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If it's this sleepy next year, I'm blogging from the pool (photo by Kate Gardiner/NewsHour)
 

By mid-afternoon, it was time for more mellow as Beach House, the ethereal duo of Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally, played a wispy, dreamy set of songs that functioned as intimate pillow talk—that just happened to be overhead by 18,000 people.

Beach House (photo by Kate Gardiner/NewsHour)

“You know, as headphones music, this stuff is great,” said one concertgoer standing beside me during the Beach House set. “But here… now… really?” My thoughts exactly, and obviously expressed not for the first time during this long, somnambulistic weekend.

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While almost everyone is in agreement that day three is the strongest of Pitchfork 2010, it started out on the main stages with only slightly more energy than the past two days.

To be clear, I have nothing against chill-out music as a genre; I just expect ambient pop to measure up to the best of what I’ve heard from that sound in the past, whether it’s the godfather himself, Brian Eno, or Aphex Twin in his ambient mode, or the mellower of the early ’90s shoegazers. Too much chillwave, doesn’t rise to those peaks on record. And even if it did, that’s not guarantee that it can carry a crowd of 18,000 in the festival setting. Especially when it’s interspersed with just plain generically jangly indie rock.

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(photo by Kate Gardiner/NewsHour)

And Yawnfork continues. Sad to say, the first part of day two at the Pitchfork Music Festival has continued in the sleepy spirit of Friday, with nothing as yet to energize a sold-out crowd of 18,000 baking in the 92-degree heat.

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(photo by Kate Gardiner/NewsHour)

Day two ended with the uneven mix of a few highs and a whole lot of lows that has characterized the fifth (or sixth) annual Pitchfork Music Festival, the weakest to date -- though there's still the hope that day three will redeem 2010 tomorrow.

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(photo by Kate Gardiner/NewsHour)

In 2008, touring in support of their first album "The Airing of Grievances," Patrick Stickles and his bandmates delivered an edgy set of twisted art-punk. With the release of their second album, the historical concept effort "The Monitor," their sound has taken a turn toward simpler song structures with anthemic choruses and dramatic dynamic shifts -- a sound, needless to say, ideally suited for motivating a bored, over-heated crowd in the wide-open spaces of a baseball field.

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(photo by Kate Gardiner/NewsHour)

And Yawnfork continues.

Sad to say, the first part of day two at the Pitchfork Music Festival has continued in the sleepy spirit of Friday, with nothing as yet to energize a sold-out crowd of 18,000 baking in the 92-degree heat.

…Read Full Entry

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While we're in the full-on Pitchfork mode, and because a couple of readers have emailed with questions about my thoughts on past festivals, here are some links to my festival coverage in years past. (I'm missing a few, it seems, but blame the beyond-sketchy quality of my former employer's Web site.)

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