FYF Fest 2012: Refused, Wild Flag, M83, Yeasayer booked

Now in its ninth year, the independent-focused FYF Fest is returning to the Los Angeles State Historic Park and for the first time since moving downtown will expand from one to two days. The lineup for the Labor Day weekend fest is an adventurous mix of acts young and old, leaning heavily on punk and veterans of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Top-billed artists this year include the reunited Swedish punk band Refused, reunited local rock band Redd Kross, the trippy M83, indie-punk supergroup Wild Flag and electro-soul artist James Blake. 

Once again the FYF Fest is working in conjunction with Coachella promoter Goldenvoice. This marks the fourth straight year that FYF has been stationed at the Chinatown-adjacent State Historic Park, also the site of this summer's dance-focused Hard Summer. While FYF has long specialized in promoting punk and noise shows in and around Echo Park, this year's lineup was first unveiled on Santa Monica's non-profit KCRW-FM, a sign of FYF's growing influence on the local scene.

Other acts booked for the festival, which will take place Sept. 1 and 2, include the reunited Desaparecidos, the politically inclined scrappy punk outfit led by Bright Eyes architect Conor Oberst, and the global influenced music of Yeasayer. All told, more than 50 acts were revealed Monday morning. Among the highlights: hard-core act Quicksand, noise-pop aficionados Sleigh Bells, '80s revivalists Twin Shadow, electronic act Purity Ring, the patiently ambient rock of Warpaint and in-the-news punk band Against Me!

Weekend passes will start at $77 and will go on sale Friday via Ticketfly. FYF Fest is all-ages and will run from noon until midnight each day. Tickets will also be available at independent record stores in the L.A. area and select Chilli Beans locations. Visit the FYF Fest site for a complete run-down of outlets. 

Complete lineup and poster is after the jump:

Review: Sleigh Bells bring 'Treats,' 'Reign of Terror' to Mayan

Sleigh Bells hammers through songs from its two albums at Mayan Theater. The energy is contagious; the message is muddled.

At the Mayan Theater alcohol isn’t allowed on the floor in front of the stage. You want a grown-up drink, you stick to the bar on the mezzanine. This was the case, anyway, on Tuesday night, when New York’s Sleigh Bells arrived at the downtown venue for a sold-out concert mere hours after releasing its new album, “Reign of Terror.” That title happens to reflect the way lots of rock acts might view the Mayan’s strict booze policy.

But Sleigh Bells had no reason to worry: Within seconds of the group’s opening number, the floor had become a writhing mass of outstretched limbs, fists pumping in time to a beat that felt loud enough to crumble plaster. The band was eliminating the need for liquid encouragement by flooding its audience with something more elemental: pure adrenaline.

Sleigh Bells’ animating idea amounts to a reimagining — a reclamation, perhaps — of rap-rock, with Derek Miller’s economy-sized guitar riffs laid over stark drum-machine beats; Alexis Krauss adds pop polish with her breathy, chant-like vocals.

On “Treats,” the band’s 2010 debut, the sound appeared fully formed, as though Miller and Krauss had somehow accessed the spirit of Run-DMC without bogging down in the memory of Alien Ant Farm. The record earned ecstatic reviews and led to high-profile placements in a Honda commercial and on “Gossip Girl”; Sleigh Bells played Coachella and toured Europe with M.I.A., who later hired Miller to produce a track on her album “Maya.”

Not surprisingly, “Reign of Terror” is more expansive than its predecessor: There are several cuts in the power-ballad tradition once embodied by Def Leppard (an avowed Sleigh Bells influence), and Miller has spoken of writing songs about the death of his father and his mother’s battle with cancer. The new music still bludgeons, but does so with newfound finesse.

Sleigh Bells didn’t bother much with that finesse Tuesday, hammering through tunes from both of its albums before a wall built from a dozen Marshall amplifiers. A third member, Jason Boyer, joined Miller and Krauss on additional guitar, beefing up power chords already fattened by digital effects; drums came from a machine somewhere out of sight. In the band’s best songs — “Tell ’Em,” “Comeback Kid,” the perfectly titled “Infinity Guitars” — it projected so much energy that it made you wonder if more groups might not benefit from renouncing detail.

Album review: Sleigh Bells' 'Reign of Terror'

Brooklyn duo Sleigh Bells has a lot of nerve titling a song "Leader of the Pack," as it does on its jumbo second album, "Reign of Terror," because it could be perceived as stomping on the memory of the classic 1964 teenage weeper of the same name by the Shangri-Las. It’s a bold incitement, as if either to negate music history or write itself into its narrative. What’s next, Sleigh Bells does a new song called "Ticket to Ride"?

But, then, Sleigh Bells has a lot of nerve, and on "Reign of Terror" that nerve manifests itself as noisy, brash volume. Vocalist Alexis Krauss and guitarist-producer Derek E. Miller, whose debut, "Treats," was one of the most acclaimed records of 2010, have doubled down on big guitar chords, humongous beats and an overall maximalism that suggests some weird collision of arena rock -- the first track, "True Shed Guitar," mimics the screaming-fans opening of a 1970s-era live album a la Foghat or Peter Frampton -- dance music, 1960s pop and the kind of borderless big beat electronic music erupting from all corners of the world.

It’s an infectious recipe, with Krauss’ wisp of a voice serving as the soft and pretty foil to Miller’s aggressive tendencies. Miller’s background is in rock -- he was the guitarist in the Miami metal-core band Poison the Well -- but on "Reign of Terror," he arrives at his destinations from any number of angles. "Road to Hell," for example, merges the hammering hard-beat techno sounds of early Nine Inch Nails and KMFDM with,  oddly, a guitar tone that sounds time-traveled from an '80s hair metal band, and Krauss sweetly repeating the title like a mantra.

On the charts: The hunt for some non-'Glee' good news

In another slow week on the U.S. pop chart, no album tops the six-figure mark in sales, and reworked versions of pop hits continue to dominate the tally. Just a few weeks removed from when Justin Bieber led the Billboard charts with only 60,000 in sales, the latest soundtrack to Fox series "Glee" logs a second week at No. 1, racking up about 63,000 in sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan. 

"Glee -- The Music Volume 3: Showstoppers" has roped in 199,000 in sales in its two weeks of release, and keeps a comeback album from the Stone Temple Pilots to the No. 2 position. STP's self-titled effort, coming nearly a decade after the band's last, sold just under 62,000 copies. As far as '90s artists on the comeback trail go, STP logged a stronger first week than Courtney Love's recent "Nobody's Daughter," which bowed last month with about 22,000 copies sold and has since disappeared from the the top 200. 

The only other newcomer in the top 10 belongs to the Nas & Damian Marley collaboration "Distant Relatives," which settles in at No. 10 after selling about 25,000 copies. Things are expected to get shaken up next week, when easy-going beach crooner Jack Johnson will enter the chart with his "To the Sea." Billboard is already predicting that Johnson will sell in the 250,000 range, but reports that sales are still trending down about 13% when compared with 2009. 

With few major releases, things certainly seem bleak. But there's a success story or two in the making. Brooklyn noise-duo the Sleigh Bells are nesting at No. 165, but the act's "Treats" has sold 21,000 copies in three weeks of release. That number is digital-only, as the album was not made available to physical retailers until Tuesday. 

Coachella 2010: Sleigh Bells revives rap metal (for the better)

Ponder this: A band that could non-inaccurately be described as a rap-metal version of Ke$ha just played the most searing set of Friday afternoon.

Sleigh Bells is a New York duo built on oversexed white-girl rhymes, metalcore guitar riffs and redlining 808 drum beats. One of its members played in the Floridian pierced-lip battalion Poison the Well. They have every reason to be, let's say, abrasive.

But somehow all of their deeply unsubtle influences pull together in a weird way that makes them the Platonic ideal of a pan-cultural party band circa right now. A lot of this is due to producer-guitarist Derek Miller, who cracked the very fraught code of how power chords sonically interlock with samples and still leave room to breathe (or, in the case of the full-to-bursting Gobi tent, grind on anything that moves). Singer Alexis Krauss remained an absolute firecracker despite her raging sunburn: She's a nimble rapper (Sleigh Bells' debut album will come out in May on M.I.A.'s imprint N.E.E.T.), a fine falsettist and unafraid to peel off a banshee wail that Miller's old band might have envied.

Every anxious sound scratched and clawed its way to the front of the mix, but the clear winner was anyone within arms reach of a liquor shot or someone pretty to feel up. It was trashy, take-all-comers fun that also made the idea of "genre" feel as passe as a single day ticket.

-- August Brown

Photo: Derek Miller and Alexis Krauss make up the band Sleigh Bells and performed in the Gobi tent on day one of the three-day Coachella Valley Arts and Music Festival, on the Empire Polo Club grounds in Indio, Ca., April 16, 2010. Credit: Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times