100 gecs: Pitchfork Day 1 review

Whether you brought your kid or just wanted to feel like one while digging your feet into the grass as the music played, it was all cool as 100 gecs delivered the goods Friday evening.

Laura Les (a one-time Chicagoan) and Dylan Brady make music that doesn’t need a whole lot of thought — see the stoner ode “Doritos & Fritos” or the juvie jam “Frog on the Floor” — but that’s kind of the point. It’s temporal, it’s a communal release, it’s the type of zany bangers that would make your mom say “dance like nobody’s watching.” And believe us, most of Pitchfork Fest did.

The duo, who met as high school friends in St. Louis, drew one of the biggest crowds of the weekend thus far, playing a cartoonish mix that led many to pogo along to the pop punk of “Stupid Horse,” skank to the ska joy of “I Got My Tooth Removed” and headbang to the nu metal glory of “What’s That Smell?”

Less is definitely not more in the eyes of 100 Gecs, with the bleached-blonde quasi-twins taking on nearly every genre imaginable and then overloading it all with effects they can in less than an hour, like the Guinness recordkeepers are watching. And somehow it always comes together and makes sense for a cohesive, attention-grabbing show that has inked the duo many gigs — opening for everyone from Nine Inch Nails to Brockhampton, or more recently joining boygenius for a Halloween show, or getting on the lineup for Coachella.

Is their simplistic shtick (like playing their lone technical instrument, a board housed in a Pelican case on a garbage can) irony for irony’s stake or just some kind of well-played evil genius that has a big hold on the masses? It’s been quite an obsessive curiosity the past five years since their 2019 debut LP “1000 gecs” made a ruckus, and probably won’t abate as they reportedly work on their latest head-turning material.