Like TBD Fest—only not

Day one: Now that Sacramento has its own indie/Pitchfork-style festival, the urge is to compare TBD Fest to every other festival one attends. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do!

In its eighth year, San Francisco’s Treasure Island Music Festival bears much in common with TBD. The acts are EDM, indie and hip-hop centric; there’s artsy shit like glowing mushroom-like sculptures. In fact, the only difference is the dust: At Treasure Island, there’s instead a sea of grass, an inimitable San Francisco Bay view and a welcome coastal breeze. When is Sacto gonna get some of that?

Gorgon City is a U.K. house duo that played a live set with a real drummer and stuff, but couldn’t escape the trappings of being a boring live house band playing at 2 p.m. in the afternoon. So, I bailed on that for comedians, including Kate Berlant, whose bio says she is what you would see “if David Lynch did stand-up,” which is total crap, and John Early, a hilarious gay Brooklynite who joked about masturbating on the wall for dudes he met on Grindr.

In general, the comedy tent—new this year, presented by Funny or Die—was a welcome reprieve from some of the oddly dark and disconcerting EDM acts (Cashmere Cat) and the Burning Man jam band vibe-killers (STS9). Tim Heidecker, of Tim and Eric, was skull-numbingly odd and awkward.

Moment of the day was FKA Twigs intoxicating set. She’s a former dancer, now EDM artist with a strong industrial/“weird Bjork thing” going on—and her visceral and unfiltered passion kinda blew me away.

I ultimately give the edge to TBD Fest: more opportunities to explore and discover, more exciting food, the West Sac layout feels less like a state fair than TI, there are more acts and stages at TBD, and the artists that performed were generally more festive. And, of course, hometown bias.

—Nick Miller

Day two</b: Per usual, Treasure Island’s lineup nicely split into electronic day and indie rock day, and Sunday felt hangover-chill. Similar to TBD Fest, there was that moment of, “<i>holy crap, there are a lot of people here.” And that moment arrived during Father John Misty’s set. Playing almost exclusively material from his newest release I Love You, Honeybear, Father John Misty’s set was about as annoying as that album title. His self-righteousness glowed from his sexually-charged shimmying, and particularly when he slowly swept his hair into man bun, requesting fashion input from the crowd. Then, completely deadpan, he called the festival “an orgy of illicit pleasures” and “vomitorium.”