Pitchfork Music Festival: Cut Copy, TV on the Radio, Deerhunter

Cut Copy was the hit of the Pitchfork Music Festival’s third night, delivering a set of its ’80s-inspired dance-rock that had Union Park jammed and jumping.

They’re just four clean-cut Australian blokes in nice shirts. But in the middle of “Saturdays,” just as the sun was fading out a broiling afternoon, Dan Whitford called out a simple arena-rock, crowd-juicing trick — “On the count of three, I want you to go crazy! One, two, three, go!” — and craziness ensued. It is a beautiful, beautiful thing to watch a crowd of nearly 18,000 people jumping and waving hands in time, freaking the frack out, throwing inflatable things around and spraying water, with wide eyes and smiles from ear to ear.

The crowd was putty in Whitford’s hand, a dynamic performer who makes up in audience engagement what he lacks in his pinched voice. Whitford commands the stage with a kind of authority that produces results; when he sings about something “in the sky” and points toward it, you look up.

Cut Copy is not a complicated band — this is basic pop with disco grooves and lyrics about reaching for the stars, holding onto your dream and trying to get you on the phone — and the crowd was full of fans, people who knew when to “ooh,” when to “yeah!” and who cheered the songs they recognized just from the first synthesizer note. The band pulled from its whole catalog, including tracks from the latest album, “Zonoscope,” and the new single “Blink and You’ll Miss a Revolution” (a song from 2010, though it gained some note during the Arab Spring, so now it’s a new single out July 25, packaged alongside a remix by fellow Pitchfork performer Toro Y Moi). When they started “Lights and Music,” a propulsive tune with dissonant synths and the bassline from the Pretenders’ “Mystery Achievement,” the park went crazy without being told. Even Whitford was taken aback by the crowd’s enthusiasm, blurting a “Wow!” when the song ceased.

As acts compete to fill the void left by LCD Soundsystem, the Oprah of indie dance-rock, Cut Copy might have a chance for a breakthrough.

Before Cut Copy was Deerhunter, Atlanta’s wall of noise rock band. Deerhunter recently covered a band that gets to its root influences, fellow Georgians Pylon, and their Sunday set was an irresistible and daring mix of the same dance rhythms and guitar drone. The quartet opened with several minutes of guitar wash and cymbals before collapsing into “Desire Lines,” a song of tightly controlled jangle, an evolving rhythm and several showcases for guitar scrapes within guitarscapes — towering leader Bradford Cox ringing one chord for what seemed like days, while guitarist Lockett Pundt worked up and down scales. Reverb drenched the instruments and the vocals, so eventually everything was ringing, ringing, ringing. The band let layers of sound pile up, and often left them there — buzzing on for several minutes, while the rhythm section kept it afloat, until the tension was almost too much. “Little Kids” crumbled into waves of feedback. “Nothing Ever Happened” snaked through its verses before stretching itself to the breaking point. Occasionally they dabbled in barroom stomps and slow, Red House Painters narcotics, but mostly it was walls and walls of sound.

After Cut Copy was Brooklyn’s revived funky bunch, TV on the Radio. The band released the acclaimed “Nine Types of Light” on April 12, eight days before bassist Gerard Smith died of lung cancer. Sunday night they were just as eclectic as ever, mixing up Southern boogie, post-punk, electronica, blues and balladry, sometimes in the same song. Their headlining set seemed extra funky, at least at first, tripping explosives in “New Cannonball Blues” before going slow jam for a few tunes. “The Wrong Way,” however, was a hot soul stomp utilizing the competitive vocals of both Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone to conjure the revelatory dream the song’s poetry describes. Such a swampy mix of music: they’re indie-rock’s Little Feat.

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