FYF Fest: Grimes brings an aggressive edge to dance-pop

More than hot new bands or beloved old songs, what the modern music festival promises is an opportunity for escapism -- a chance for attendees to imagine themselves, for an evening or a weekend, in circumstances softer or easier than their real lives.

That’s why Todd Terje & the Olsens, from Norway, were at FYF Fest on Saturday playing what amounted to mid-’80s Pat Metheny jams (complete with flautist). And why there was a food stall selling Maine lobster rolls to people standing in a dusty Los Angeles parking lot.

But not everyone at FYF was taking it so easy (or allowing their audiences to).

On the main stage, the Canadian artist Grimes moved through a set of busy electronic pop songs underpinned by harsh digital rhythms, as though she were determined not to let anyone slip into the kind of passive enjoyment some pop seeks.

“Welcome to reality,” she sang in her opener, before letting loose a guttural scream.

In a similar spirit, Grimes kept calling attention to the mechanics of her show, as when she took a second to untangle a microphone pack from her mesh top (“the most ridiculous wardrobe malfunction of all time,” she called it) or when, mid-lyric in “Go,” she cautioned a fan near the stage to be careful.

No glazing over here.

Nor at a performance earlier Saturday by Head Wound City, an underground supergroup featuring members of the Blood Brothers, the Locust and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

At a festival where many acts, like Terje and the French band Air, specialize in super-smooth sounds, this muscular five-piece was churning through knotty hardcore riffs set a ferocious volume.

To close its set, Head Wound City offered a seething cover of “Just One Fix” by the seminal industrial-rock band Ministry.

So much for the comforts of nostalgia.

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