The same cycle occurs each time. Someone says I should go to this or that festival, I look up the bill and get excited to see all these artists, and then I set foot on the grounds on the first day and that’s when I remember that I hate festivals. The compressed sets, the futility of bands playing their greatest hits in an open field in the bright sun of mid-afternoon. The terrible, flattened sound. All the people. The fact that most are in the summer and oppressively hot but the fact that even a comparatively cooler one like FFF Fest starts to acquire a certain undesirable smell of many thousands of people blending with the dirt by the third afternoon. How wrecked your body feels by the end of it. And yet, as wearying as I find it all, for some reason I keep coming back to them. I guess by the time the end of each festival rolls around I’ve been swayed back, or I’m too tired to think straight about it. And so the cycle goes on.

On the first day, Cut Copy’s set seems to simultaneously represent all my hangups as well as the qualities that eventually allow excitement to supplant the irritants. I love this band, and I’ve been waiting a long time to see them live, but knew going into this that I should be seeing them in an indoor club-sized venue, not a park (even if the Summer of Love trappings of their new album Free Your Mind seems to reach for the latter). This is a band with impeccable taste in how they layer sound, and I’m predictably disappointed with how dead they sound from the festival’s main stage. Something shifts about halfway through, when the band launches into the pulsating synths of the Free Your Mind standout “Let Me Show You Love.” Suddenly where there was lifelessness before the beats now seem monolithic, the synths elemental currents washing out over the field. There it is. They’ve pulled me back in.