Just Like Heaven has been called a high school reunion festival for elder millennials.
I'm not sure if that is meant as a slight but it's mighty fitting, especially for Southern Californians as the full day fest is held in the shadows of the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.
Curated by Goldenvoice, the good people who give us Coachella, Just Like Heaven is the younger cousin festival of the and the recently-rocked Cruel World that happened on the same golf course a week previous.
Headlined this year by The Postal Service and Death Cab, the crowd got a nice dose of Ben Gibbard & Co.
There were also some really nice familiar faces many in attendance hadn't gotten to see in a while including Warpaint, Broken Social Scene, and Gossip who hadn't performed together in five years.
The Go! Team is another who doesn't tour enough, which is a shame because they can really deliver some good time music.
With horns, fun percussion, cool samples, and frontwoman, Ninja, their sound is like a group of cheerleaders trying to wake you up from a beautiful dream you're having in a psychedelic parade while a radio plays between stations.
Ninja's given name is Nkechinyere which means "gift from God," and now at 40, she has just as much energy as when she was in her 20s helping make The Go! Team SXSW darlings in 2006.
The band has an very unusual tour schedule for this summer and fall so go to their site for tickets.
Another female-fronted band who broke out in '06 is Be Your Own Pet.
The pop punkers from Tennessee took a 14-year break after being shot out of the canon as mere teens.
"When you’re a teenage girl, you feel like you’re the lowest rung, and so being on stage was a true place of power for me,” Jemina Pearl said about the best part of being BYOP's singer on tour at just 16 years-old.
Sadly, Pearl was groped by fans, sexualized in the media, and the group had three of their songs banned by their own label.
So in 2008, the band ended, but was mercifully revived in 2022.
BYOP is playing a short 9-stop tour in July in the Southern part of the US. Get your tickets on their site.
Which leads us to a band who warned the Pasadena audience they might not be playing live shows in the States for a few years, Phoenix.
The French party crew apparently are going to take a breather as they write and record their next album, their eighth.
The group whose LPWolfgang Amadeus Phoenix won the Grammy in 2010 for Best Alternative Album, brought out their old pal Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend for a trio of tunes to close their set.
After singer Thomas Mars broke the bad news to the crowd, he promised they'd be happy soon and voila, there was Ezra who literally needed no introduction and just waved to the screaming crowd while sporting a comfortable sweater and sensible slacks.
He joined them for "Tonight," a single he recorded with the band last year. Last month it was Vampire Weekend who brought up Mars to sing it with them in Austin.
One song Phoenix hasn't played in a decade, sadly, is "Chloroform" from their 2013 album Bankrupt!
Not only is the tune good, but the video, directed by Mars' wife Sophia Coppola is so simple and seemingly inexpensive that it shows you music videos can be good and not cost and arm and a leg.
Therefore more should be made. Excuse my Gen X desires.
While Mars' wife may be more famous than he is, his oldest daughter became a viral star for a little while about 14 months ago.
Some called Romy Mars "Francis Ford Coppola's granddaughter" or "Sophia Coppola's daughter" when her Make a Vodka Sauce Pasta With Me Because I'm Grounded
TikTok brought a light to this dark, dark world.
While explaining why she was grounded, 16-year-old Romy admitted she didn't know the difference between garlic and onion, passive-aggressively revealed she isn't allowed to have "public social media accounts" (fair), and how they don't want her to become a cliche Nepo Baby.
But then she said she was grounded for trying to use her dad's credit card to get a helicopter from NY to Maryland to see her friends.
In all that hilarious, weirdly relatable teen drama, most never asked who the dad was attached to the credit card. It was singer Thomas.
Phoenix is now off to Europe and Japan for a summer of festivals. Get your tickets on their website.
