Lorde should have been responsible for the final at Lollapalooza

You know that you are alive now when you can take the subway to the festival. Only twenty years ago, the idea of ​​bringing in close to a hundred bands and 50,000 visitors on a lawn in the middle of the city appeared almost utopian. Of course, Sweden Rock is still struggling. But otherwise, the giant events of the time in small towns, with unsafe camping areas and lunch on canned ravioli, are just a memory.

Despite the proximity to a warm bed, Lollapalooza at Gärdet still has a lot in common with what festivals used to look like in the past. Not just because the weekend ends with the dinosaurs Pearl Jam. The deficit of black music and the sprawl in the bookings also smell of the nineties. Sunday’s program ranges from Norwegian pop export Sigrid via retro rocking Graveyard to EDM mastodons Galantis.

Somewhere in the middle meets the Los Angeles trio Haim audience. Their latest album, “Women in music pt.III”, is their most ambitious to date, in terms of influences and style choices. Almost immediately, unfortunately, it becomes clear that the live version lacks the richness of detail that characterizes the recordings. Instead, Lollapalooza gets a rock show of a classic cut.

Thunderous bass and distorted guitars drown out most of the album’s subtleties. At best, the three sisters create a delicate turn, drawing as much inspiration from the epoch-making folk scene of the sixties and seventies in Laurel Canyon as from the souliest sides of Thin lizzy. Here, “My song 5” sounds like Faith no more. It is something, but not a demonstration of Haim’s strongest abilities.

A more accurate picture of a complex and talented artistry you get instead when Lorde takes the same stage. The twenty-five-year-old New Zealander is barely recognizable at first, with blonde locks of hair and black sunglasses. With the sun on her face and a ribbon in bright yellow costumes, she manages to marry together the multifaceted components of her three-album long catalog.

Despite the obvious temperature differences between the troubled debut of adolescence and the life-affirming last year album “Solar power”, Lorde makes every note feel like a natural component of the same, warm story. Where she is right now, she creates soft, inviting music filled with curious references that are actually unparalleled in today’s commercially successful pop landscape.

The intensity of the concert unfortunately gets a thorn in the side that large parts of the audience halfway in choose to stand in front of the empty stage next door. There, Eddie Vedder soon appears, and the delight he encounters makes it clear that his Pearl Jam still manages to be a drag patch at the festival. With the same heavy, earthy tone and dense guitar mats that they have held on to for more than thirty years, they do not disappoint anyone who came here alone for their sake.

For those who, on the other hand, have moved on in life since masculine rock sold multum, the ending appears to be a bit of an anticlimax. Lorde’s forward-looking, bright moods had tied the weekend’s charge with Monday’s pallor in a more conciliatory way. She, not Pearl Jam, should have been in charge of the final.

Read more about Lollapalooza and more texts by Sara Martinsson