Few lineups this summer have felt as stacked as the one provided by the Pitchfork Music Festival, taking place this weekend in Chicago's Union Park. We are pleased to provide comprehensive coverage of the festival in all of its glory, including show reviews, photo galleries, and a general overview of the festival as a whole. Friday's report focuses on the facilities and on performances by Liars, Robyn, Broken Social Scene and Modest Mouse. Be sure to check back for our coverage of Saturday and Sunday's festivities in the next few days.

It’s Friday, July 16, 2010, the first day of the Pitchfork Music Festival here in my adopted hometown’s Union Park. It’s a bright day, thankfully not very humid, and there’s just enough of a breeze to keep the heat from being a problem. Pitchfork is doing an even bigger “green” push this year than last year, including having a bicycle parking area on the southwest end of the park, complete with rows of bike racks, posted staffers to keep watch, and floodlights for after dark.

Union Park is a great venue, and they’ve planned the festival to take full advantage of the space. It’s big enough for a great crowd but not so big that you have to hike from stage to stage. The bathroom situation, which, as anyone who’s ever been to a festival knows, is absolutely essential to the success of the whole enterprise, is the best I’ve ever seen, with well placed and plentiful porta-potties complete with sanitizer foam dispensers. There are trash cans placed liberally throughout the park, each with one or two recycling bags mounted on the sides for bottles and cans. They’re working too—the place is staying very clean and those bags are filling up, mostly with water bottles, which are cheap when they’re not just being given out freely by the staff. Throughout the day the staff have been friendly and helpful, keeping people happy and hydrated and the shows going smoothly. Fantastic job, guys, well done.

The crowd runs the gamut from the scrupulously fashionable (I swear I saw a guy in vest, ascot, and jean cutoffs) to the determinedly unfashionable (c’mon, guys, it can’t be laundry day for that many people today) to the barely clad at all (this may warrant further investigation by your faithful intrepid reporter). The cynical hipster poseur contingent has made a good showing, but overall I’m struck by how friendly and happy the attendees are as a whole. Smiling, friendly people who are thrilled to be right where they are.

I missed the first couple of performers to interview Andrew Whiteman of Broken Social Scene and Apostle of Hustle. You can read the interview as soon as I’ve finished typing it up. He was a gracious, funny, and fascinating guy to talk to, and I wish I’d had more time with him.

The first show I did catch, albeit only the second half, was El-P’s. He seemed to be trying too hard to get a very chill bunch of people all riled up, Rage Against the Machine style. It didn’t work. I get that it’s hard to be an opener, and harder still to be one of the first acts of a festival like this, but what he was trying to do on stage just didn’t suit the crowd. The smell of pot in the air was WAY too strong to expect to get the audience angry and fist pumping with a chant against consumerist America, dude.

Liars put on a good show. They were relaxed and seemed to be having a good time in spite of a somewhat unenthusiastic crowd that was really there to see Modest Mouse. Robyn’s performance was also solid. She seemed a little tired up close, but she determinedly strutted her stuff regardless and, given that she did just fly in from Sweden the day before, she put on a fine, if unspectacular electropop show.

Broken Social Scene, the band I was most looking forward to see, barely seemed aware that they were doing a show. That sounds bad, but it’s really not. They’re in love with the music they’re playing. It’s a rare and wonderful thing to see a band that actually plays their music. These guys weren’t at work, they were at play, doing what they love, and it showed. Their much-discussed intraband chemistry was almost palpable. I don’t know if it would have made a difference to them if there hadn’t been anyone outside of the band there at all. Their show was the highlight of the day for me.

Modest Mouse, on the other hand, seemed a little angry. “Buy some brand of bottled water. Mother earth can take another hit for you,” Isaac Brock taunted the crowd that had stood or lain sweating in the sun for hours in mid-July to see him. Thanks, Isaac, that’s what we need, people passing out from dehydration to impress you. There’s a time and a place, man, c’mon. It didn’t seem to put a damper on the crowd, though, who were clearly thrilled to see them play at last. The singing was intense and severe, and rather more energetic than I expected. I didn’t enjoy the near-militant feel that their music gave off, but the crowd was on a different page and were enthralled.

All in all, a great first day. No really bad performances, if a couple that could have been better, and a couple of great ones to finish off the night. As I trudged off to the bike racks after the show I found that the Chicago Stolen Bike Registry (http://chicago.stolenbike.org) had visited the racks and had rubber banded “Bike Locking Report Cards” to the handlebars of the bikes (I got an A+, woohoo!). That kind of attention to detail and encouragement to take care of yourself was a hallmark of the festival. I look forward to the next two days.