The Brickside Festival, Duke University’s spring music celebration, might not appeal to your average college kid, but it’s shaping up to be a music nerd’s wet dream. The initial lineup for the March 24 event included blissed-out garage star Kurt Vile in addition to Supreme Dicks, Tanlines and The Postelles. Today, the festival added three more names that should make a small number of people very excited—and will likely floor any uninitiated attendees.
The Gunn-Truscinski Duo, the stellar pairing of hypnotic blues guitarist Steve Gunn and gifted percussionist John Truscinski, will play alongside Royal Baths and Mark Kozelek, known for leading both Sun Kil Moon and Red House Painters. The Gunn-Truscinski Duo, who laid down one of the best day party sets at last year’s Hopscotch Music Festival, find spacey avenues within the structure of a traditional blues duo, somehow melding cymbal crashes and elliptical riffs to create a gorgeous wash of sound. Royal Baths just released their second LP, Better Luck Next Life, which adds a darkly distorted veneer to psych rock a la Velvet Underground, creating twisted garage gems that are as menacing as they are catchy. Kozelek’s solo work is an oddball treat, sometimes dominated by gorgeous acoustic folk covers that come from left-field places: His 2001 LP What’s Next to the Moon is all AC/DC covers.
The festival is presented by WXDU, Duke Coffeehouse, College Concert Series and Major Attractions. All the acts announced so far will play at the Coffeehouse, but more bands and venues are set to be unveiled. It’s perfectly possible that the rest of the festival will hew to more traditional college crowd-pleasers. For now, though, let the nerds rejoice!
