The traveling carnival known as Re:SET is so set on putting a brand new spin on the festival experience that it’s not even using that particular F-word in its name or advertising. Setting down at Brookside at the Rose Bowl over the weekend, it was a rose by any other name, but the concept is just novel enough (and just hard enough to explain in a user-friendly nutshell) that it counts as a semi-reinvention, and a welcome one: the festival as an a la carte buffet. LCD Soundsystem, Boygenius and Steve Lacy are the headliners for a three-day outing hitting different regions across the U.S., where local fans need not attend all three days (and in most cases, probably won’t), but get quite a smorgasbord if they do.
In Pasadena, Lacy took the top spot the first night, followed by Boygenius on night 2 and James Murphy’s group to round things out — while the lineups rotated through similar stage setups in San Diego and San Francisco on the other weekend afternoons and evenings. The bills all seemed designed to group together similar but not-too-similar acts: Clairo was an obvious opener for Boygenius, but that day’s bill wasn’t solely female-fronted acts, lest things get too obvious. LCD Soundsystem’s openers incorporated Jamie XX, with a DJ set not being too far afield from Murphy’s sometimes EDM-adjacent sound. The neo-punk of Idles and the non-binary bounce of Big Freedia? Not quite as obvious, but also making a nice kind of sense.
These three bills might’ve been equally weighted in most ways, but not in merch — the line for Boygenius T-shirts stretched to what appeared to be a two-hour length in the early evening Saturday, while there was immediate walk-up service for LCD Soundsystem souvenirs on Sunday. At least the enthusiasm, if not the overwhelming desire to show it to the outside world, seemed roughly equal, though the appeal of a true hometown show for Phoebe Bridgers couldn’t be underestimated.
Here’s a photo gallery of some of the artists’ RE:warding sets over the weekend.
