The North Coast Music Festival, held in Union Park from Friday, September 3, through Sunday, September 5, launches this year fully formed as a credible competitor to Pitchfork and Lollapalooza. The newcomer stands apart from those fests by virtue of a relatively strict curatorial strategy. Rather than offer a dizzyingly huge range of genres, North Coast has booked artists who almost all fall solidly into one of three categories: dance music, hip-hop, or jam band. This approach narrows the fest’s potential audience, of course, but it also promises to eliminate the jarring stylistic collisions that can make a broader-minded festival feel like listening to a shitty bar DJ who can’t put together a segue or work a crowd—on the last day of Lollapalooza, for instance, even before Erykah Badu finished her set, Wolfmother cranked up on the nearest stage, and it was not a good vibe.
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Nonmusic attractions include photo booths, art installations, and something the organizers are calling a “Relaxatorium bounce room.” There will be food and drink from more than a dozen local vendors, among them Wishbone, Smoke Daddy, Veerasway, Soul Vegetarian, and Chicago Soydairy, plus a bazaar selling clothes, jewelry, art, and more from the likes of Palmer Square Studios, Strainge Clothing, Squasht by Les, and On the Rocks. The Reader hosts a Living Gallery with live art from local graffiti artists Revise CMW, Czr Prz, Tews 1, and Demon SB, tribal-psychedelic illustrator Pablo Ramos, body painter David Hilborn, and many more; the public can get in on the action by creatively reimagining the Reader R logo for a chance at prizes (and a spot in the paper). The North Coast festival is also throwing afterparties throughout the weekend, some of them quite large; see the sidebar for details. —MR
Chemical Brothers After getting burned by Goldie’s Saturnz Return in 1998, I decided that a good time to give up on dance producers would be after they start collaborating with Noel Gallagher. I still stand by it as a rule of thumb, but it backfired when I stopped paying attention to the Chemical Brothers following their Gallagherized 1999 album, Surrender. When I checked back in with the group on 2007’s We Are the Night, I found that Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons were still as willing to push stylistic boundaries and take house and techno into weird, druggy turf as they had been on their first record—not the rote makers of big-beat I had expected them to become—and I subsequently learned that I’d missed a few jams on their previous couple albums. This summer’s Further (Parlophone) is a blended eight-song collection that goes far out on excursions into Krautrock and whatever you call TV on the Radio, but its centerpiece, “Horse Power,” is a psychedelic house floor-filler with squelchy synths that hark back to Dig Your Own Hole—which suddenly seems like something I need to hear again. Fri 9/3, 8:30 PM, North Stage. —MR
Moby Following Moby can be frustrating—after years of hearing his songs in TV ads and dealing with his vegan fair-trade piety and public opinions on sociopolitical issues, it’s sometimes hard to remember that he’s responsible for several of dance music’s all-time greatest bangers, including the epic “Go.” This DJ gig would be an excellent opportunity for him to dig into his formidable crates and pull some cuts that remind us of his ability to make a dance floor absolutely explode. Sat 9/4, 9 PM, Coast Stage. —MR
To buy tickets to these shows (with the exception of the one at Schubas), you must have already bought an equal or greater number of North Coast tickets—you’ll be asked to provide either proof of purchase, like a stub or wristband, or your username and password from the festival’s ticketing service, Clubtix.net.
Sat 9/4, midnight, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, 773-549-0203, $22, 18+.
Green Velvet (DJ set), Claude VonStroke Sun 9/5, 10 PM, Transit Nightclub, 1431 W. Lake, 312-491-8600 or 773-598-0852, $12, 21+.
