Austin CIty Limits Festival Review: Final Words

Another festival has come and gone. So much music, so much food, so much of everything. Where to begin to bring it all together into one concise little post.

I will start by saying, out of the four festivals I have been to, this one rates first or second. I haven't picked between this one and the 2004 festival yet. It will come to me in time. Musically, it was time to experiment a little bit. Most of the artists early Friday and Sunday I had hardly heard, save a few tracks off of their myspace page. I got to know a lot of new artists that I would normally have never heard. That is the beauty of a festival of this magnitude, you will always find something new.

With that said, time to break down the Best and Worst of ACL Fest 2006

Best Food: Boomerang Meat Pies: Hand held pot pies. Brilliant! The Southwest Chicken was the bomb! Close Second: Saba with their Mahi Mahi Tacos and some damn good chicken flautas

Worst Food: None, all the food was damn good, and all from local restaurants and vendors

Had to get that out there. Austin has some of the best food in the country.

Worst Performance: Wolf Parade. Maybe I expected too much, but I was not pleased with their show at all.

Worst Music Selection: Guster. C'mon, play more than 4 songs from Lost and Gone Forever and before. Close second: The Raconteurs. You lost over half your crowd after playing Steady As She Goes third. Genius setlisting.

Worst Experience: Being back too far for Van Morrison and Ray Lamontagne. Sound quality sucked for some reason. Couldn't hear a damn thing. And I so wanted to catch them.

Act I Should Have Seen, But Didn't: I heard only high praises for latin bands Del Castillo and Los Amigos Invisibles. Even the frat boys were talking them up.

Best Unknown To Me: Matt Nathanson. Absolutely great on stage.

Best Cover: Ben Harper. Voodoo Child. There is nothing even close.

Best Music Selection: Willie Nelson. Check Day 2 Review to see all the songs he brought out. Freakin' amazing.

Best Performance: There were four front runners for this: Damian Marley was high energy from start to finish, busted out some Bob with some brothers. G. Love will always be one of my favorite live acts to see. Matt Nathanson blew me away, but the best stand-out performance that I saw goes to Austin's own Ghostland Observatory. Such raw energy put into the performance and the sound just was incredible.

Well, that does it from Zilker Park this year. Until 2007!