With so many big time music festivals happening over the span of summer, it seems like everyone these days is picking one big festival nearest them and then saving up to buy an all-weekend pass which ranges up to and even beyond $200 for the big festivals like Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Sasquatch. The Capitol Hill Block Party is making an effort to stand as a strong competing alternative to those mega-festivals, expanding this year to featuring 60+ bands over a full 3 days (Fri. July 23, Sat. July 24, Sun. July 25), after previously being only a 2 day event for over a decade now. The Ticket prices? A mere $23 a day or just $60 for all 3 days. It's true that the lineup doesn't pack nearly the depth of big hitters of the aforementioned mega-festivals, but the 3 headliners this year are an astonishingly solid lineup of
MGMT,
Atmosphere, and
The Dead Weather.
The Capitol Hill Block Party is located in the Capitol Hill neighborhood (who'd of guessed?) of Seattle, Washington and features 4 different stages put on by different local venues. The Block Party, like most other big U.S. music festivals, has an emphasis on alternative and non-commercial music; The Block Party lineup also traditionally features a lot of local musicians from Seattle and the Pacific Northwest as a whole. Other notable names playing the festival include Yeasayer, Blonde Redhead, Blue Scholars, Holy F**k, !!!, Fruit Bats, The Dutchess and the Duke, Avi Buffalo, Grand Archives, and Bear In Heaven. One surprising shift in the lineup this year is the amount of hip-hop acts featured, in the past there was always a handful of them, but this year in addition to headliner Atmosphere and Seattle's own Blue Scholars, the lineup is packed with nearly all relevant Seattle hip-hop groups (and it's a really up-and-coming hip-hop scene in the Emerald City) including most notably Macklemore, Fresh Espresso, Grynch, Champagne Champagne, Mad Rad, Hella Dope, and THEESatisfaction.
A late addition to the Block Party lineup is the electronic band Hey Champ who hasn't made too many waves through the blog-o-sphere yet, but I have been a big proponent of their music and even wrote a post about them
here on Havoc back in April.
The full lineup for the Capitol Hill Block Party can be found at their website,
www.capitolhillblockparty.com/, where you can also buy your tickets. For only $60, I urge anyone with a wide music taste that lives within reasonable distance of Seattle to not sleep on this music festival, $23 a day or $60 for all 3 days is a much better deal than any other music festival I have heard of that features an equally strong lineup. I'm going all 3 days and you can expect a review of it here on Havoc shortly after the festival ends.
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