2011 Voodoo Experience – The Weird, The Awesome and The Macabre

The Moon Gods of My Morning Jacket @ Voodoo Experience 2010 - Photo by Wesley Hodges

Worship The Weird

Regardless of your thoughts on this year’s lineup, to the festival’s credit, the Voodoo Experience always does a bang-up job of compiling one of the most unique, wholly eccentric and random yearly lineups of any American festival. No one outside of the Rehage camp could’ve envisioned this sorta lineup and I’m actually kind of excited about it after having been to Bonnaroo and ACL this year (two great festivals, but two with a great deal of crossover acts). Doubt I’ll get another chance to see Soundgarden, Blink-182, Fatboy Slim, Peelander Z and Snoop in the same weekend. Seemingly marching to the beat of a different drummer with their bookings than many of the other majors isn’t such a bad thing in our view and there’s no cookie cutter out there that coulda carved this one out. Now we’d like to direct your attention to 3 acts who will likely fuse the green fields of City Park with the 3 completely different levels of electricity on 3 different days.

The Weird: Peelander Z – Friday

Peelander-Z @ Voodoo Experience 2011

The Awesome: The Raconteurs – Sunday

The Raconteurs - Sunday @ Voodoo Experience 2011

With The Dead Weather, Jack White’s Third Man Records responsibilities and the excellent new ROME spaghetti western soundtrackin’ project with Norah Jones, Danger Mouse & Daniel Liuppi, it seemed like it’d long time before we got to see The Raconteurs surface once again on the festival circuit. With apologies to Sister/ex-wife Meg White, The Raconteurs are my personal favorite Jack White project and the recent announcement that they’ll be playing on a stacked Sunday with The Meters, Fatboy Slim and TVOTR has us very much excited to get out there for yet another epic closing day in City Park (remember last year (Pres Hall > Janelle Monae > MGMT > MMJ) or ’09 (Pogues > WSP > Flaming Lips)?). Just a rock solid, Zepp-ed up garage rock band of buddies closing it out on a Sunday night, can’t beat that.

The Macabre: Mastodon – Saturday, October 29th

Mastodon: Appearing @ Voodoo Experience 2011

This band will be coming in hot from a handful of dates with Friday night’s headliners Soundgarden and will also likely be riding a great amount of hype around their stratospherically-sprawling new record The Hunter (out this Tuesday – in the running for coolest album cover of the year). This Atlanta metal outfit delivers a unique brand of pioneering, hyper-literate hybrid of prog rock, sludge metal, & driving hardcore riffage, helping the band ascend to the throne as one of the paramount metal acts of the early 21st century. If the cute lyrics of the opening song on The Hunter (I Burned Out My Eyes/I Cut Off My Tongue) are any indication, these guys haven’t gone soft. For me personally, this is the show of the weekend. Check out the video below that shows how the sculpture featured on the album cover of The Hunter was constructed – very cool.

Mastodon – Black Tongue