There is a certain calm that settles over the Shaky Knees Festival by Sunday morning.
Maybe it’s because by Sunday we’ve all managed to turn up a couple notches and exercise a few demons. We’ve danced a little bit, drank a couple drinks, maybe smoked a little something. Maybe it’s the tired legs, calling uncle from hauling it 25,000 steps a day back and forth between Peachtree and Ponce stages, over and over. Or maybe it’s that office Monday looming over everything, daring us to order another 32oz. Bud Light at our own peril at 6:30 p.m. on a worknight.
*Check out our SHAKY KNEES 2022: The Friday Edition – Day 1 Review here
*Check out our SHAKY KNEES 2022: Friday, Day 1 Photo Galleries here
*Check out our SHAKY KNEES 2022: The Saturday Edition – Day 2 Review here
*Check out our SHAKY KNEES 2022: Saturday, Day 2 Photo Galleries here
*Check out our SHAKY KNEES 2022: Sunday, Day 3 Photo Galleries here
*Check out our SHAKY KNEES 2022: From The Photog – Top 14 Sets here
Whatever it is, it requires the right kind of music. The formula for Sunday is this: go hard early, then ease into laid back vibes. This year delivered masterfully on that.
The day began with a set from Lanie Gardner, a 21-year-old social media sensation who at present has exactly one song on Spotify. Of course, that one song is a David Guetta club banger where Gardner offers an inspired Stevie Nix cover on vocals. I don’t know anything else about her, and in general, this is more the kind of set I would expect to see at Music Midtown, but put Gardner on your pop radar, she is an act on the rise, building a massive online following using the Justin Bieber “social-first,” music playbook.
One of the absolute best sets of the day belonged to San Francisco-based punk rockers Spiritual Cramp. Their set was energized, emotional and driving. To borrow from the fine folks at Ghettoblaster, who I think describe the music perfectly, “Spiritual Cramp communicates a state of unease in a seemingly at ease system.”
At Shaky Knees, lead singer Mike Bingham was in storyteller mode, noting that one song was about his time spent living in the Bay Area’s famed Tenderloin district, and another was about the time he filed down the serial numbers on a gun and gave it to his friend, who was later caught with it and did two years in prison over the debacle. Their gritty, no shit DNA shines through in Spiritual Cramp’s working class punk rock. This is a band I would run to see at The Earl, or at 529. Check out I Feel Bad Being Me.
Other daytime sets came from The Garden, who had no shortage of fans in black and white facepaint, Nashville-based pop rockers COIN, who sounded a lot like Parcels to me, and back-to-back sets from OG rock and roll acts Band of Horses and Death Cab for Cutie.
But the set of the day surely belonged to Khruangbin. It’s a funny thing, I was at their show at The Eastern just a few months ago, and my experience was honestly mixed. I had been excited to see them for the first time, but I left that concert a little underwhelmed. And so, when I saw the Texas trio on the Shaky Knees schedule I didn’t exactly have them targeted for “best set of the day.”
Boy was I wrong. Khruangbin is literally the perfect band for 6 p.m. on a Sunday at any festival. They were absolutely killing it, turning the crowd behind the sound guys into an impromptu dance circle kicking up dust and good vibrations as the band rattled off one cover after another in a medley that had the Piedmont stage fully lifted.
The last set of the weekend belonged to the band from which Shaky Knees derived its name, My Morning Jacket. What can be said about Jim James and his band that hasn’t already been said? They’re a massive rock and roll act, and one that has been among the upper echelons of modern rock and roll for two consecutive decades. I first saw them 18 summers ago, at Bonnaroo 2004, when their version of One Big Holiday had me suspicious that they might one day become the biggest band in the entire world.
And here, some twenty years later, with Jim James in a cape blessing the crowd with a middle earth intro into Victory Dance, I realized that we’d long since arrived at that moment where MMJ reached to top of the mountain. In fact, my prediction in 2004 probably fell short. After all, here was one of rock and rolls very finest front men, leading one of rock’s great bands of the last two decades. I would argue that given the longevity of their success, and the offshoot success of Jim James as a solo act, that My Morning Jacket deserves a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Which is exactly why it was so great to see them once more at Central Park in Atlanta, for a little festival put on by a local legend who named the show after his favorite band. If you’re an ATLien at heart, you can’t beat it.
See y’all at Shaky 23.
Check out more photos from Shaky Knees Music Festival 2022 – Day 3 on Sunday, May 1st, 2022 below. All photos by Mike Gerry
