Being a press badge first-timer, I didn’t really know what I was getting into with Noise Pop. I knew it was in far-off San Francisco, I knew it lasted about a week, and I knew some fascinating people have said very good things about it. Naturally when the good folks at Verbicide dispatched me to go write about it, I was all sorts of stoked — any festival that considers The Magnetic Fields to be their “big finale” is always a winner in my book. When you spread some of indie’s most affirmed gallants and buzzed-about up-and comers across a selection of some of the most beautiful venues…good times are simply destined to be had — and good times were.

But enough about me, this article is about you, the reader, right? So I’m going to break it down mathematically for you, the way god intended festival coverage to be. Unfortunately my camera was K.I.A. for the most part, and I only managed to participate in the Friday and Saturday merriment, but hopefully my judo grip on the English language will make up for that.

Friday, February 19 at Great American Music Hall

Band 01: Nice Nice
The Great American Music Hall is pretty imposing, complete with baroque architecture and a Victorian balcony — it looks like it was built for Napoleon, not rock music. It must’ve been a little awkward for Nice Nice, a two-man psych-noise-dance crew, to set up their monolithic network of electronics on a stage so enshrined, and it must have been even more awkward to play to a still-filtering-in crowd of 20 or so who were more interested in talking than listening to their 15-minute set. But those who did listen were certainly in for a treat. Like a more eccentric Battles, the band embraces the sillier, spacier side of math rock songwriting — they sampled a plastic, playground kazoo for godsakes. Surprisingly, it works. Well, at least I’m sure it works on tape — the band’s two members remained stone-cold throughout, barely acknowledging the audience once. And really, you can’t look serious when you’re sampling a goddamn kazoo. Loosen up.

Band 02: Magic Wands
As a music journalist, I like it when bands make it easy on me. So when Magic Wands set up their live show with two giant disembodied white tiger heads on two massive podiums wrapped in Christmas lights, a planetarium-esque tapestry of twinkling stars, non-ironic top hats, bedazzled blazers, a drummer wearing a humongous zebra mask, and every member wearing ultra-dark wayfarers indoors — I kind of knew what I was gonna write about. The music? Well, the music was basically a MGMT-heavy dose of electro-rock dance hooks, but, you know — less good. But honestly, when you’re watching a strobe light pulse alongside some of the dumbest/greatest lyrics ever written, you’ve gotta give it up. Don’t buy the record, but definitely go to the club.

Band 03: Geographer
Admittedly, Geographer started slow, very slow, extremely slow. The first half of their set was characterized by some of the numbest, most trifling folk songs this side of the new Devendra album. It was one of those moments where the murmurs slowly challenged the music and the bar gradually became more crowded. Not even lead singer Mike Deni’s “Hi Mom!” shout-out could save it. However, around the halfway point (and coincidentally, right around the time I started seriously considering the aforementioned bar) the band introduced a startling and incredibly left-field synthesizer into the foreground of their compositions. What resulted was some confounding — but still very vanilla — electropop. I was left having no idea what Geographer was, or more importantly, what they were trying to be, but at least they kept my attention.

Band 04: Atlas Sound
An acoustic guitar and a harmonica — that was the extent of his live setup. Anyone even remotely familiar with the arrangements of Bradford Cox knows that they’re an incredibly layered, dizzyingly bottomless beast, that sound as if they require the might of an entire studio, sound booth, and orchestra to bring to life. But no — all you really need is an acoustic guitar and a harmonica.

With a Byzantine sprawl of pedals at his feet, Cox overlapped a countless number of sampled loops into a flabbergasting whirlwind of guitar thumps, strums, and his own frail voice. Seemingly without effort, he could pull something as sweet and focused as “Walkabout” from a primordial soup of hazed tape.

Bradford played for a solid 10 to 15 minutes, linking his songs together with the precision of vinyl. When he did stop playing, he would chat with the audience though they were at his garage band practice — without even the slightest whiff of pretension. “Oakland? I don’t know what that is. What’s the difference between Oakland and San Francisco, can somebody tell me?” And later, “Yeah, we opened for Nine Inch Nails in…Oakland…that was Oakland!” Rarely does music this beautiful come from sources this cheeky.

Saturday, February 20 at Bottom of the Hill

Band 01: Letting Up Despite Great Faults
Oh young, inexperienced opening bands — with your charming anti-charisma, your inability to enunciate into the mic, and your inexplicit nature to knock over things you shouldn’t be knocking over. Letting Up Despite Great Faults were exactly that, a group heavy on the blunders, but also heavy on the charm. Maybe it was Bottom of the Hill’s forgiving nature, or their headbanging, turn-to-the-drummer-and-slam-on-your-guitar-really-hard modus operandi, but they won over everyone in the room with ease, and they even convinced me to buy a shirt after the set. How’d they do? Well, for a young, inexperienced opening band, they did alright.

Band 02: Birds & Batteries
The sound bite is simply “The Flaming Lips without the charm,” or, as I like to call it, Embryonic-era Flaming Lips (har har wink wink). But seriously, while Embryonic was alluring in its spazzed-out, scuzzed-out, drugged-out environment, Birds & Batteries just came off bland. Out of everything I saw over the weekend, theirs was the set I remember the least vividly, just a lot of angry analog disjointed-dance music and an ever-smiling bassist. They at least had the decency to conclude with their best song, a frolicking Okkervil-aping swinger; it’s something to build on, I guess.

Band 03: Loquat
Loquat is five people in their mid-30s, all of which are modestly-hip, all of which probably work nine to five, and all of which are in this band on the side. So naturally, they play indie-ass indie rock music — think REM, The Lemonheads, etc. These San Francisco locals have clearly been at it for a while. It didn’t do much for a San Diego transplant like me, but the crowd knew the songs and they cheered when the intros became recognizable. We’ve all got one of these bands, Loquat just happens to be the Bay Area one; and hey, the songs weren’t half-bad either.

Band 04: Memory Tapes
Oh, how I love to see the indie kids dance, mainly because the indie kids can’t dance; we do a clumsy side-shuffle and look at each other awkwardly when it becomes obviously apparent how out of place we look. It’s especially entertaining when an unequivocal dance project like Memory Tapes gets on stage — ravers we are not.

From my research, it seems that Memory Tapes mastermind Dayve Hawk has only been playing live for an exiguous few months, and that seemed pretty apparent considering his set lasted for (at least what felt like) a sparse 35 minutes, and included his guitar, a live drummer, and a bulging collection of pre-rendered samples. Hell, he didn’t even have enough juice to do an encore, instead sheepishly apologizing when the crowd refused to be sated. But hey, his music is lymphatic, bouncy, and totally made me spin Seek Magic again, so mission accomplished — I just wish it could’ve been a tad more substantial.