Amanda Mack
The first time I attended Shaky Knees in Atlanta, Georgia was in 2018. I only did one day – Friday – and it was specifically for Franz Ferdinand. Ahead of them was Jimmy Eat World, a nice surprise on the Piedmont stage, and from the hill between the Piedmont and Peachtree stages, I caught Courtney Barnett and David Byrne’s pre-Broadway iteration of his American Utopia show. Franz’s set was a festival set, but intoxicating and dancy in the way you can always count on Franz to be, even as the sun indiscriminately scorched the crowd and the band. I stayed for twenty minutes of Jack White, who headlined that day, before I took off to hang with my favorite Scots at their late-night DJ set.
While I don’t seek out music festivals, I do like them and when they don’t take place outside at the ass-end of a southern summer, I don’t mind attending them. I didn’t really think about Shaky Knees again until 2021, when the state of the world kept me concert-less for 20 months and desperate to see as many bands as possible to make up for going so long without that coveted muffled, morning-after hearing. It didn’t hurt that this year’s festival was moved to October, a kinder month in the state of Georgia, or that it included almost every band I would have booked for my own festival. Weirdly, the only band seemingly missing was Franz Ferdinand.
Day 1
I walked through the gates of Shaky Knees and straight into the set of GLOVE, a band out of Florida that was the first to take the main stage for the day. While I enjoyed the monotone drone from Rod Woolf over new-wave grooves, things really got interesting when drummer Brie Denicourt stepped from behind the kit and played the lead singer for a song. The mic passed again, this time to their guitarist, for the last song of their set.
Between GLOVE and a mid-day set from Cults, I fueled up on very mediocre, yet very expensive chicken tenders but I wish I would have had a very expensive beer or two in the name of the Manhattan duo. The issues started a few songs in when Brian Oblivion’s keyboard began cutting in and out. To fix what I expected was a heating issue, a fan was brought out and pointed at the keyboard. Unfortunately, this did little to fix the malfunctioning device and it threw off their attempt to play a new song. For anyone less graceful and unshakable than vocalist Madeline Follin, it could have been a very disastrous first post-pandemic performance for Cults, but they took it all in stride and seemingly didn’t even remember the blunders by the time they played “Go Outside”.
As much as I shamelessly and biasedly adore Annie Clark, aka, St. Vincent, I’m willing to admit that I just didn’t get her sixth studio album, Daddy’s Home. I bought it, I listened to it, and I enjoyed it for the musicianship because if nothing else, Annie is an endlessly impressive musician, but there was a disconnect for me. I didn’t ram every quirk of every song into my brain as I did for MASSEDUCTION and St. Vincent. I absolutely dreaded hearing my favorite St. Vincent tracks from albums past get dragged through the slinky 70’s soul vibe of Daddy’s Home, but I honestly didn’t mind it when she opened her set with “Digital Witness.” It softened the angular edges of it and opened it up into a song that I found myself swaying my hips to. Thankfully, she didn’t force that treatment on any song that just wouldn’t support it like “Cheerleader” or “Birth in Reverse”. If I were unbiased enough to gripe about anything in her set, it would be the phone call skit she did where she talked a friend through a bad drug trip. I’m sure it played better during her normal tour shows, but she had an hour here and it went on for a bit longer than it needed to. But, since I’m not unbiased enough to admit to any of that, her set was flawless.
Foo Fighters headlined and they felt monstrous, if not a little out of place, under the banner of a festival that was started to give exposure to indie bands in Atlanta. I thought Dave Grohl sounded a little horse even before he started affectionately yelling at the crowd and calling us “motherfuckers,” but there was zero sense of preservation from him. They blasted through “The Pretender,” “Learn to Fly,” and “Breakout” pretty early in the night and Dave did every guttural, screamy part like he had spare vocal cords stashed in his guitar case. Through videos on YouTube, I learned that they did their cover of “You Should Be Dancing” by The Bee Gees later on and Dave sang so comically above his vocal range that I cried laughing as I watched it. I wasn’t there for that. I left somewhere in the middle of the set because I had a date with some Swedish rockers and I could not be late.
In addition to playing Shaky Knees, several bands had officially sanctioned late-night solo shows at venues in the area. I’m pretty sure they’re designed to start at a time that allows you to see the headliner’s full set, but I was too paranoid to take a chance on missing even a single second of The Hives. What if my phone lost signal as I was trying to call for a Lyft? Or what if my Lyft driver just kept driving past the drop-off location for an hour? After factoring in several scenarios that would put me arriving late to see the band that single-handedly sold me on getting tickets to the festival, the only reasonable thing I could do was allow Foo to sing “These Days” to me as I exited the grounds.
A majority of lead singers prefer to be on stage and behind the microphone for the show, away from the outreached, grabby hands of fans with cell phones ready to be shoved into their faces, but not Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist. He’s a man of the people, and he often spends more time off the stage than on it. When he’s not in flight from using Chris Dangerous’ drum kit as a launchpad, he’s in the crowd, singing directly into people’s faces and inviting the audience to do their worst in their attempts to crush him in their midst. If any band suffered the most from social distancing protocols for the last two years, it was probably them.
The Alive opened for them at Center Stage. They didn’t quite have the same brand of energy as The Hives, but they didn’t need it. Their sound is built from bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Queens of the Stone Age, something that their song “The Man” is a great testament to. Their sound will most likely get modified as they get older. They’re young (like their-parents-drove-them-to-the-gig young) but they’re already doing a hell of a lot right. They played at least thrice during Shaky Knees weekend which is one gig more than the band they opened for.
Pelle refuses to let anyone sit comfortably for too long. His very first order of business was to drag that wired microphone all the way to the back of the room to the people in seats and get them in on the action, because if you’re not moving to The Hives, you are a target of The Hives, and they will get you. There weren’t too many surprises to the setlist but they did come with some treats for the people of “Atlantis,” the name Pelle dubbed the city. They didn’t seem all that interested in using their first time back in “The A” in several years to test out new material but they did do the two singles they officially released pre-pandemic, “Good Samaritan” and “I’m Alive.” They also did “Paint A Picture,” a song they’ve been playing live long enough for several people in front of me to know the words to it.
I thought that by the time I left Center Stage that I would cross The Hives off my live band bucket list, but that night with them added an addendum to it instead: see them as many times as I possibly can. Luckily, I had day two of Shaky Knees to help me make good on that.
Day 2
I did the exact thing I told myself I wasn’t going to do at Shaky Knees: I camped out at a stage all day to see one band from the railing. Doing that seems to go against the very design of music festivals – to take in as much of the varied offerings of live music as possible. But I woke up Saturday morning and decided I was dedicating it to a second-round with The Hives at the expense of missing Geese and Garbage who were both on my list of must-see bands.
Ahead of them, I saw Larkin Poe, a band I knew in name only. I was under the impression that they were shoegazey art rock. That notion may have also come from them having Poe in their name, a nod to Edgar Allan Poe that was not by accident. They are two sisters, Rebecca and Megan Lovell, who seemed as determined to give us a southern revival as they were to give us a bluesy rock show born in the swamp. They succeeded splendidly at both.
The Hives setlist was tweaked a bit for the casuals. They axed “See Through Head,” “Try It Again,” and most surprisingly “Two-Timing Touch and Broken Bones.” Pelle climbed the stage scaffolding and yanked a beer from the guy next to me to steal a swig. Nicholaus Arson jumped down from the stage and crowd-surfed during “Walk Idiot Walk.” I think he was trying to get passed around a bit, but security kept him close to the front. Chris Dangerous, Vigilante Carlstroem, and newest member, The Johan and Only, watched amusedly from the stage, keeping the music nice and tight during the crowd escapades of Brothers Almqvist. At some point, an emboldened fan crowd-surfed his way to the front and broke through security in an attempt to crash the stage. The Hives were mostly unphased. Perhaps they were even secretly pleased by it. I get the feeling that’s the desired outcome of a show for them – swift kick back on the unbridled chaos that they so freely give out.
I watched Alice Cooper’s theatrical creep show extravaganza from the back as I mentally prepared for my second late-night outing, this time with Orville Peck.
Orville did not have an opener for a show that was already starting close to midnight, and my poor, day two festival feet thanked him for that. The stage at Terminal West was small and left little room for his band and his usual boot scootin’ boogying he does, but it made the affair that much more intimate. It created a cozy, unshowy atmosphere that let Orville test out a new song and perform some covers that he wouldn’t have time for during his festival set like “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other” and his slightly reworked version of “Fancy.”
Day 3
Day three was for Modest Mouse. I was able to admit that to myself pretty early in the day after getting past the personal music festival transgressions I’d committed.
Tennis is a band I became familiar with around 2017 with their release of Yours Conditionally. Shaky Knees gave them a mid-afternoon set on the main stage where they played for an audience that was already partly made up of people claiming the barricade for The Strokes. But those people were blessed by the airy, spellbinding vocals of Alaina Moore all the same. Since the husband-and-wife duo released their newest album, Swimmer, last year without much of a chance to tour behind it, much of their set was them excitedly getting to play tracks from it for their first festival crowd.
Seeing Orville Peck is fun, but seeing him surrounded by people who have zero idea who he is was the better experience for me. I think so much has already been said about Orville’s booming voice that is Johnny Cash-colored in some places and shades of Roy Orbison in others, but enough cannot be said about hearing it in person. The reaction wasn’t as strong at the solo show because everyone in that room knew what we were in for. That voice is a knife that cuts through any giggly bewilderment the mask and fringe tends to create for the uninitiated. Orville left Shaky Knees with new converts, and many of them were standing near me.
I’d heard very mixed things about Modest Mouse’s late night show. Theirs was the same night as Orville’s, and the word around social media (or just the small, Shaky Knees-focused Facebook group I was in) was that Isaac Brock, mythical frontman of the band, had seemed aloof and uninterested during their show at The Masquerade. There is not enough internet to contain the disquisition I could give about how much I adore Isaac Brock and all of his enigmatic, moody rockstar quirks, so I knew I was in for a good set at Shaky Knees. And boy, I’ve never been more right. Modest Mouse had the most unexpected festival set of the weekend, playing “Spitting Venom” and “Rat King” in place of songs like “Ocean Breathes Salty,” “Missed the Boat” or even “Lampshades on Fire” which would have felt more fitting for the occasion. The only songs they knew they had to play were “Float On” and “Dashboard,” but they seemingly balanced out the obligatory radio hits with “Paper Thin Walls” and the surprise moshpit-starter “Doin’ the Cockroach.” The band didn’t forget they had a new album to peddle, so they gave the most stage time to cuts from The Golden Casket. I don’t know if the album has been out long enough to know what the live staples from that one are going to be yet, but I was still pleasantly surprised at their choice to include “Leave a Light On” and “We’re Lucky.”
I got to share a sunset with one of my favorite bands in the world and then lost the lens cap to my camera in my attempt to get out of the audience before The Strokes. Shaky Knees giveth and Shaky Knees taketh away, I suppose, but thankfully, it was much more generous with the giving.
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