1. Catfish and the Bottlemen
Wales is responsible for the blue-eyed R&B swagger of Tom Jones and the avant-rock of John Cale, but Catfish and the Bottlemen more strongly recall The Strokes and fellow British Islanders and Life is Beautiful headliners Arctic Monkeys. Singer Van McCann boasts possibly the best name in music, and his haircut and vocal style channels everything we loved about Julian Casablancas circa 2001.
2. St. Paul & The Broken Bones
Somebody’s been poring over old Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett sides, and his name is Paul Janeway. The former bank teller and accounting major leads this six-piece ensemble that combines classic Stax-Volt vocals with the most in-your-face horn section this side of Chicago. That Janeway looks nothing like you’d expect only enhances songs like “Call Me” and the brassy “Don’t Mean a Thing.”
Holy Ghost!
3. Holy Ghost!
Friends since grade school, Alex Frankel and Nick Millhiser turned their synth-pop ambitions into reality with their high school band Automato, but it was under the tutelage of LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy that they truly came of age. Like the best work of Murphy’s own (sadly defunct) group, Holy Ghost! rides the line between retro and futuristic without sounding cliché.
4. The Head and the Heart
Thanks to its appearance in an American Express commercial, you probably know “Lost in My Mind” even if you’ve never heard of The Head and the Heart. The Seattle-based sextet offers up a healthy
dose of Americana, and the rotating vocals of guitarists Josiah Johnson and Jonathan Russell and violinist Charity Rose Thielen tug at more than a few heartstrings.
5. St. Lucia
Jean-Philip Grobler grew up in South Africa, and his band St. Lucia sounds like what Live Aid 1984 would’ve sounded like at Johannesburg’s Ellis Park Stadium. The synths are big and synthy, the Afrobeat drums are on point and Grobler’s musical stew incorporates the best of Peter Gabriel and Paul Simon’s world-music excursions from that decade. Except Grobler’s actually from that “world.”
Dizzy Wright
6. Dizzy Wright
“Everywhere I go turn into Vegas,” Dizzy Wright raps on his latest EP State of Mind, and if there’s a better expression of civic pride in 2014, we haven’t heard it. Dizzy was actually raised in Las Vegas, where his mom unsuccessfully tried to add hooks to his earliest raps. In 2012, a 21-year-old Dizzy released SmokeOut Conversations, a high point in a career just beginning to generate steam.
7. Mø
Mø is the Lana Del Rey we want Lana Del Rey to be. The one who drops the pretense and the languid beats and rechannels her Hollywood-underbelly aesthetic toward actually danceable beats and a weltanschauung that doesn’t so closely resemble the end of days. At 26, Danish singer Karen Marie Ørsted is only one album into her career, but it will be fascinating to see where she goes from here.
tUnE-yArDs
8. tUnE-yArDs
There’s something about songs that remind us of schoolyard clapping games that makes us instantly happy. It’s why Pitch Perfect’s “When I’m Gone” and Lumidee’s 2003 hit “Never Leave You (Uh Oh)” became so popular, and why tUnE-yArDs’ “Water Fountain” is maybe the one song that will be stuck in your head a month after the festival. And it sure beats the hell out of “Mary Mack.”
9. Little Dragon
Artists who make their living on slow jams are not really a staple of the festival scene, but Life is Beautiful is banking on two: The Weeknd on Friday and Little Dragon on Sunday. Of the pair, Little Dragon is the more intriguing, mainly because Japanese-Swedish singer Yukimi Nagano sounds like she’s had Janet Jackson’s “Any Time, Any Place” on repeat for the past 20 years.
