The Past and Present Merge at Just Like Heaven 2024: Recap + Photo Gallery
The post The Past and Present Merge at Just Like Heaven 2024: Recap + Photo Gallery appeared first on Consequence.
A one-day festival is like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. With so many acts overlapping, time is precious. Prioritizing gets much more difficult at a festival like Los Angeles’ Just Like Heaven, which features a bevy of indie bands whose best known albums came from the early 2000s to roughly 2017. If you liked one of these acts, at any point in time, you’ll probably want to see the others, too.
Now five years since its first edition, Just Like Heaven 2024 featured two distinct paths of indie. There was the Ben Gibbard strain: With The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie respectively concluding their dedications to Give Up and Transatlanticism, the fest programmed for similar tastes with the likes of Alvvays, The War on Drugs, Broken Social Scene, Metric, and Warpaint.
And then on the other hand, Phoenix — who headlined the inaugural edition — brought its own strain of synth-inflected indie. If you wanted to see Phoenix, there was a good chance you’d also want to catch Two Door Cinema Club, Passion Pit, Miike Snow, Phantogram, and Washed Out. The overlap between these two groups is strong, and out of the three post-pandemic Just Like Heaven lineups, this year had one of the more wide-ranging sonic selections.
The bands themselves were celebrating the occasion on Saturday, happy to still be around all these years laters with groups that they came up alongside. “In France, we don’t have high school reunions,” Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars said during their set. “So this is kind of like ours.” Matching the “all grown up” vibe at the festival was the assumption that attendees have a lot more money now than they used to, which may be true — still, the exorbitant ~$700 Clubhouse tier of passes offered an entire slab of private access in front of the stage, meaning that getting a perfect, close-up view of a treasured act wasn’t very likely. So, we stood mostly from afar and took it all in.
As a Zillennial who came of age in the MySpace-to-Facebook realm, I had long wanted to try out Just Like Heaven — “formative years” and all that. But upon arriving, it hit me: Barring the electrifying early performances of the reunited CSS and Gossip, every single act I saw at Just Like Heaven 2024 I had seen before at a music festival, be it Coachella or Outside Lands or Lollapalooza.
These days, though, the big, multi-genre festivals are mostly ignoring these established indie acts, relegating them to the genre-specific nostalgia blasts like Just Like Heaven. It’s a sign of indie rock’s minimized cultural dominance, especially when it comes to Gen-Z and festival-going teens — as expected, I spotted maybe five people under the age of 20 at this festival that weren’t with their parents. But Just Like Heaven knows that it’s not trying to meet the moment. It’s trying to take you back to the myriad of moments that these bands had over the last 25 years.
At times, this was a strange point of tension. Death Cab for Cutie opted to stick to the Transatlantacism play-through instead of a career-spanning setlist. They were booked as a package deal with Ben Gibbard’s other band, Postal Service, and it’s pointless to knock a band for wanting to celebrate an album as remarkable as Transatlanticism 21 years later. But given how incredible Ben Gibbard sounded on Saturday, it would have been nice to hear some of the songs from 2022’s Asphalt Meadows, which they’ve toured minimally. Or even Thank You for Today’s “I Dreamt We Spoke Again,” or Kintsugi’s “Black Sun,” and so on. 10 albums in, Death Cab’s catalog is not quite immaculate, but they have reached transcendent heights on every album since Transatlanticism — and of all bands from this era, they have a sampler-worthy selection. That being said, what a spell Gibbard and co. conjure on “Transatlanticism,” each steadfast refrain of “I need you so much closer” landing with swelling, blistered emotion.
Death Cab for Cutie, photo by Ashley Osborn
So as great as Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is, it’s good that Phoenix opted to keep things career-spanning instead of leaning on their breakthrough moment. “LA, I would love to talk to you… but we have seven albums and 50 minutes,” Thomas Mars told the crowd on Saturday — not the only band who had to shelve a bit of banter to keep up with the schedule’s shorter set times. The group raced through a medley of their greatest hits, though without any from 2017’s Ti Amo or earlier albums Alphabetical and It’s Never Been Like That.
Still, Phoenix’s music has never really been rendered unfashionable or unappealing — every album they’ve done, it’s been on their own terms, right down to their terrific 2022 drop Alpha Zulu. Helping reinforce the fact that “things are as good for Phoenix now as they once were,” Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend (a band sorely missed at this festival who are similarly Still Kickin’ It?) showed up to play Alpha Zulu cut “Tonight,” and later sat in with the band to play guitar on “1901.” Phoenix could play two full sets jam band-style and it would be a worthy watch.
Meanwhile, an act that did not benefit from Just Like Heaven’s nostalgic attitude happened to boast the single greatest performance of the day: The War on Drugs. Their set on Saturday night reinforced that there was no “golden era” of this band, regardless of how incredible 2014’s Lost in the Dream still is. Their entire catalog is worthy of praise, and live, they take on shimmering, majestic shapes — some of those songs are just two chords oscillating back and forth, and Adam Granduciel and co. find ways to stretch a limited frame and cram in as much life as possible.
The War on Drugs, photo by Quinn Tucker
Watching The War on Drugs, it became easy to measure the power and imagination of that performance to some others that day.
So many of the groups playing Just Like Heaven, I had witnessed years prior at their visceral peaks: Two Door Cinema Club, Passion Pit, Washed Out, Tegan & Sara… I had been lucky enough to see them when they were the moment, not a memory of it. Everyone sounded good on Saturday (Passion Pit’s Michael Angelakos has not lost his astounding vocal range, that’s for sure), but still, there was something missing. That fire had quelled, the chaos settled. The music was lively, danceable, but hardly any of it landed the way it once had.
Looking around at the festival, this appeared to be a shared experience. There weren’t any moshpits, no crowd activity that suggested “reclaiming youth.” Young children were everywhere — the parents had turned up to not turn up, but to peacefully indulge. Death Cab and The Postal Service have been peacefully indulging in their 2003 moment for a year now, and they did put on excellent shows. Phoenix sound like they’re indulging in everything all the time (in a good way).
The War on Drugs were the only band that seemed to carry the full weight of the past. And in doing so, they provided a glimpse of our futures. The hype that these bands rode in on may have died, but the music can still be brimming with life. These nostalgia festivals don’t have to predicate themselves on a memory, and the live experience does not have to be tethered to who that band used to be. The past was fun — the present should be more interesting.
Just Like Heaven 2024 Photo Gallery:
The Past and Present Merge at Just Like Heaven 2024: Recap + Photo Gallery
Paolo Ragusa
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