Fran's Pitchfork Weekend Friday: Frankie Rose, Mikal Cronin, Joanna Newsom, Björk's rain dance

“Are there any good beaches around here?” asks Ms. Frankie Rose of the Dum Dum Girls. She is the perfect opener for the 86 degree-afternoon here at the Pitchfork Music Festival. With clear, ear-friendly voice, and distant surf-rock guitar, Frankie Rose coos into a sunny afternoon as the Pitchforkers of the Blue Stage enjoy their spiked watermelon lemonades. Rose’s jumpy single “Night Swim” picks people up off their picnic blankets and onto their feet, bopping heads to indie drummer dream girl.

Mikal Cronin’s fame is still fresh, and he wanders the Pitchfork fields before his set like as if he were one of us. Long haired, squinty-eyed, Cronin is glad to be performing outdoors, and he plays his hit Pitchfork-famous hit, “Weight” to the delight of every sunbather.

San Francisco garage-pop artist Cronin used to be the right-hand man of Ty Segall, but being the star of Friday’s Blue Stage has reassured his place in the indie music scene. Here’s to better and brighter things for Mikal in the years to come, and thanks for making a pit-stop to WIUX’s Culture Shock this spring! Bloomington loves you.

Pitchfork was the quietest it’s ever been when Joanna Newsom took the stage Friday evening. You can tell a lot about Joanna Newsom by the nature of her audience. Her fans were receptive, thoughtful, and reactive to everything she said and did. Joanna giggles, everyone giggles. Joanna sighs, everyone sighs. The audience stares agape, and nobody sings along even though we all know the words. Some cry, and the rest smoke quietly.

She sings two new songs to the audience’s delight. The first is a crashing, staccato, vocal challenge, invoking the audience’s applause mid-song. The second is a piano ballad.

At the harp, a dull spotlight lights Joanna. The light is periodically blocked by a flag blowing in and out of the way, and her face is brought in and out of focus, ebbing, flowing, flickering. Her audience cheers and claps nonetheless. She is an actual, living Tinkerbell.

Björk‘s set was cut a half-hour short because of weather, and I'm convinced that that her guttural belting and theatrical light shows summoned the wrath of the rain gods. Where crystalline was without a doubt the most memorable of her songs that night, all her tracks were backed up video shows, one of which featured hundreds and hundreds of star fish in time lapse, touching each other and crawling around. She is queen of weird stuff.

Most odd, though, were her silvery blue backup dancers. These dancers were not professionally trained with set choreography, but perhaps, a group of Björk’s friends. Björk wore an enormous headpiece made of, what appeared to be, giant silver needles. After each song she spoke jovially into the microphone, “Sank You!”