Big Gigantic

One Liner: Electronic hip hop and jazz with lots of guest vocalists

Wikipedia Genre: Electronica, livetronica, hip hop, jazz
Home: Boulder, CO.

Poster Position: 5  (fifth line!  for this!)
Both Weekends.  

Weekend One - Friday.  Weekend Two - Saturday.

Thoughts:  It's a sucker's game to try to predict what someone will sound like because of the band name, but I was really leaning in to the idea of this being a cool rock band with jam tendencies.  I think I had MMJ's "One Big Holiday" in my brain from that show last week.  Instead, this seems to be electronic music that is making me think of that AJR band that I really dislike.

They feel like the perfect festival group.  Wikipedia says they have previously played Coachella, "Lollapalooza, Ultra Music Festival, Hangout Music Festival, Austin City Limits, Governors Ball Music Festival, Electric Forest Festival, Outside Lands and Bonnaroo, among others" although I can't find any old posts about them in my blog, so they must have come before I started blogging (yes, a little searching shows it to have been 2012, which was before I started my neurotic past-time).  But anyway, they feel perfect because they mix electronic with hip hop and so you get a good beat, lots of bass, and a sound that is danceable and raveable, but is also milquetoast enough to just be used as background music as you sit on the grass and chat with your friends.

One thing that I find interesting is how exactly they will do these songs.  Just about every one of their top tunes has someone else doing the singing or rapping.  Their top ten has the following as collaborators on the ten songs: Logic/ Rozes, GriZ, Angela McCluskey, Louis the Child/NoMBe, no one listed, Pell, Ashe, Aloe Blacc, Kota the Friend, and Nevve.  So, who does all of those vocals when they are playing the track live?  How does that work?

The tune with no contributor has these lyrics, which make me grin that Genius has them typed out:

Ooh

I been heatin' up on you

Got me feelin' up like cool

Ooh, got me like

Ooh

I been heatin' up on you

Got me feelin' up like cool

Ooh, got me like

[Drop]

Ooh, ooh, ooh

Got me feelin' up like cool

Ooh, got me like

Ooh, ooh, ooh

Got me feelin' up like cool

Ooh

I really love that they have the [Drop] marked, and that someone had to type out all of those "ooh"s.

The group is made up of two dudes - Dominic Lalli, who plays the saxophone and produces, and Jeremy Salken, who apparently plays the drums.  They've been together for a while, and boast a surprising number of albums: 2009's Fire It Up, 2010's A Place Behind the Moon, 2012's Nocturnal, 2014's The Night is Young, 2016's Brighter Future, and 2020's Free Your Mind, with another album apparently coming out next month.  I would have predicted an album or two and a bunch of singles.  

The old albums generally sound the same as the newer stuff, but with less hip hop sensibility and more electronica.  Actually, no, I just had to stop the music from playing on their first album, that one is super annoying.  No songs from that old era still populate their top ten, so I'll spare you any interaction with them.  Their top track is the one with Logic, from 2016's Brighter Future.  84.4 million streams.

I like Logic, but that is a super weak set of bars from the guy.  Not especially nimble and not very interesting lyrically.  And the music itself is plain jane as well - you're not really going to rage to it, and you're not really even going to pay attention to it.  They kick in a minor drop and some horns/maybe sax about 2/3 of the way through, but its not much excitement.

And we should talk about the saxophone.  I actually kinda like it.  I thought GriZ was fun a few years back when I saw him, and he was heavy on the sax.  But the fact that someone listed this band's musical genre as "jazz" on Wikipedia means that we are simply broken as a society.

Their second-most popular track right now is a 2022 single with GriZ that involves a lot of reggae sounds intermixed with some brostep effects that take me back to when Skrillex was a thing.  And then the saxophone comes in strong as hell.  It's super catchy and would be fun to jam to if you are in to angry dancing in a crowd.  Only 1.4 million streams so far.

As an aside, I super-duper hate those SeatGeek commercials that have the twitchy butts talking about buying tickets.  Also, that little bear's bucket hat for sure would have blown off if he went skydiving.  That video was so unrealistic.

There are bits and pieces of this that are fun to listen to, and I'm sure they'd be fun to bump at the fest or as part of an Apple commercial for new iPhones or something, but I really don't find significant pleasure in it.  I'll leave this to the kiddies.