Re:Set’s first attempt at a three-day, three-city festival was by all accounts a success, and San Diego’s edition welcomed concertgoers to the first event at Snapdragon Stadium’s Thrive Park, a field located directly west of the stadium.
Re:Set’s model is interesting. Each day, three sets of acts play in three different cities (San Diego, LA, and Stanford, for ours). The acts rotate each day, playing sets every day across the weekend; a new take on the travelling festivals of yesteryear . The festival is travelling across the country, with similar dates in the Midwest and East Coast; it will be interesting to see if the model is successful, and will be replicated elsewhere.
For San Diego, this meant seeing BoyGenius on Friday, LCD Soundsystem on Saturday, and Steve Lacy on Sunday. ListenSD attended Saturday’s show, where icon Big Freedia, darlings IDLES, and Jaime XX also wowed the San Diego crowd through the afternoon and early evening. The set up was shockingly great; there was lots of space in GA, with a small VIP section to one side, and while crowded, there was still room to maneuver. Plenty of food and drink options lined the outskirts, and while lines got long at times, they moved quickly. Most importantly, the sound was consistently good no matter where you were standing, and given the median age of over 35, was at a volume that was doable without ear plugs.
On stage, LCD Soundsystem delivered. While they didn’t fully listen to their own advice to ‘shut up and play the hits,’ as they didn’t play “Daft Punk is Playing at My House,” the band did play a solid 90-minute, 14 song set including “I Can Change” (which had to be paused and re-started during a computer failure), and ending with a strong three song closer of “New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down,” “Dance Yrself Clean,” and closing on “All My Friends.”
In all, the festival felt like a single-stage Kaaboo, had Kaaboo followed up on its pre-pandemic promise of a move down to Petco Park. It would be great to see Re:Set come back again, and expand to a multi-stage model, utilizing the interior of Snapdragon Stadium for another stage and additional amenities.
By: David Israel