Hopscotch Music Festival Preview

Julia Holter

Listening to Holter is sort of like walking into a dark living room while covered with thick pudding made out of the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary. Which is to say, there’s something a bit off about it—its the kind of music I can imagine Salvador Dali dancing to—but Holter’s tracks are unexpectedly soothing. Her most recent album, Ekstasis, captures both usages of the word ecstasy: the sense of purified, almost deranged, joy and the sense of being outside oneself looking back. Her songs are hyper-literate—she references French new wave cinema and spouts off Greek—yet her albums never feel like art history lessons. Rather, there is the persistent sense one is strolling leisurely through a museum with wide halls. It’s night and the museum is empty. And at the end of the hall, there Holter stands, crowned with some spectral lampshade, singing her tunes of mystery and love.

The Roots

Even if you’re not a hip-hop head, Hopscotch headliners The Roots promise to deliver one of the most entertaining and polished live sets of the festival, if only for the fact that they’ve had a lot of practice performing. Currently the house band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, The Roots have featured live instrumentals across their 10 studio albums while incorporating soul, jazz and alt-rock sounds into their hip-hop blueprint. The band’s backbone is composed of two monumental talents: Black Thought, an MC who spits dense, winding lyrics with unrelenting energy, and ?uestlove, professional drummer and Twitter extraordinaire (you’ll thank me later). The two co-founders are the only consistent members of the band’s 20-year career, but their penchant for exploring new musical styles has led to longtime collaborations with artists like Malik B. and Dice Raw. Their most recent release, Undun, was a concept album narrating the life and death of fictional character Redford Stevens, a street-level drug dealer inspired by The Wire’s Avon Barksdale. While concept albums are not unheard of in the realm of hip-hop, they’re few and far between, but so are bands that have the same level of cross-genre appeal and musicianship as The Roots.

Dan Deacon

You are probably familiar with Dan Deacon’s work whether you know it or not. If you have ever seen a lizard wearing a sombrero talking about “drinking out of cups” and “captain tying knots,” you have heard a Dan Deacon song. But his body of work is far more expansive than his most heard song. Over the course of eight albums, he manipulated sine waves using physics equipment and his current styles range from freak folk to minimalism. Some of his songs (e.g. “Pink Batman”) could, if recast as an orchestral piece, be mistaken for Steve Reich or Philip Glass. His newest album America features strings and winds on several tracks. In addition to Deacon’s fanciful music production, he is known for involving the crowd at shows. If you’re lucky enough to be close to the stage, you might see his homespun electronics--tangles of hand-soldered wires and knobs that I doubt anyone but Deacon understands. This Friday, I hope to dance myself into a similar tangle.