Indie Rockers Join the ‘Picnic’ for Their Day in the Sun

Even cultural revolutions have their ups and downs. And right now indie rock is a merely dependable pop music genre, with much of value to offer but little of surprise, nearly a decade after the explosion of Nirvana into the mainstream.

On Sunday at Irvine’s Oak Park Ranch, the “This Ain’t No Picnic” festival gathered a solid cross-section of music rooted in punk, all in search of common ground in a world momentarily obsessed with romantic pop sung by actresses and teenagers.

On Sunday, the band most likely to break that barrier was Sleater-Kinney, an Olympia, Wash., trio that sets joyous and tortured vocals against the edgiest of guitars.

Singer-guitarist Corin Tucker was not stuck within some limiting anti-pop manifesto, and somehow inspired fans wilting in the July 4th heat to dance and clap to the urgent, raw pop of “Dig Me Out.” For all its well-deserved indie credibility, Sleater-Kinney is unafraid to have fun with the genre, from the nursery rhyme chorus of “Little Babies” to “Turn It On,” which blended supercharged punk with ‘60s bubblegum pop.

While Sleater-Kinney offered many of the day’s brightest moments, they were still a club band working to fill an outdoor festival stage, an especially formidable task in the bright sunlight.

Headliner Sonic Youth benefited from cooler temperatures in the late afternoon, but was faced with daunting hurdles of its own. Guitarist Thurston Moore announced that all of the band’s guitars, drums and amplifiers had been stolen that morning, a particularly devastating blow for a band dependent on hot-rodded guitars and obscure tunings.

Sonic Youth played on with borrowed gear (a Sleater-Kinney drum set here, a Scarnella guitar there), and Moore joked, “Now we know we can’t play real instruments.” But if the band struggled with the unfamiliar instruments, it was far from obvious during a 90-minute set.

The quartet is still making some of the most challenging music of its career, which has its roots in the punk and avant-garde movements of late ‘70s New York. Sonic Youth briefly flirted with the mainstream in the early ‘90s, even scoring a modest modern rock radio hit with “Kool Thing,” but has wisely returned to the bold experimentation of its earliest days with last year’s “A Thousand Leaves” album.

And yet the band didn’t rage through some quick avant-garde noodlings Sunday. As the sun slowly dropped behind the trees, Sonic Youth demonstrated grace under pressure, and showed how a band with finesse could weave crackling guitars and feedback into something of beauty.

Also compelling was Scarnella, an experimental duo of singer Carla Bozulich and guitarist Nels Cline, both formerly of Geraldine Fibbers. The sound was unrelentingly personal and raw, as Cline sliced a wire egg-beater and a toy ray gun across his guitar strings to rumbling, spacey effect. Self-absorbed in the best way, all of Scarnella’s sonic excesses were never simply reckless, and remained focused against a tight rhythmic sense.

The indie rock legacy could be heard in the likes of Superchunk or Orbit, a young Boston quartet that mixed atonal angst with pop hooks on the festival’s third stage. It was loud and lively, but hardly something on which to hang the future of a revolution.