In Bloom Fest 2018 Rundown, Pt. 4: Birthday Club + Moon Taxi + Broods + Jax Jones

Well, here we are, friends. The inaugural In Bloom Music Festival unfurls tomorrow, Saturday, March 24th, at the ever-picturesque Eleanor Tinsley Park.

Do me a favor, by the way, y’all: don’t just chuck your garbage anywhere, okay? Every festival I’ve been to over there has had plenty of trash bins spread throughout the grounds, and sometimes separate bins for recycling, as well, so don’t be a douche. Those of us who actually live in H-town like to visit the place when it’s not festival time, and the massive piles of trash I’ve seen strewn everywhere, are heartbreaking.

Don’t get me wrong — the FPSF folks have always done an incredible job of cleaning things up afterwards, but dammit, they really shouldn’t have to, since we’re all grown-ass people (well, most of us, anyway). Besides, a lot of garbage ends up in Buffalo Bayou, where the festival crews can’t get to it, and which then goes all the way down through the Ship Channel, out through Galveston Bay, and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico. The bottles and cans and muddy clothes and whatever else you mindlessly toss in the water ends up on beaches all around the Gulf and damages the marine ecosystem. Just don’t do it, please. I’m asking nicely.

Anyway, there’s not a lot more for us here at SCR to say about In Bloom, except that — cross fingers — the weather looks like it should be pretty nice, with only a slight (10-20%) chance of rain and temperatures between the low 70s at night and the mid-80s during the day. That right there is goddamn perfect festival weather, in my book, especially since the last few festivals I’ve been to (Day for Night, FPSF, FPSF again, Madness on Main…) have all seen either brutal heat or (more frequently) torrential, sometimes show-canceling downpours. Here’s hoping this weekend works out better.

Sadly, this will be our final round of previews/rundowns for this year’s festival — you can see the other three here, here, and here, should you feel like it.

It’ll be a somewhat truncated pile compared to the rest, as well, bringing the grand total of previewed acts to a nice, round 30. The reason it’s shorter this time out is because yours truly (that’s Jeremy) is on his way out of town this afternoon. Unfortunately, I won’t be at the festivities this weekend; I’d previously committed to a Cub Scout campout with my kids, so I’ll be up in the Piney Woods while y’all enjoy the hell out of Beck and Twin Shadow and Mija and Explosions in the Sky and Say Girl Say and Birthday Club and Broken Social Scene and Cigarettes After Sex and…well, hell, all the rest.

Okay, enough talk; let’s get this going:

Birthday Club
Birthday Club have been one of my top five Houston acts of the past decade. Their Lighten Up EP has spent more than its fair share of time in my car’s CD player. I wear their T-shirt regularly. Their ’80s power-pop-influenced melodies and songcraft keep me humming their tunes all day. Every Birthday Club song I listen to, I think, “What a hit this song should be!”

Yeah, they may be one of the best bands on this weekend’s excellent bill. So, to whoever scheduled the weekend…why in the world did you schedule Houston’s best band before noon on Sunday morning? Ah, well — even The Suffers had to play a similar slot at FPSF before they blew up, so get out there early and support this band! (Jason Smith)
[Birthday Club plays at 11:40AM on Sun., March 25th, at the Flora Stage.]

 

Moon Taxi
I’ve been curious about Moon Taxi for a while now, having heard good things about the Nashville rock band from several different people; I was a little twitchy when one review I saw described them as “jam rock,” because few things make me twitch like Phish or Widespread Panic. Happily, that description doesn’t fly, and there’s not a 10-minute extended jam in sight.

Okay, I mean, I kind of get it — like a lot of jam-rock outfits out there, Moon Taxi are aggressively cheerful and bright, even when they’re singing about sad stuff. But there’s more soul than jazz or funk going on here, making the band come off more like a less-gritty X Ambassadors, maybe, or Maroon 5 (which, again, twitch), or soul-rockers Train, who I’ve actually grown to like over the past several years, after an initial bout of knee-jerk loathing.

That band’s sincerity and friendly, just-doing-what-they-want vibe eventually won me over, and I’m feeling the same way about Moon Taxi; they’re not for everybody, sure, but when I listen to funky anthem “Let The Record Play,” organ-heavy stomper “Moving To The City,” delicate-but-determined “Two High,” or the shout-along chorus of “Good As Gold,” I can’t help but smile and bob my head. And sometimes, that’s all you really need. (Jeremy Hart)
[Moon Taxi plays at 3:10PM on Sun., March 25th, at the Flora Stage.]

Broods
Another band I’ve been meaning to check out for a long while now, New Zealand sibling duo Broods (brother and sister Georgia and Caleb Nott) won me over pretty damn quickly. They ride the line between EDM and straight-up pop in the same way that bands like CHVRCHES and Purity Ring do, although they differentiate themselves somewhat by mining a dark vein of that electro-pop sound — tracks like “Free” and “Hold The Line,” off 2016’s Conscious, are simultaneously menacing and defiant, demanding you dance but not caring what you think. There’s not that level of pure joy you get from CHVRCHES, no, but what is there is tough and vibrant and compelling as hell.

They’ve got a lot of vulnerability, though, along with the strength, as on “Freak Of Nature,” where Georgia Nott’s voice dances and twirls with Swedish pop singer Tove Lo‘s (and yeah, there’s a fair resemblance between Broods and Tove Lo’s own music, as well), or the somber, elegaic “All Of Your Glory”. At the end of Conscious, I’m wishing I could hear more, and right now.

I should note, by the way, that Georgia Nott also has a new kinda-sorta-solo album/project out; called The Venus Project, the effort saw Nott recruit an all-female group of musicians, mixing engineers, graphic artists, and pretty much every other person necessary to release an album and created the album with those women, releasing the result on International Women’s Day. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet, I’m sad to say, but I definitely will be soon. (Jeremy Hart)
[Broods plays at 7:30PM on Sun., March 25th, at the Fauna Stage.]

Jax Jones
I’ve only heard a few tracks so far from British DJ Jax Jones (real name Timucin Fabian Kwong Wah Aluo), it’s true, but he grabbed my attention recently, largely due to the song “Breathe”, and, probably more than the song itself, its accompanying video. At first blush, the video looks to be just another dance track video, but it’s quirky in unexpected ways, from the appearance of a “mascot” in a Jax Jones outfit, complete with giant grinning head, to the physics-defying top knot of the female dancer; either they ran some of the dance steps backwards, or the woman’s hair is controlled by nanites or something.

Plus, I dig it because it’s all filmed in downtown London, with a large part of the video taking place inside the London Natural History Museum (hence the giant dinosaur skeleton in the middle of the room), which I’ve been to and which is a truly awesome place, both the building itself and the exhibits inside.

As for Jax Jones’ music, he’s got a deft hand at the production, crafting melodies that are addictive as hell and impossible to resist, even to a non-dancer like me. I think Jones has mostly done remix work before now, but I’m intrigued by the few new tracks I’ve heard; they’re very promising. (Jeremy Hart)
[Jax Jones plays at 3PM on Sun., March 25th, at the Ostara Stage.]

Annnnnnnd…that’s it for us here at SCR, at least in terms of previews for In Bloom 2018. Hope to see y’all out there!

(Photos: Birthday Club photo by Jonathan Mazaltov; Broods photo by Renata Raksha.)