In its first year, the Pearl Street Music and Arts Festival owed its successes and failures to one word: ambition.
The line-up was one more creative and contemporary than any small-scale Colorado festival in recent memory. Unfortunately, the overly-ambitious ticket point ($39.50 single day, $75 for two-day in advance) led to a drastically undersold Boulder Theater on both Friday and Saturday nights.
Friday night’s bill looked promising with locals and warming the Boulder Theater stage for singer-songwriter and indie-folk buzz band . The Boulder-bred (by way of South Africa) Isakov struggled with sound issues that were all the more apparent in the still-filling room. Jennings took the stage around 10 p.m. to wild applause, though he, too, fought the soundboard for the first 20 minutes of his set — eventually leaving the stage for five minutes in frustation. The singer-songwriter played a plethora of songs from his fairly extensive catalog, though without his usual backing band, more than a few of them blended together. Fans waited for sing-alongs like “Darkness Between the Fireflies” and “Be Here Now,” though they nearly went unnoticed amidst the sea of mid-tempo acoustic numbers with his perpetually rising/falling, buttery vocals.
The Head and the Heart followed with an energetic (if derivative) set to close out Friday night. Spirited takes on “Cats and Dogs” and “Ghosts” saw the six-member band dancing and clapping across all corners of the stage, with several audience members doing the same in the pit. At this point in their young career, the Seattle sextet relies a little too much on indie tropes (handclaps, foot stomps, tambourine egg shakers) and choruses that aspire to become anthems before they are lyrically competent. Still, the group entertained and drew the biggest crowd of the weekend.
In addition to the ticketed performances at the Boulder Theater, various local bars hosted bands and DJs that seemed unaffiliated with the festival, despite being listed on the official festival website. played a rousing set of local “new-grass” at the Lazy Dog with shredding and precision that put the night’s earlier performances to shame, and the Lumineers played a creative early evening set down the street at Topo Ranch.
Saturday’s music at the Boulder Theater exceeded the previous night’s, though the attendance barely reached half capacity. started the night with its slow, delicate Wilco and Neil Young-inspired tunes, followed by a tight and magnetic performance from Denver’s own . The eight-member band displayed a confidence and swagger — the kind befitting of a festival headliner. Favorites like “Spit Spot” and their home-state homage, “Colorado,” saw some of the biggest audience sing-alongs of the weekend.
closed the festival with a bouncy, tight-as-twine set that clocked in at just under two hours (with two encores, nonetheless). The band last played a packed Boulder Theater on a Tuesday night in late October, and while Saturday’s performance was comparable to that show from a musical standpoint, it was disappointing to look around at a half-empty house for this rare, one-off performance. Still, the band played with the same ferocity for a few hundred as they have for a few thousand — with songs like “Stranger,” “The Ark,” “Fate,” “Hang On” and “The Rabbit, the Bat and the Reindeer” setting the room ablaze. Toward the end of the show, lead singer Scott McMicken invited the crowd to dance on stage in what felt more like a house show than a music festival.
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John Hendrickson is the Managing Editor of Reverb and a multimedia journalist for The Denver Post.
Brittany Moore is a Boulder-based photographer and a regular contributor to Reverb. Check out more of her work and her blog .
