the stops for a nostalgic display, four years after the group’s appearance at the inaugural Just Like Heaven at Queen Mary Park in Long Beach.
Joining MGMT in that headlining reprisal was Yeah Yeah Yeahs, who closed out the latest edition of the single-day celebration with a decidedly more stripped-down performance than their lineup forebears. Not that Yeah Yeah Yeahs were any less captivating, thanks in large part to Karen O. The South Korean-born punk savant was her usual powerhouse self, showing off her range from silky-soft whispers to metallic screams and guttural growls with the microphone nearly slipping through her throat.
The audience was with it for every moment, especially after the band’s string of cancellations late last year due to guitarist Nick Zinner’s health issues. From new favorites like “Spitting Off The Edge of The World” and deep cuts like “Art Star” to long-established standards “Heads Will Roll”, “Gold Lion”, and “Maps”, Yeah Yeah Yeahs more than made up for their absence from 2022’s KROQ Almost Acoustic Christmas in nearby Inglewood (which saw Social Distortion step in).
As rousing a rocking success as the latest Just Like Heaven turned out to be, the folks at Goldenvoice won’t have long to rest on their laurels—or do too much to get back in gear. This coming weekend, Brookside at the Rose Bowl will once again be busy and buzzing with festivalgoers as Iggy Pop, Siouxsie, Billy Idol, Echo & The Bunnymen, and more descend on the Arroyo Seco for Cruel World, which ought to have Generation X and their forebears making the journey in droves.
Check out fan-shot videos of Just Like Heaven 2023 from Sean Gargan.
MGMT – “Time To Pretend” – 5/13/23