Leor Galil: Rain’s drenched two of the last three Riot Fests, and though the clouds were breaking as I approached Douglas Park early Friday around one o’clock, the morning’s downpour had already wreaked havoc. The mud spread as more and more people entered the festival grounds—though the damage paled compared to that in last year’s site, Humboldt Park. This year hasn’t been without its little bumps. Food vendors are using tickets instead of cash, and around dinnertime a couple of them ran out of stubs. The sound quality has been dreadful in parts too—at times I felt like I was listening to the bands through an iPhone stuck in a Solo cup.
Sasha Geffen: Dark clouds rolled high over the skyline as I parked my bike, but the sky held its water as Laura Jane Grace wrung out song after song from Against Me!’s thick back catalog. It was nice to kick off a historically dudely festival by watching a six-foot-tall punk goddess scream out to the throng of women gathered at the Rise Stage; even a few technical glitches didn’t dim the band’s energy. I looped around to the Radicals Stage for Heems, who hadn’t played Chicago in some time and who honored his return with a rare performance of a couple of Das Racist cuts, just because we looked “like nice people.” Heems broke from a controlled flow into a full-on guttural scream a few times, making the timely post-9/11 cut “Flag Shopping” all the more wrenching as he closed his set.
