Sunday, May 12, 2024

Dinosaur Jr. highlights the Saturday lineup at Salt Lake’s Kilby Block Party

I’m excited and lucky to have travelled this lovely Mother’s Day Weekend to beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah to not only visit with some of my closest old high-school friends but to join them at the Kilby Block Party.

It’s a three-day festival. We didn’t attend on Friday, unfortunately missing Vampire Weekend, Courtney Barnett, Alvvays, Kara Jackson, and a few others I would have liked to have seen. But that’s ok because we now still had two full days of shows to see, which is plenty, seeing as I can’t remember the last full-on music festival I attended. Perhaps it was Lollapalooza in St. Louis and Chicago back in the 1990s. 

I had hoped to catch Beach Fossils at 2:35, but we were a little late for that so headed to see hot new band Slow Pulp at 3:25. They were a little drowned out by some Rage-like band from one of the other stages.

But the main action of the day had us getting a good spot early for Dinosaur Jr., which played at 5:10. It was a greatest-hits set, with highlights including “In a Jar,” “Out There,” “Feel the Pain,” “Just Like Heaven,” “The Wagon,” “Start Choppin’,”Freak Scene,” and closer “Gargoyle,” from their self-titled debut album. The sound was great and the moshing crowd and band kept the one-hour set energetic.


After a tasty plate of butter chicken from the Himalayan food truck, we headed over to see Belle & Sebastian, one of my favorite bands. This was my first time seeing them in concert and they entertained well from a distance, with many from the crowd invited to dance on stage for the last few songs. Highlights of the 10-song set included “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying,” “I Want the World to Stop,” “Piazza, New York Catcher,” and “The Boy With the Arab Strap.”

We hung out for a few cool songs from Santigold, then caught the end of Bombay Bicycle Club’s set before finishing the evening with Death Cab for Cutie playing all of its classic album Transatlanticism before morphing into Ben Gibbard’s other band Postal Service. I think this was the first time I had seen Death Cab, and while formerly being a favorite band (and it was cool that Jenny Lewis came out to play with them for a bit), I’m not sure if they stand the test of time all that well in my book.

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