Okkervil River, among others, performed at the festival.

With the chaos of Outside Lands an easy act to follow, Treasure Island Music Festival nevertheless pulled out all of the stops for a flawless festival, well roster-ed and run, promising in its second year to invigorate the Bay Area music scene for many more to come. Hosted by Another Planet Entertainment and NoisePop, two local entertainment production firms responsible for much of the recent rise in Bay Area booking power, attracting international acts like Justice, Hot Chip and the Raconteurs for clubs and festivals alike, the festival managed its stages superbly. One band ended, always on-time, as another started on the other stage, prompting a tidal surge of crowd from one end of the festival to the other.

Scattered throughout the festival grounds, artist, vendor and sponsor booths occupied the ear-achey and idle in between and during sets. The artist booths focused on spontaneity and community: in one, an artist illustrated postcards; in another, a writer composed poems on the customer’s chosen subject; in a third, a collective of graffiti artists painted an open-collaboration mural. Mingling with listeners both in the market section and in the stage audience, burlesque pirates on stilts swaggered and swayed and a cadre of rubber monsters danced and trotted along.

The musicians presented equally startling and entertaining sets. On Saturday, Tijuana’s Nortec Collective fused electronic beats and Latin samples with the sounds of a live accordion, guitar, trumpet, and drum Norteño band; San Francisco native Mike Relm masterfully mashed-up samples on his two turntables, looping film dialogue with top 20 hits; and the English Foals glitched and distorted their guitars, screamed and strained their vocals, and bucked and frolicked onstage, true to name.

The audio quality impressed, especially for so windy an island. On Sunday, the mics on the smaller stage more open to the bay transmitted a low rumble of wind but not so loudly as to detract from the music. The sound cut out on Hot Chip once and was fixed in under three seconds (compared to Outside Lands shorting Radiohead’s sound three times, once for the entire half of a song). The volume on the main stage was so loud for the final acts (Justice on Saturday and The Raconteurs on Sunday) that the island was sending out ripples rather than accepting waves.

The festival morphed on Sunday from the stomping grounds of the neon-hued, glamor-shoed electronica crowd of Saturday to that of the emo-haired, screaming teen girl, old rock dad, indie amour.

Vampire Weekend seduced and satisfied the screaming teen girl crowd, skipping through a bubbly set of songs from their first album. Lead singer Ezra Koenig’s voice, reminiscent of Police era Sting, holds as well live as on the album, with clear highs vaulted to from the middle range of indie nonchalance. Keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij initially disappointed with slightly sloppy, just behind-the-beat key work, but then pulled his weight as the siren voiced harmonic complement to Koenig. The one new song the band played testified to their potential as a staying power.

Spiritualized began its performance with the heavenly harmonies of Amazing Graze sung over a hyper-distorted background track. The band’s following songs imbued a foundation of southern rock with echoes of Green Day, grunge and the distorted psychedelics of Jimi Hendrix. The band treated its backup singers not as members of the band but as instruments, which is how it normally is, especially considering that lead singer Jason Pierce is the sole original member of the band, crafting album after album with a rotating cast of collaborators.

Tegan and Sara worked the indie-emo angle, rocking with casual humor their songs (dedicated to premature ejaculation, and the Lost Boys) and slip-ups (gifts thrown onstage, harmonies poorly hit, songs falsely started).

Sounding the guitar anthems of old, the Raconteurs channeled the Who and Led Zeppelin through Jack White’s more gothic sensibilities for a show beholden to golden-age festivals at Woodstock and The Greek, boundary breaking in its own right. Songwriter and sideman Brendan Beson’s clear voice contrasted and complemented White’s stylings screeched and stuttered, or sung through an old-time distorted mic, as if the music were recorded in the 1920s. Utility-man Mark Watrous tied the Raconteurs to their Nashville, Tennessee roots with fiddle fills and breakdowns. While Benson’s guitar solos on their own couldn’t compare with the shredding skills of Clapton or Hendrix or Paige, the Raconteurs together assimilate blues, rock and roll and southern ballads in an engagingly innovative way impossible for others to emulate.

Image Source: Ian Ferguson of the Daily Californian