For Those Who Have Art Music Festival

An hour and a half north of Los Angeles, nestled in the San Gabriel mountain range, lies Lake Hughes. On August 12^th, this sleepy haven was home to a who’s who of the Antelope Valley (The high desert area on the outskirts of LA county) with the For Those Who Have Art Festival. It was labeled as half art exhibit and half DIY music fest, but the end result clearly edged towards the latter as by the time that most of the attendees had arrived most of the art had been packed up and the crowd of near 150 kids from the surrounding area of Palmdale/Lancaster were gathered around the two outdoor stages.

 

The bands started playing early in the afternoon and lasted well into the night. Out of the earlier acts some of the stand outs were Bare Knuckles, Trap Her Keep Her and LITOA. Bare Knuckles singer Cris Lopez came out dressed in corpse paint and introduced every song by talking about 90′s black Norwegian black metal bands, despite the group being a straight up hardcore act. By the looks of the crowd not to many got his jokes but they responded heartily to their brand of throwback hardcore. Trap Her Keep Her, the joke hardcore act featuring members of Love American and Hopeless in Paradise (both of which played later in the night), got everyone moving. Their sub-minute long blasts were a molotov cocktail of feedbacks and buildups all the while vocalist Jed Bookout was shredding his vocal chords. LITAOA on the other hand sounded like a mixture of pop-post-hardcore melodies and bands like Cynic’s proggy chops. The reception from the crowd was mixed but these dudes sure had skills as they went through soaring choruses and technical jazzy runs.

 

At around the halfway mark everything went haywire. Between mounting downtime in between some acts, scheduling conflicts, and some bands complete disregard for set times the show ended up running over an hour and a half late to its posted schedule. A key example of this was the supposed split set between Jungle Life and Life For a Life. While the bands were supposed to be sharing a single half hour slot, they each ended up playing full sets complete with their own set up times, throwing everything further into the mire and eventually led to the closing acts of Villains, Harbours and Few Words for Comfort having to play extremely shortened sets in order to get the show to end before the 1 AM mark.

 

As the sun went down pop punk act Hopeless in Paradise took the stage. Their brand of melodic vocals, extremely catchy riffs a la early Blink-182 and the occasional breakdown to get the hardcore kids moving does the whole modern easycore sound pretty damn well. During Love American’s set all the pit kids took a break since they couldn’t pretend to be ninjas to it. It was to be expected. Half way through the set our vocalist Javier Ramirez took time to acknowledge some of the bands that have broken up this summer, like the Bled and RX Bandits, from which we all take influence from. Ska act The Solutionaries was the last of the bands with a big draw, as by the time they took the stage it was nearing 11 o’clock. Their set consisted entirely of 90′s ska punk covers which normally isn’t the best thing to woo a bunch of angsty hardcore kids but the audience loved them. Sadly after their set a good two thirds of the audience emptied from the concert grounds leaving Ventura, California’s Harbours to play their reduced set to a much smaller crowd than if they went on at the time they were supposed to, but they gave it their all, so much so that guitarist Raymond Bolado ended up breaking his guitar during the last song of the set as he threw it against the stage. A short time later Few Words For Comfort closed out the festival. Normally their metalcore stylings get AV area crowds going nuts but since it was well past midnight and most of the people who had come out had already long since gone home they gave it their all, delivering their 3 song closing set to a near empty grounds. In a way it was kind of a bittersweet way for the festival to go out on, but for those in attendance it was clear that almost everyone had a hell of a time.