Match 3 - Shadowlands vs. Rust Belt

Have Sigur Ros and the Kronos Quartet ever collaborated before? I know Kronos has covered Sigur Ros... anyway Shadowlands is a runaway winner here in my book.

q and not u renunion, damn it, i wish i had thought of that.

both posters are stellar, not really muse fan, but pink floyd beats all (no matter how unlikely)

With all due respect to the 2nd festival's creator, I think this is the first one I haven't had to really think and analyze it. I love some of the random acts dropped into the first one. Fastball, They Might Be Giants, Transatlantic, Blackfield, VAST, Oceansize, Pain Of Salvation, etc. This one is definitely more me.

wow this one was the hardest choice so far, i chose shadow lands mainly because of location, reunited floyd and eoto. my first instinct however was to pick rust belt, but a second look of shadowlands won my vote.

Damn. Both of these look really good. As far as lineup goes, Shadowlands has the bigger individual draws. Which is to say you've got Pink Floyd headlining your festival. But your lineup looks good overall, even if it's not really my thing.

Rust Belt, however, is a sharp, elegant lineup with a definite focus. It'd be hard for a lineup to have more of the greatest artists of the last decade on it. The decision not to feature a big reunion headliner from the 1970s means your tickets will run significantly cheaper, though you could've benefited from a bigger draw. I would've inserted some combo like Lou Reed and John Cale in - Velvet Underground is a good band that fits this festival and would draw more fans of this type of music. Failing that there's always the fallback - Radiohead - but that's a little boring. The thing is I've seen Death Cab live and they're just not terribly interesting. But the undercard is just really really good for this sort of fest, and that would be a huge draw for me. The only other problem with a focus this narrow is that it's going to create conflicts, especially if you've got five stages running. Which this fest doesn't really need, by the way. It could easily get by on four and probably on two.

But why set em so late in the summer? By then, a lot of the kids will be back in school. I know I will. What's the point in setting a festival at this point in August where it becomes harder for a sizable portion of your audience to make it? For me at least, this is the tragic flaw in two of the finest creations we've got. But maybe it's only tragic because it'd be impossible for me to make it.

I was really leaning Rust Belt, but this makes me want to reconsider. For one it takes place later, once school is underway for more students; perhaps more importantly, the lineup is geared extensively towards acts that are currently popular rather than older acts, which means your audience is going to be made up of a lot more college kids. Shadowlands - with its lineup nearly devoid of younger acts - doesn't have that problem. So I'm voting Shadowlands, even though my heart says Rust Belt.

I went with Shadowlands. I was tempted to go with The Rust Belt, but that would have primarily just been because of The Polyphonic Spree. Overall, I just liked a lot more bands on the Shadowlands lineup.