Heartless Bastards closed out the Mountain View stage on Saturday night at Pickathon with one of the loudest and most powerful sounds the festival saw all weekend. The Ohio band, who sounded even better live than they do recorded, played the kind of music that can wash over a crowd and drown them in sound. By the end of their performance, it was clear that there is nothing heartless about this band.
Lead singer Erika Wennerstrom may have looked small on that huge stage in front of a packed crowd, but her voice is nothing to joke about. When she sings, she has the deep sultriness of Fiona Apple with an added bluesy edge that complements heavy, garage rock influence instrumentals. Watching her move across the stage and strum her guitar, she throws her whole body into her music, proving to be a powerhouse of a woman as she performs.
Early on, the band busted out an incredible cover of Junior Kimbrough’s “Done Got Old,” a song which was featured on their 2005 album Stairs and Elevators. This song showcased the band’s talent for taking seemingly simple melodies and injecting an incredible amount of feeling into the music. The amount of emotional transference they were able to pull off in such a large crowd was astounding as they turned the outdoor stage into their own personal playground.
The instrumentals themselves could be described as a veritable orgy of power chords--quite a departure from a lot of the music present at the festival this weekend and a welcome break from the usual folk and roots melodies that had populated the stages that day. During the set, a couple members from Black Prairie came up to sit in on the set, with the band’s drummer and bassist leaving for one of the songs.
The only dim point in Heartless Bastards set came when they played “Hold Your Head High,” a song that should have been the high point of the set. Instead, it felt cluttered, with what appeared to be a few extra instruments thrown into the mix and a frantic energy to Wennerstrom’s singing that did not lend well to the tune.
Despite that little hiccup, the rest of their set sounded superb, with the band finishing on a heavy note as they busted out a beefy song that dissolved into both crazy instrumentals and mad applause from a thoroughly satiated audience.
