For kids, it's a three-month chunk of freedom. For sports nuts, it's a sacred time reserved for the baseball diamond. And for music lovers, it's festival season. In all instances, there's bound to be some sweat – maybe even some blood – but every adventure, every game and every concert has the potential to take your breath away. Despite the ridiculous amount of festivals littering the North American landscape this summer, many weekend treasures are kept hidden under the heavy blanket sewn by powerhouse line-ups at shows like Lollapalooza and Outside Lands. Nothing against these concerts, but there's a level of intimacy and genuineness they can't match when compared to smaller-scale, niche festivals like this past weekend's Pickathon Indie Roots Music Festival (by way of some serious banjo and guitar pickin') in Oregon. The bill featured some well-known contemporary folk bands (like Blitzen Trapper and Dr. Dog) plenty of Portland favorites (Horse Feathers and Alela Diane for instance) and a pair of excellent Bay Area bands (known as Thao with the Get Down Stay Down and Vetiver).

The ninth-annual, three-day event was pushed as a Portland affair, but in truth was held thirty minutes southeast in Happy Valley. The locale's home-grown, any-town USA attitude fit right in with Pickathon's collection of back-country, Americana performers. Even better, the festival is held each year at Pendarvis farm, a unique, woodsy 80 acres that is transformed into a musical multiplex of farmhouse stages, beer gardens and activities for the tikes. Save for nightfall, things stayed toasty and muggy, but the main stage's beautiful patchwork canopy, the music being projected underneath it and the groups of people dancing and hoola-hooping around it, were almost enough to take the sweat off your brow – or at least make you not care.

While many of the Pickathon acts fiddled, twanged and otherwise yee-hawed all over the stage, there were other performers that leaned more toward indie, pop and alt-folk rock. A prime example was Thao with the Get Down Stay Down, a band that hasn't played too many festivals and was a newcomer to Pickathon. “It's nice to be able to hang out more, 'cause it's more of an event,” said singer/songwriter Thao Nguyen, a Virginia-native who now lives in San Francisco. “Often (our shows) will be a one-off that we just fly in for and it's a nice change, nice contrast, to the club beat and the rigor of that.”

While the sun set on the event's first night, the band appeared to have benefited from the extra rest as they gave one of the most energized and raucous performances all weekend long. It's been a cliche for decades, perhaps centuries, but this is a group you simply have to see perform live to fully appreciate. During the set, which was the first of two for the band that night, Nguyen jumped beautifully between brashness and delicacy; headbanging one moment, then lulling the crowd softly the next with vocals reminiscent of a youthful Beth Orton or Erin McKeown (as she's cited as key influences) and honest, no-punches pulled lyrics.

The band's debut album, We Brave Bee Stings and All, is great – filled with fun, soothing melodies and smart, often stirring lyrics – but see the group live if you want the full picture. The trio is willing to take risks, as evidenced by a Pickathon collaboration with Adam Matta, a New-York beat boxer that joined Nguyen as she hummed and beat-boxed to begin “Bag of Hammers.” Matta and drummer Willis Thompson kept the dynamic beat going throughout the song, and the entire foursome then dipped into a jam-version of Salt-N-Peppa's classic “Push it” – an unexpected but welcomed highlight for a band that deserves your ears and your eyes.

The other band representing the Bay Area, strangely centered around another Virginia-native turned San Franciscan, was Vetiver. The aforementioned San Francisco front-man, Andy Cabic, led a performance late Saturday afternoon that was intimate and dreamy, following a windy path of psych-folk tunes that could calm even the thickest blood. Many of the songs during the first half of the band's set appeared simple and subdued, but listeners were rewarded when they stuck to the melodies that often built exponentially upon themselves. “I think that there's a real mellowness and peacefulness to Vetiver's music that thrives off of quietness,” said bassist Daniel Hindman, who joined the group earlier this year.

The band picked up the tempo further into the show, but never sped things up past their core. They played a couple covers, including “Hey Doll Baby” by The Everly Brothers, which is also featured on their collection of covers titled More of the Past. The song was actually one of the more up-beat tunes of the entire set, but the band pulled off the classic bounce quite nicely despite playing underneath the afternoon sun. How about that heat, Mr. Hindman? “Oh my God – that was debilitating.” Ah, summer, blistering age of the festival.

-Chris Middleton. Photos by Alex Wong and Jane Park

More photos coming soon!

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