Lane 8

One Liner: Perfectly acceptable EDM

Wikipedia Genre: Deep house, house, progressive house (sounds like a sequel to Goodnight moon that just talks about the whole house instead of the items in the kid's room)

Home:  Denver

Poster Position: Line 6
Sunday of Weekend One at 6:30 on the Tito's Stage.

Friday of Weekend Two at 6 on the Tito's Stage.

Thoughts:  With that name, I was kind of hoping for some sort of Americana thing that would sound like R.E.M.'s "Driver 8" covered by Son Volt.  Instead, I get relatively generic electronic dance music.  I've said this many times - I am not a great judge of this style of music.  This guy may be breaking all the rules and using some sort of style that blows the minds of the Electric Daisy Carnival crowd, but to my ears, this is just more of the same danceable beat stuff with a generic lady singer piping up every once in a while. He has personally described his own music as "dreamy back rub house," which makes me want to die.

His real name is Daniel Goldstein, so the moniker isn't some clever play on his name.  Where did it come from?  Wikipedia says it originated from making garage rock with his sibling when they were kids.  Which is NOT HELPFUL.  But Reddit just came through for me with a story that I actually like - a self-depreciating reason!  "I used to be on a swim team with my sister when I was really young. In a swim race, the slowest guy or girl is put in lane eight, which is the outside lane. And we had a really terrible garage band with another friend of ours from the same team and we did Nirvana covers and stuff, and we were called Lane 8. The name always just kind of stuck with me.”  Actually kinda clever!

The albums - 2015's Rise, 2018's Little by Little, and 2020's Brightest Lights.  I can't tell much of a difference between the three albums to say whether or not one of them is superior to the others, its just a bunch of dreamy back rub songs that blend together.  "Fingerprint," a 2016 non-album single, tops his streaming numbers with 20.8 million streams.

I like the build from a tiny little beat up to the multilayered thing that ends around 2 minutes in.  But overall, that is pretty uninteresting.  No real bass either, the beat is mid-range and not deep.  I kept hoping that something cool would happen, but that is just 6:44 of building and shifting and building, but remaining with the relatively generic same little synth riff and midrange thump throughout.  I guess I need to eat some mind-expanding substances first.

"Neon Jungle" sounds like something the people of Zion danced to in the Matrix (2? 3? I dunno).  "The Flood" is so insistent with its repeated synth notes that I just had to pause the music, shake my body out, and breath deeply.  I don't comprehend how people listen to this music unless they are partying.  "Run" very much has the melody of some other song I've heard before, but also makes me think it would work in a Grand Theft Auto game.  Much of this sounds like something that would quietly play in the background of a commercial meant to inspire you to buy stuff with a Visa or something.  

I'll give you one more - the most recent single is called "Is This Our Earth?" and has 848k streams so far.

I can see dancing and grooving to this - I definitely think it is better than "Fingerprint," mainly because it has more energy and some pauses that I think make it more interesting.  And while it keeps echoing the same little weird riff thing, at least it isn't constant, which makes it seem more like an interesting song than just a background beat.  Actually, I'm listening to this track again and I am digging it.

But the generalized response is the same.  I've been hearing this music for about 5 hours of this workday and I'm very much ready to not hear it anymore.  I couldn't recall any single bit of it as standing out over the rest, and I would not choose to go see this live.