The cool breeze blew in from Solana Beach and stirred the empty cups and racetrack vouchers on the ground. But from the empty stage electricity remained, like the horse eager to go on without its rider.

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hris Cornell’s voice sounds as good as ever, and in spite of the passage of time since Soundgarden’s glory days—made obvious by both the median age of the crowd and the streaks of grey in guitarist Kim Thayil’s once jet-black hair—the band did their catalog justice.

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Blong is a powerful on-stage presence. On stage, decked out in one floofy-but-revealing costume after another, she looks somewhere between a little boy and a grown woman, moving like a sexually active android and singing like a child. She also dances, plays keys, reads poetry, and screams (or pretends to scream) at her cast mates.

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Wearing a white wisp of a dress matching her dainty demeanor, the arrestingly attractive Kazu Makino and equally stunning identical twin Italian brothers Simone and Amedeo Pace commanded immediate attention as they delved into the slow-burning “Black Guitar” off their latest effort, Penny Sparkle.

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The night air buzzed around The Echo Thursday evening as a celebration of Johnny O’Donnell’s EP release “Masquerade” on White Noise was about to kick off. The evening held an eclectic line up of unique bands with different sounds. Die hard music lovers stayed the whole night and the short attention span LA crowd floated in and out like flies throughout the night. Head bopping and cat calls gave the bands some deserved appreciation throughout the night.

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The 2nd annual Folktale Fest, and the triumphant return of Sean Carnage Monday nights at Pehrspace after a very brief hiatus, made for a packed crowd on a warm summer night. As I entered I found Sacramento performance artist/musician Mom dancing away, half-clothed and squeaking in a cutesy pitch-modified falsetto to novelty type music in a classic Mouseketeer hat.

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You might as well have spritzed me with the latest fragrance because every jiggling skanky ho trying to get in to the show made my eyes tear with their excess of fake perfume. I was really crying that I couldn’t dance to a live version of your first album with a bunch of nerds.

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Every single person brought their own brand of magic. Some magic was flamboyant fun and uplifting, and some magic—like the people having sex in the Temple of Consciousness with kids dancing around three feet away, or the dudes who told me they took two hours to sneak in over the hill so that they could find “E” and did I have any—creeped me out. The festival itself was a canvas sculpture dreamworld of people going for it, being unique, finding their childlike expression and spreading what is possible once we rid ourselves of standards or social norms, put faith in the religions of Expression Experience and Eccentricity, worship through rave, and leave the critical eye at the ranch’s dusty entrance.

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Rammstein at the Forum on May 20th, 2011. All photos by Lindsey Best. 1. Rammlied 2. Bückstabü 3. Waidmanns Heil 4. Keine Lust 5. Weisses Fleisch 6. Feuer frei! 7. Wiener Blut 8. Frühling un París 9. Ich tu dir weh 10. Du Riescht So Gut 11. Benzin 12. Links 234 13. Du hast 14. [...]

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The great thing about the Jubilee is that there is so much going on. The not so great thing is that it all seems to be going on at the same time so you have to either pick your poisons or run back and forth to see snippets of as many acts as you can.

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