BØRNS & X Ambassadors Honor the Past, Sufjan Stevens & Grimes Look to the Future on Sasquatch!’s Final Day

Lyndsey Parker
·Editor in Chief, Yahoo Music

Monday at the Sasquatch! festival, held at the famous Gorge Amphitheatre in Quincy, Washington, also happened to be Memorial Day. Traditionally, the holiday is a time to reflect and honor those who died while serving in the armed forces, of course; but in a musical festival setting, it was a day for paying tribute to recently departed rock ‘n’ roll legends as well.

Sasquatch!’s fourth and final day started off with a bold set from electro-soul-pop androgyne BØRNS, who took the stage serving Marc Bolan/Jim Morrison rock-star realness (it’s no wonder one fan tossed a pink brassiere in his direction), and capped off his electric, glammy set with a falsetto-laced cover of the late David Bowie’s “Heroes.” The song was a perfect segueway after his unexpected remake of Arcade Fire’s “Rebellion (Lies),” since Arcade Fire were one of Bowie’s last musical collaborators.

Later on the main stage, New York alt-rockers X Ambassadors paid homage to Prince, with this festival season’s go-to cover song, “Purple Rain.” It wasn’t the first Prince tribute of Sasquatch! 2016: On Friday, Seattle R&B revivalists Grace Love & The True Loves grooved out to “Kiss,” and Andra Day covered “I Would Die 4 U.” (Day also honored other late musical greats, including Nina Simone, Bob Marley, and Queen’s Freddie Mercury.)

While BØRNS and X Ambassadors drew inspiration from the past, other Sasquatch! on Monday acts looked to the future – and, in their own indirect way, honored ground-breakers/game-changers like Bowie and Prince, by pushing musical boundaries and defying expectations.

Most notable was former folky Sufjan Stevens, now reinvented as an angel-winged, banjo-smashing, Prophet-synth-playing, glow-in-the-dark, postmodern space-rocker. Looking like he’d just walked off the set of Liquid Sky (or maybe off the set of an Empire of the Sun or Flaming Lips music video), Stevens hit the stage wearing neon warpaint and Christmas tinsel, and flanked by two dancers nicknamed “Cat” and “Dog” (“the hardest-working ladies in show business – besides Grimes and Florence Welch”). Stevens explained that after touring for a year singing songs about death (his 2015 critics’-list-topper, Carrie & Lowell, was inspired by the passing of his mentally ill mother), it felt good to be performing more celebratory fare – although he later asked the audience, “Do you mind if we ruin the party with some folk songs? It wouldn’t be a Sufjan Stevens show without a few songs about death!”

The party got restarted at the end of the set, however, when Stevens performed a Vocoder-trippy, 25-minute rendition of “Impossible Soul” while dressed like a giant disco ball, undergoing a costume change midway through the song and reappearing wearing a suit fashioned out of rainbow balloons. It was a nonstop ecstatic cabaret, and even if some people in the crowd were confused by Stevens’s wild new Day-Glo direction, no one seemed disappointed.

Canadian visionary Grimes, aka Claire Boucher, also brought experimental, exploratory electropop to the main stage – coming across as a sort of avant garde Debbie Gibson during her aggressive but effervescent, proudly girl-powered set. While her boundless creativity was hampered a bit by her daytime slot, which didn’t allow for her usual onstage trippy audiovisuals, Grimes definitely didn’t play it safe. The highlight of her hour-long show: a Russian version of “Scream,” originally recorded with Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes. The bubbly, Hello Kitty-bowed Grimes turned downright demonic – and, yes, she screamed a lot – in what was Monday’s most ferocious and fearless moment.

Sasquatch! ended with a very different sort of pop goddess: the ethereal and benevolent Florence Welsh, of the Machine, gliding onto the stage like a dream in an Old Hollywood pink chiffon dressing gown, barefooted and beaming. When she wasn’t belting out her band’s many anthemic hits or channeling Stevie Nicks circa Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy” music video with her hippie ballet moves, Florence was a great unifier of the Sasquatch! masses – crawling into the crowd to accept gifts of flower crowns from fans, or even (nicely) demanding that audience members put away their phones for the duration of her sentimental love ballad “How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful.” The fact that the audience actually heeded her request and stopped taking selfies for five minutes was a testament to this woman’s total command of the stage, and it was the perfect way to end Sasquatch!’s 15th year.