Jangling guitars intertwined, dreamy keyboards washed over them, and a chugging bass line pushed along an insistent beat.
The song was “Lost In the Dream,” the finale of The War On Drugs’ performance, which itself capped off the Hideout Block Party and A.V. Club Fest Saturday. That description also could be applied to nearly any other song in the band’s enthralling set, or much of the evening performances during the festival, which began as rain still was falling Friday and continued under clear skies Saturday afternoon and night.
Now in its 18th year, the Block Party again took place on the grounds outside the Hideout, the cozy little club tucked into an out-of-the-way Bucktown side street, but the acts that performed reflected the sensibilities of the A. V. Club, the Onion’s entertainment news wing, which combined its own fledgling festival with the Block Party in 2012.
In an uncharacteristic move, none of the performers given prime time slots were acts with roots in Chicago or the Hideout, although local mainstay Jon Langford and former Chicagoans the Handsome Family performed rain-delayed and shortened sets early Friday evening. Instead, this year’s event forged an intersection of psychedelia, dream pop and emo.
The War on Drugs leader Adam Granduciel drenched his plaintive, Dylan-indebted singing and guitar in reverb and played achingly beautiful solos, while the rest of the six-man band layered on keyboards, the lowing of a baritone sax and rhythms that at times reached the propulsive velocity of Krautrock.
The preceding set by emo veterans the Dismemberment Plan also had moments of beauty, particularly the sparkling guitar and twinkling keyboards of “Let’s Just Go to the Dogs Tonight,” but the band’s unsettled rhythms and squawking guitars more often matched the agitation that frontman Travis Morrison expressed with his yelping calls even while busting out his best James Brown – indebted dance moves.
Too bad that the Funky Meters did not merit that kind of a response when they performed earlier. Instead, the new line-up of the New Orleans quartet, whose history stretches back nearly half a century, relied on bombastic jamming rather than the slinky rhythms of classic Crescent City soul.
In fact, Death Cab for Cutie proved much funkier when the indie rock stars headlined Friday night. Even when singing about long division in his pinched, bookworm voice, Ben Gibbard swayed his body to the grooves that Nick Harmer fueled with his lumbering bass lines.
Chris Walla, who’s announced leaving the band later this month, alternated between joining chiming guitars with Gibbard and adding spacey keyboards, as Death Cab turned songs that once had been knotty guitar rock (“We Laugh Indoors”) or rambunctious pop (“Codes and Keys”) into spacey arena rock powered by Jason McGerr’s concussive backbeat.
Earlier Friday, Hamilton Leithauser, the lead singer of the Walkmen, showcased songs from his debut solo record during an abbreviated set, but his raspy voice couldn’t put over his goth-cabaret songs, despite the help of a local string section.
