Review: 8 highlights from Day In Day Out festival

Concert review

It was good to be home.

Local dates with Seattle folk rockers The Head and the Heart aren’t exceedingly rare these days, thanks to their still-fresh holiday tradition of Showbox charity gigs. But playing smack-dab in the middle of Seattle Center closing the Day In Day Out festival on Sunday, their surroundings seemed to make them a little more sentimental.

In between an especially tender “Let’s Be Still” and the falsetto coos of “Tiebreaker,” self-described “Seattle kid” and Garfield High School alum Matty Gervais recalled coming to those very grounds for Bumbershoot as a teenager and stealthily drinking beer by the whale.

As their one hour and 45-minute set — which featured a kickdrum-thumping newbie called “Arrow” from their in-the-works upcoming album — wound down, singer/violinist Charity Rose Thielen couldn’t help but note their proximity to KEXP, the first radio station to play their music. Even playing to a festival crowd that was largely seeing THATH for the first time, it was hard not to feel the hometown tug on the heartstrings as Seattle classic “Down in the Valley” — the song that first graced KEXP airwaves — washed over the hushed Fisher Pavilion lawn, eventually ending with frontman Jonathan Russell’s husky lower register fading into the summer night.

It was a welcome Seattle-proud mood as THATH became the first hometown band to headline the fourth-year festival, which expanded from two days to three this year and moved the dates up a month after seeing its largest crowds in 2023.

After single-day attendance peaked at 8,000 fans last year, this weekend Day In Day Out averaged roughly 5,000 fans per day, organizers said. As is often the case with weekend-long festivals, Sunday’s crowd was on the lighter side as Seattle’s first major music fest of the summer came to a close. (THATH almost certainly drew more fans over a pair of 2022 Marymoor Park shows than were present for their DIDO set.)

Regardless, the music was as solid as ever. Sadly, we missed Saturday cameos from Friday’s headliner Carly Rae Jepsen, who stuck around and popped in with producer pal Jack Antonoff’s band, Bleachers, and Gov. Jay Inslee campaigning to protect his carbon cap program from repeal with Initiative 2117. (Apologies, we Kenny Chesneyed.) But here are some of the highlights from Friday and Sunday.

Mannequin Pussy brings Friday energy

The conditions weren’t perfect for the galvanizing rock group Mannequin Pussy: Attendees were forced to choose between the respite of shade and the exposed pit area as the 4 p.m. Friday set began during the warmest part of the afternoon. Those who did, however, were rewarded with a great show.

Singer Marisa Dabice was a master of crowd control, leading the group in a cathartic, primal scream before launching into anthem “OK? OK! OK? OK!” Dabice later instructed the crowd in a sugary, ASMR-style voice that “you’ve got to feel it.” Outside the festival gates, a handful of devoted fans — all in uniform and nearly matching Dabice’s outfit — stood on elevated concrete platforms near Climate Pledge Arena, jumping up and down to catch a peek of the rockers. — Xavier Martinez, Seattle Times staff reporter

Cheeky (and peachy) crowd work

The crowd, which never grew close to filling up the lawn outside of Fisher Pavilion, was nonetheless entertained by a variety of commentary. Dream pop group Beach Fossils encouraged Friday festivalgoers to embrace their bacchanalian side; frontman Dustin Payseur’s first comment to the crowd was a proclamation that he’d “been doing a little bit of day drinking.”

Peach Pit’s Neil Smith, fresh off a performance at Alberta’s Calgary Stampede festival, “the world’s largest outdoor rodeo,” joked about wearing cowboy boots for the first time before closing the band’s set with an indie version of Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!” Earlier in the Vancouver, BC band’s set, a fan threw a peach on stage, which Smith cheekily took as a compliment. Even the vendors and event staff were friendly, passing out free mini cans of Jones soda, Celsius energy drinks and stickers. — XM

Glamour pop 

In a year of music marked by Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter’s meteoric rise, it was only fitting for Carly Rae Jepsen — the Canadian pop star who first broke out in 2012 with “Call Me Maybe” — to close Day In Day Out’s first night. As the night progressed, more festivalgoers clad in Jepsen shirts, ranging from traditional tour shirts to “Carly for President” campaign shirts, appeared. I overheard several attendees saying variations of, “I only came here to see Carly.” Jepsen’s Friday headlining kept the crowd rocking for nearly 90 minutes (and 23 songs). Couples sang their hearts out while Jepsen pranced across the stage and up a set of terraced platforms. One group even salsa danced to Jepsen’s penultimate track, “The Loneliest Time.” — XM

Are we in California?

At times, Friday’s setting felt more like a surfer’s paradise than the grungy Pacific Northwest. As the sun dipped, stretching shadows across Seattle Center and lowering temperatures to a near-perfect 75 degrees, Vermont-based Sir Chloe, Beach Fossils and Peach Pit all jammed to guitar-driven melodies and riffs. The crowd, too, moved around in slow, fluid motions. Maybe the THC-infused beverages sold at the festival’s bars had something to do with it, but scores of fans sprawled out on the grass between (and sometimes during) sets, unwinding from the workweek and enjoying the music. — XM

‘Feel it all around‘

Is there any band more suited to play a sweltering late afternoon set on the third-day of a festival, when everyone’s just trying to chill, than the chillwave progenitors themselves? Perhaps, but the musical vehicle of Ernest Greene’s gauzy strain of synth-pop hit like audio mist during peak sun hours on Sunday, cooling off a light crowd while providing plenty of dance floor fodder.

Yes, Washed Out, performing as a trio, played “Feel It All Around,” the blissed out lo-fi synth bop that “Portlandia” adopted as its theme song and defined the chillwave aesthetic in the early 2010s. But as Greene’s last two albums for Sub Pop demonstrated, Washed Out has long since evolved beyond the micro genre it helped spawn. In addition to all those hazily gliding numbers that fans who haven’t kept up in a while might expect, Washed Out’s 45-minute set often carried an understated dance floor exuberance, including one tropical house-flavored number that continuously morphed with free jazz sax skronks and rippling sub bass. — Michael Rietmulder

Blast from NYC indie rock past

Between The Head and the Heart and Washed Out, Sunday brought a 2000s/early 2010s heavy tilt, none more nostalgia-dependent than the Walkmen. In 2023, the NYC indie rockers reassembled following a 10-year hiatus for a reunion run that’s spilled over into sporadic dates this year. After the time away, frontman Hamilton Leithhauser had much to say about the band’s history and (less comfortably) current events, noting he doesn’t usually talk politics on stage. “But I gotta say, if that guy had been a [expletive] half inch to the right… That’s it.”

When not saying the quiet parts out loud, Leithhauser swayed and serenaded the late afternoon crowd, which included more than a few OG die-hards, draping his singular talky howl-croon over angular guitars. The loose-lipped singer also recalled fond memories of Seattle, playing at the nearby Vera Project and writing/recording one of their best known songs, “Heaven” — which sounded determined as ever on Sunday — at Avast! Recording Co. — MR

Heads in the dream pop clouds

Our neighbors to the north were well represented at DIDO this year, though perhaps none embodied the laid-back, relaxed-pace festival better than Montreal dream pop favorites Men I Trust on Sunday. After introducing themselves with a flurry of guitar shreddery, the sonic clouds parted, clearing the summer skies for their drowsy-in-a-good-way indie hit “Show Me How,” its slinky bass line making like a temporal lobe massage.

With her feather-soft vocals, singer/guitarist Emmanuelle Proulx and the band airwalked through their subtly complex numbers, drifting through gossamer soft rockers with electro hues and jazzy guitar licks. — MR