Detour’s signs of the times

Early in the afternoon at Saturday’s Detour Festival downtown, a man in lime green sunglasses and a checked kaffiyeh scarf rode a scooter down Main Street to catch a set from art-rap duo the Cool Kids. His outfit was a one-stop collection of twentysomething urbanite fashion atrocities, but it symbolized how today’s cool kids look at music. Taste in bands (like wardrobe accessories) is about curating eclecticism. Nothing’s lamer than admitting you aren’t equally versed in Parisian house, vintage reggae and knob-twiddling shoe-gaze music, all of which were on the plate at Detour.

The result of that approach, however, can be a bit of a mess. This year’s Detour-goers got a head-scratching mix of vaguely popular indie-rock bands, aggressively chic DJ sets from hot-to-trot newcomers Ed Banger Records and Perry Farrell’s latest misguided project, Satellite Party. If scattershot genre-hopping keeps one cheaply bleached DJ in a T-shirt with the words “I Love You But I’ve Chosen Disco” off the streets, it’s for the best. But it doesn’t mean that eclecticism for its own sake makes for a satisfying concert.

The best sets were from the lowest-profile bands. The Cool Kids’ nerdy, virtuosic rhymes about cardigan sweaters and how they’re “the new black Beastie Boys” reached dizzying heights of reverse cultural appropriation, and the Aggrolites’ airtight reggae was blue-collar stylish.

Detour’s most out-there act, the Mexican techno-punk-samba quintet Kinky, actually best embodied the festival’s genre-exoticism, pulling it off with grinning enthusiasm. These musicians also nodded to their status as the sonic “immigrant aliens” of the festival, as the audience didn’t quite know how to process a band that beat them at their own game of style-mashing.

The wheels started coming off of Detour during the target-market rock sets, though the Noisettes’ spiky spy-movie rock and navel-gazing Autolux sounded great bouncing off the downtown skyscrapers. Jittery new-wave group Moving Units buckled under computer gear problems, while the Shout Out Louds’ MOR indie-pop missed the live charisma that its Swedish cohorts Peter Bjorn & John (who weren’t at Detour) have in spades. Satellite Party’s New Age hair metal perpetuated the question of whether Farrell has lost his mind or if his new band is a deliriously ironic joke on Jane’s Addiction fans.

Clearly the night belonged to French coke-house duo Justice, as fans literally sprinted down Main Street to get prime dancing spots (and scenesters run about as often as rappers smile on album covers). The band has a merciless attention deficit for any sound snippet longer than a few seconds. Justice bashes disco singalongs, gut-rumbling bass lines and squealing-siren wails together so quickly that they eventually add up to a cohesive, singular sound.

Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé radiated goofy metal-head charm (De Rosnay took the stage on a skateboard and smoked throughout the set), and it’s no surprise that of all the blog-house acts to break in 2007, this one is fast becoming the genre’s biggest star. Justice still needs to decide how to put on a visually interesting live show, but playful gestures such as splicing the bawdy chorus from 20 Fingers’ “Short Short Man” over devil-horned synth riffs suggest this group is smart enough to figure it out soon.

The closing set from Bloc Party epitomized Detour’s unnecessary need to be all things to all American Apparel shoppers. There are a few revelatory tracks on the post-punk band’s latest album, “A Weekend in the City,” but live the band is unsure if it wants to be a jagged party-starter or transcendent arena act. “Please be safe,” frontman Kele Okereke asked an audience member sitting dangerously close to a City Hall ledge. Detour Festival tried not to play it safe but ended up there anyway.

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august.brown@latimes.com