Continuing my coverage of The Siren Music Fest we bring you the bulk of the bands that I photographed. I have separate updates for headliners Spankrock and Built To Spill as well as the completely fucking insane Monotonix and the new Frank Black project Grand Duchy. The rest of the bands, while still excellent I am sure all get lumped into this big update because I don’t want to spread this Siren Fest update out all week. That being said, I will give you a little run down of everyone involved.

Japandroids were playing when I got there. My editor really wanted me to get shots of them so I timed my arrival perfectly. They were a pretty fun two piece a la Japanther and they give their drummer a mic which is always awesome because I was always a huge Mickey Dolenz fan growing up. I also really appreciated how psyched the band was to be playing in front of thousands of people. At one point they said that if you added up every person who had ever seen them play it would have been less people than were at Siren. Check out the shots I took of them here.

Frightened Rabbit and Future of the Left I shot at the hottest part of the day and I shot them quickly and escaped to the comforts of the VIP tent. I got some nice shots of both bands but I really don’t remember much about them for some strange reason. That part of the day is a complete blur. I did however see a pretty amazing Future of the Left video when I looked them up that involved a British Pub and had a Donkey in it. Check out their shots here and Frightened Rabbits shots over here.

A Place To Bury Strangers just sort of stood there playing. After pretty much all day of people with pretty good music, but little stage presence, I was getting a bit bored. I turned to my editor at the Voice and said something about a bands responsibility to put on a good live show. She defended them by saying that in clubs they have a whole crazy video set up and cool lighting effects, but then midway into her sentence they began swinging a guitar around wildly and ripping out strings. And even though I was stuck behind a monitor and couldn’t see what I was aiming at, I got some pretty fun pictures of them fucking shit up. Intense. You can see it all here.

The Raveonettes are the only band in the Siren Music Festival that I own music from. When my old roommate moved out he gave me some CDs and there were two Raveonettes discs in the box. I don’t think I actually listened to them, but I don’t really listen to any music except old records because I have become a weird old man some how. The Raveonettes also had the disadvantage of playing right when the sun was perfectly aligned to shine perfectly on the left side of them, and not at all on the right side, ruining every possible chance I had of getting a decent shot. Sharin Foo’s white blonde hair and all black dress did not help the situation. If only I remembered my Zone System classes… Still, I managed a few decent shots, and you can see them all here.

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