Make mine Melted

Melted crowd on Bluestone upper level

Music festivals rise and fall, dazzle and sputter. So there was little shock that I had not heard of the inaugural Melted Music Festival before my concert-going friend Chris told me about it.

Surveying the lineup and seeing it would land in Columbus, home of many free places to stay, I was game for a February excursion. The psych-rock/garage-rock/noise-rock/whatever kind of rock festival was put on by the folks behind the Nelsonville Music Festival, one of Ohio’s better good-weather music events.

Bluestone

While I was hoping Melted might include some type of grilled cheese tie-in, the music covered enough ground to satisfy any appetite (late afternoon pizza from Mikeys’s Late-Night Slice also helped).

On a blustery Sunday when the wind blew hard across Columbus, Melted occupied The Bluestone, a century-old decommissioned Baptist church that has some decent acoustic and good lines of sight for its small stage. There are windows and ledges for sitting, a requirement for those of us not used to 12 hours of standing. The Bluestone also has many bars, built during its brief run as the Bar of Modern Art (BoMA) during the double-aughts, which were stocked with Jackie O’s beer along with the usual Midwest bar necessities. While not all bands were equal, the music felt compelling throughout the entire afternoon and evening.

DANA

 DANA led off the festivities. Their noise was embellished by female vocalist Madeline Jackson, who could shift from R&B passages to throat-shredding on a moment’s notice. It was the opening performance that Melted needed to grab attention. Jackson also played theremin, which added new textures to the power chords and screaming guitar pedals. They were followed by Ma Holos, who hail from Cleveland and play a strain of gritty rock that agreed with me.

For a break in the proceedings, a rear chamber on the second floor had been opened for a record show with about 10 vendors. Some sold genuinely good albums that tempted me while others sold scratched-up 45s no one wanted. I found some decent 45’s at one of the few vendors who took a credit card and call it good, not wanting to hold a bunch of record for 10-plus hours.

Ma Holos

Hailing from Southern California, JJUUJJUU had a bit of a hippy vibe. At moments the music felt as if they should have just played instrumentals as the dreamy vocals tended to get buried in the mix. They excelled at songs of sparse chords and jangly passages with an underbelly of rough guttural noise.

One drawback to a festival geared around a number of psych-rock bands – the more you hear, the more the bands sound alike. Most have enough structure to their songs that the bands never blended together too much, but it’s a concern. There were an impressive number of bands with female singers, something I didn’t necessarily expect from this bill. But gender diversity livened the proceedings and kept the sound from turning stale.

Heron Oblivion stood out for its different arrangements, lead singer Meg Baird doubling as the drummer, while Ethan Miller played an unmistakable Hofner bass. There’s also a strong influence of British folk=-rock, with Baird’s voice often veering into Sandy Denny territory. Her voice add some haunting depth to the band’s extended jams.

Cherry Glazer is driven by Clementine Creevy’s wide-ranging vocals and a sound that marries shoegaze, grunge and a bit of 80s pop. They were among the catchier bands in a day of longer songs.

When Deerhoof struck its first notes, the festival entered a new phase. After 25 years of bashing it out, these guys are pros. Black Lips were the name I knew best in this lineup, but I found myself not knowing their songs at all. If asked to identify a song from either Kikagaku Moyo or the Black Lips, I would fail miserably.

At 11 we arrived at the capstone to a day of loud rock, Ty Segall with sometime-collaborator White Fence. Segall and his compatriot played songs that felt like snippets and defied convention. It was loud but joyous and complex. Such a prolific musician was a perfect closer for all the moods of psych-rock heard at the Bluestone that evening.

As they finished, the winds still pushed hard against the old stone church. The crowd had dispersed, but Melted already felt like a music festival like might return to echo across downtown Columbus again.

Ty Segall and White Fence