- There's a common refrain here in Mexico City that each year the rainy season gets longer. You hear it over and over again, with natives and old-timers insistent that a hurricane season supposedly beginning in June and ending late September in fact stretches from March to December. The jury's out on whether or not it's true, but after squelching through two days of mud-caked pop and rock at this October's Corona Capital festival—a stark difference from >last year's sunbaked warmth—I'm starting to fall for the locals' argument.
Everyone knows that rain is a music festival's kryptonite. With a torrential downpour on the first night that brought an early end to Massive Attack's main stage appearance, the tone was set for a wellies-and-ponchos affair that, for this reviewer at least, severely limited the potential for enjoyment.
To be fair, the lineup didn't help. While last year's well-heeled attendees got to enjoy adventurous fare like DJ Harvey and Matias Aguayo, Corona Capital 2014 played it boring. While Kings Of Leon, MGMT and The Kooks are de facto main stage fodder, this year's smaller tents revealed a distinct lack of risk-taking.
On Saturday afternoon, Hercules And Love Affair's Andy Butler arrived on stage looking like he'd just stumbled out of Berghain, and the group set about proving how durable—and festival-friendly—the '90s house paradigm remains, putting in rowdy performances of "Blind" and "My House." On Sunday, CHVRCHES took to the main stage and made the crew with isosceles tats and parallelogram necklaces happy, dropping soaring synths and brostep-referencing stomps. By this stage, much of the site had turned into a muddy mess. Luckily, St.Vincent emerged from the swamp, her icy blue hair twinkling in the late evening night, while her droney dub-rock washed over the smiling crowd.
Corona Capital is what it is: an upper-class, expensive and presumably hugely profitable commercial music festival that makes bank by playing it safe. Clearly, given that nearly 200,000 people passed through the two-day event, it remains highly popular, both for the paying public and the bands on stage, many of whom seemed truly thrilled to be playing for such large audiences. But with the stormy weather and the sterile line-up, this year's event failed to dazzle.