SHAKY KNEES 2021: The Friday Edition – Day 1 Review

Shaky Knees returned this year, after a COVID year on the shelf. 

Not sure about you, but I learned something about myself during the pandemic: that going to see live music matters to me. It isn’t just like a hobby or a thing that I do when there aren’t other things to do, it’s something that fills a hole in my heart. An important part of who I am. It’s church. And I missed it so desperately during the year without shows. 

So, it was one of those incredibly beautiful and relieving things to see a big line of people streaming back into Central Park in Atlanta for the first Shaky in two years, with their vaccine cards, their festival gear and even some pretty dope costumes to celebrate the one and maybe only time that Shaky would be an October event. Shoutout to the dude who went as Wario, big white gloves and all. Favorite costume of the weekend, made me laugh.

Check out our SHAKY KNEES 2021: The Saturday Edition – Day 2 Review here

Check out our SHAKY KNEES 2021: The Sunday Edition – Day 3 Review here

Check out our SHAKY KNEES 2021: From The Photog – Top 14 Sets here

Standout Acts, Friday Edition

The festival opened on the main Peachtree stage with the Tampa-based upstart band Glove, a four-part band who go a lot harder than the noon slot at Shaky Knees calls for. They play with that dark 80’s, new wave Depeche Mode sound, blended against a more modern DIY indie undertone and visual aesthetic. Check out “Behavior“, my personal favorite.

“How do you guys describe yourselves?” I asked them in an interview after their set. 

“Freaky,” replied drummer and singer Brie Denicourt in a single word, with a laugh. 

The band played Lollapalooza earlier in the year, and Shaky was their second big festival ever. Their debut album comes out in January.  Keep an eye out for more, their synth-heavy new wave goth pop was one of the bigger standouts from the day, and if they ever come back, I suspect they’ll be playing much later in the day.

At the same time as Glove performed on the main stage, the festival kicked off at the other entrance with a noon set on the Criminal Records stage from the up-and-coming Specialists. Their show was filled with driving, energetic funk. Shades of Vulfpeck.

“Make some noise if you’re a piece of shit!!!,” I heard the Tejon Street Corner Thieves ask the crowd before launching into a rowdy, raucous bluegrass performance. 

And the media tent was buzzing with excitement about The Alive, a group of teenagers even younger than the Greta Van Fleet kids, whose hard rocking live performances have gotten them the attention of media and other rockers alike – the band of teens has already played at festivals like Lollapalooza Chile, and opened for Foo Fighters. My favorite thing they did on this little tour was Zoom it up with NPR’s Lois Reitzes for “City Lights”, which is just so weird and amazing, and speaks for itself on the cool scale for both Lois and The Alive in my world.

If Glove was the first big standout of the weekend, the other big daytime winner was Frankie and the Witch Fingers, who brought what I’d contend was the most energetic set of the entire weekend. I always assumed Frankie was the lead singer, but that’s not actually accurate. 

“Frankie is my old cat that lives in Toledo now, and we’re all the Witch Fingers,” lead singer Dylan Sizemore says of the band’s origins.

Sizemore, if you haven’t seen him is, to lift a description from the Witch Fingers’ newest member, bassist Nikki Pickle of Death Valley Girls, “cocaine, personified.” 

He’s like that kid in high school that jumped out the class window when the substitute teacher wasn’t looking, so he could go smoke cigarettes in the alley. He’s wild and rambunctious. Punk rock, on fucking fire. He’s a star. 

Behind the scenes though, he’s thoughtful and a bit more subdued and tends to answer questions in a soft-spoken voice, punctuated by a childish grin. Don’t sleep on The Witch Fingers, either they hold it down. 

Bassist Nikki Pickle comes to The Witch Fingers from her other band, the also impossibly hip Death Valley Girls. Drummer Glenm Brigman has “an encyclopedic knowledge of psychedelic rock history,” and guitarist Josh Menashe brings an immensely talented flavor, rooted in an authentic classic rock sound. Without him, I suspect the sound might stray out into the garage punk and psych rock ether. He moors the band in something timeless, while simultaneously doubling down on the energy with bruising fuzz and sharp riffs. 

It’s a lot to unpack, but the results speak for themselves: Frankie and The Witch Fingers were a show stealer at Shaky ‘21. If you pull up your handy psych rock leaderboard, you’ll see them rising up the charts and inching awefully close to psych rock icons like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and The Oh Sees. This band matters.

Here’s a performance of Dracula Drug did in Athens, GA a few years ago that really captures the vibe. They’ve swapped some new band members since then, but the sound remains the same. TL/DR: If you see Frankie and Witchfingers coming to your town, go. They’re well worth the price of admission. 

It’s been five years since Atlanta’s own Parker Gispert released any music with The Whigs, but Shaky found him playing the Criminal Records stage as Frankie was concluding. His sound remains as rich and classic rock driven as a solo artist as it did during the Whigs heyday, as evidenced by this jam from his 2018 album, called Volcano.

We managed to catch a few tracks from Noga Erez on the main stage. She don’t know what really, really happens at the end of the road. Not sure either, but the set seemed fun in a carefree, swaggy pop crossover sort of way.

Cults played the Piedmont stage in the 3:45 timeslot. Like so many bands in 2021, they released an album amidst the pandemic and only now are returning to the stage to play the new songs live for an audience. Which puts the music itself in a funny place, where the songs could be a year or two old, and yet still feel brand new even to the musicians themselves.

“We didn’t get a chance to play this music much in the last year. The way we make music is just the two of us, so we don’t get a chance to hear the songs with people until we play them live. Sometimes I don’t even know if I like a song until I play it live,” said Brian Oblivion.

“I think we’re finally getting to the point where we have enough music to fill out a live show. We’re in year 11 now and we can retire some old songs, play a handful from our newest album and just pull from a deeper catalog.” said Madeline Follin

That catalog now includes the recently-minted-gold “Always Forever.” How did an eight-year-old song suddenly find new life and go gold?

“TikTok will take you to the top,” Oblivion laughed. 

Ty Segall & Freedom Band  was the show I was most excited for on Friday. But when the time came to actually rock out to Ty, honestly something fell just a little flat for me. Don’t get me wrong, Segall was his usual mythicaly fuzzy self. His band hits crunchy notes, one after another for an hour. And there’s plenty of new content: he’s touring on the 2021’s surprise Harmonizer album, and the sound was great. Even fuzzier and thicker than expected. Heavy. So why didn’t I love that Ty Segall set? It’s probably me not him. 

The other big show for the night? The main event for the evening. The entrée. Foo Fighters.

What is there to say about Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins and Pat Smears that hasn’t already been said? They’re living legends. Icons. And they play a brand of safe-for-work, fun-loving rock that still has a place in this world. It was honestly great just to see them out. Like running into an old friend.

What I wasn’t prepared for, however was the fact that the Portugal. the Man. late night set at the Earl would be so fuckin decent. When bands get as big as Foo Fighters, or as big as Portugal, the Man. they have a tendency to regress towards this approachable, overproduced mainstream sound that leaves behind a lot of what made them so exciting in the first place.

I assumed that the PTM set would go like that, until I saw them live at the Earl. They played things like Helter Skelter and IASIP’s Day Man alongside deeper cuts I hadn’t really heard before and the whole thing just worked so well that I left thinking “wow, turns out I love that band.” 

This video kind of catches the vibe I’m trying to get at. Friday was a good day.

All photos by Mike Gerry