While I was waiting on a malfunctioning camera to get fixed the window where people might actually care about a straightforward review disappeared. However, I still wish to impart why I love music festivals. Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Pitchfork, Wakarusa, and a slew of others happen every year with consistently impressive lineups. If you’re not going to some of these, then I can only ask: Why not?

The main reason people don’t attend these is due to the costs. The costs can be anywhere from 200-400 dollars. Especially for a college student on a budget, these prices can seem untenable for one event. However, I’d like to list just some of the artists I saw at Bonnaroo this year (not to mention ones I could have seen): Stevie Wonder, Dave Matthews Band, Kings of Leon, Jay-Z, Conan O’Brien, Les Claypool, The National, Phoenix, Dropkick Murphys, Against Me, Dead Mau5, GWAR, Baroness, The xx, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes, and The Flaming Lips performing Dark Side of The Moon. Even if I had just seen those bands I’d be paying less than 20 dollars a piece for each of them.

There’s also a lot more you get aside from the concerts. It gives you an opportunity to travel and, for most festivals, a few days of camping with friends. Days of sipping beer, barbecuing, making friends, and kicking back while you cool down from seeing some of your favorite bands.

There are dozens of vendors that offer wares from delicious food (anything from giant jalapeno corn dogs to curry chicken with a side of sweet potato fries), hip and hippy clothing, shoes, and varieties of quality and cheap “glassware.” The sponsors of concerts also bring in lots of different attractions. Bonnaroo featured a 24-hour silent rave (a dance featuring personal headphones that played music from the live DJs), free showers and hair styling from Garnier, and hammocks next to fans spraying mist sponsored by, um, someone cool I’m sure.

If travel is the expense you’re most worked about then worry no more. Most festival sites have rideshare forums that can give you plenty of opportunities to carpool. I randomly ran into two different groups of people at concerts who came from Kalamazoo.

Festivals also allow you to enjoy concerts in whatever way works best for you. I enjoy concerts in a number of different ways depending on my mood and they all work at big festivals. Some people hate moving through crowds and prefer to wait for hours in order to get a good seat. I ended up waiting for 2 hours (making good use of my liquor smuggling tactic mentioned in my previous article) in order to get 5^th row to see Jay-Z. This delay was made considerably more bearable by the fact that I had pretty good seating for Stevie Wonder while I waited.
Others are opportunists who look for gaps in the crowd and slowly shift towards the center and forward. This tactic worked perfectly for the Flaming Lips where I started in the middle of the crowd and was able to slowly duck, swerve, and side step my way to front and center. There’s also the rough-and-tumblers who prefer to push, shove, mosh, and fight their way through a show. While not as decidedly chill as most people prefer at Bonnaroo, I participated in this act in several shows, such as Baroness, Gwar, Dropkick Muprhys, and Against Me.

This leads me to the type of concertgoers that almost only exist at festivals. Some people like to sit down on a blanket with some of their best friends under the stars, kick back, and watch a great show. While this happened at a lot of the shows, one sticks out in my head. It was the last day and we all decided that we weren’t very interested in seeing Dave Mathews Band. I’ve never been a huge fan and I was tired from back-to-back punk shows, but I decided to go anyway. The night had killed the Tennessee heat, someone ponied up and bought a round of beers, and I finally understood why people like DMB.

Festivals are a life changing experience, especially if you haven’t been to a lot of concerts. While I prefer to go with friends, there are also plenty of great people to meet there. Do yourself a favor and go to at least one. Look at any line up if you need further convincing:
2010 Bonnaroo
2010 Lollapalooza
2010 Pitchfork

Summer has hit and to me that means one thing: concerts. Festivals like Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Pitchfork, and a slew of others. The music is usually enough to keep anyone focused and dancing, but some concerts sometimes require a little bit more. It seems slightly sacrilegious to attend a Dropkick Murphys or Gogol Bordello show without at least a little bit of liquor in your belly.

However, this can be problematic when you’re working an 8-hour gig in order to pay for rent, gas, concert tickets, let alone $4.50 for a single shot of Jack Daniels or a 3-dollar beer from the hassled bartender at the side of the stage. What is an honest concert loving American to do?

The only real options to gaining alcohol is to pony up your hard earned cash after you already bought your pricey ticket.  Or, better yet, sneak it in. The only problem is that concert venues recognize this as a very tempting option as well. Classic tactics such as flasks, bottles in coat pockets, and even pints in the sock are failing in the face of increased security and prolonged pat downs.

There are some quality products such as The Beerbelly, which is made up of a neoprene and a polyurethane bladder with a tube for dispensing. In layman’s terms, it’s a plastic bag you strap to your belly that imitates the stomach of a college senior in a frat and has a tube that conveniently dispenses beer or liquor into your mouth. The only problem with products like this is that they cost $49.95 for a basic model.

I’ve luckily happened upon a tactic while I was studying in Ecuador that works perfectly for concerts. In many Ecuadorian stores and gas stations it is customary that you drink any soda or beer you might purchase in the store or near the premises. This is so that the storeowners don’t have to risk losing the bottles which they can return to the bottling companies for money. To avoid this risk, they will give you your beverage in the equivalent of a “to-go sack”. This is simply a plastic lunch sack that they pour the beverage into and tie up at one end. It holds carbonation surprisingly well and can be drank by ripping out a corner of the bag and sipping until it’s gone.

The benefit of these plastic sacks is that it can feel very much like the fillings of any pair of briefs or a bra. It can be attached to articles of clothing by simple pressure, a twist tie, or a small amount of any adhesive. These bags can easily hold 12-16 oz. with very little risk of spilling.

I’d recommend using mixed drinks or beer because once the whole is ripped or the top is opened it is fairly difficult to get it closed again. This can lead to the bags being drank quite quickly, and a lunch sack of Jager or vodka can get you well past the point of enjoying the concert, unless you want to hear the band’s hot new track from inside a bathroom stall.

A review of Lived in Ayre, by Brothers Radio

Walking down the street, skipping over cracks in the sidewalk, Lived in Ayre shines through my headphones.  I trudge along with my hands in my pockets, thinking about this springtime we are so loving here in Kalamazoo.  I think about the birds and the flowers and the silly little things that make life so beautiful and so worth living.  For many of us here at The Kosmo, college is coming to an end, and we will be moving on to find new lovers and play new music and do new things with our new found freedom.  But we will be taking all of everything about college with us, the confusion, the pain, the love, the ecstasy, and we will need a way to package this all up so we can take it with us and not leave it behind because even the painful moments are the beautiful moments, the ones we need to keep, even if we don’t want to. And maybe this is what the new album from Brothers Radio allows us to do.

Lived in Ayre cover art, by Erica Fink

Lived in Ayre begins with angst, but quickly leaves that behind, moving instead to a sense of searching, of living in the wonder of uncertainty, and then charging into an infectious love of youth.  Yet throughout its whole, the album remains by and large restrained, never quite wanting to put it all out there, hinting that there is a story behind the story, that some things are being left unsaid, and that it is best this way.  Created over the course of the past four years by Rob Moran and Devin Kerr while attending the University of Michigan, the lyrics of Ayre string together from track to track like meditations on some anonymous love affair that refused to be left behind.

The first four tracks, beginning with “Open Doors” and extending through “Rosy Colors” are saddened flirtation with the more obvious joy of major chords.  Moran’s voice is like walking alone downtown, thinking about someone you love who has left you, yet makes you feel happy warmly inside.  This noncommittal peace is distorted into the instrumental “Inner Space” as your steps pick up, thinking about this someone, and you begin to sway your arms with fervor, smiling and nodding at the people you pass.  Then you think you see her, but she’s not there, but this is OK. You begin to walk again to the acoustic chorus, this time more sure of yourself, with less to fear in life. Knowing that things are going to be OK, you begin to smile again, yet this returns you to the distortion of insanity and aloneness.

There is silence.

Then, slowly and quietly, life begins to go on.  A car engine revs up, and you are going someplace new.  Only that somebody is still there with you, like a haunting ghost you know to still be alive.  She is there, quietly with you.  You begin to wake up, she is there, yes, but for the first time, this is OK, this present absence of loving.  You begin to become OK, and smile again from deep inside your heart like a little kid with a ball. You leave, you are getting out, going.  You don’t know where, but you are going somewhere to get away.  Not like you are escaping, not the leaving kind of going, but the finding kind of going, the kind that makes you feel like you are breathing for the first time in your life.  This is “Chicago.”  This is your happiness, this is your life, you realize, this is something that is beautiful, and what is so beautiful about it is that you have been given the opportunity to care about other people.  This is a good feeling, you realize.

Yet again, you retreat into sadness with “Goodbye”.  One of the best parts of Ayre is its refusal to really go anywhere, taking small trips here and there only to return to its stated center of peaceful melancholy.   This is not a weakness of unwillingness to take risks, but its greatest strength, and what allows the album to speak to so many of us around a time in our life when the answers aren’t given to us, where there are no clear paths, and lovers are lost, never to be seen again. Ayre‘s uncertainty is its license to relevance.

The finale of the album begins with the assertion that this emotional and intellectual frequency it not something to be kept merely to one’s self, a burden only one person at a time can bare, but something that is shared amongst friends and loved ones, regardless of what independence we may like to invoke. “Under Leaves” is as peaceful as it is comforting, an echo of past lonesomeness, while sounding to the deepest joys one is able to experience only through standing by themselves in the middle of an empty room and realizing that they are not alone.

“I Pretend” concludes Lived in Ayre. Like a true love affair, one is left alone with the knowledge that they will never actually get over the love, and that the sole closure one can take is  a knowing of peace.  “I Pretend,” however, lives in this peace with a flicker of joy usually reserved for new love as opposed to the old.  And maybe that’s the point.  As we leave a past behind, whether it be college, a love, or a life some place else, why look back on our experience, our wounds, our triumphs with a melancholy glaze?  Why not see the exultant joy that existed right along side even our darkest moments if only we had taken the perspective on our situation that would have allowed us to see this second light. Lived in Ayre beacons us towards this path.  And then there is silence.  And then the album begins again.

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For more information, visit Brother Radio’s MySpace, or find them on iTunes and Amazon.