Washed Out

Washed Out

So then, on the other end of things. After all the sharp angles and burning edges of The Men and Cloud Nothings, I walk back over to the Orange Stage for Washed Out. They’ve got the stage decked out in flowers and it’s immediately easy to roll your eyes and assume you’re in for some hippie-dippie nonsense and wonder whether the band members have been working over at the Cazamance stand in their downtime before soundcheck. The attractiveness of the crowd goes up quite a few notches from the Black Stage to the Orange Stage, though, so I guess you have to give them credit for that. Washed Out live is as glossy and amorphous as you’d expect from an artist that lived through chillwave’s brief moment in the sun and has gone on to purvey blissed out psychedelia. But as primed as I am to write off their performance, the lushness becomes overwhelming, and the handful of Washed Out’s songs that actually move turn into infectious, danceable synth-pop crowd-pleasers — closer “Amor Fati” perhaps being the best example. It earns your attention far more than Washed Out’s occasionally pleasing but mostly ephemeral studio work. Eventually the crowd started to become populated by the kinds of people where you can just tell by looking at them that they still think MGMT is brilliant — like the dude wearing clip-on sunglass lenses on a pair of sunglasses — so I had to get the hell out of there.