CRSSD Fest brings its own looser vibe to SoCal dance music

L.A. fans who had planned to take the Amtrak down to San Diego’s CRSSD Festival on Saturday -- far and away the most pleasant, leisurely way to attend this growing, influential dance music event -- got a bit of a shock when they saw a note that Amtrak train service to San Diego was cut off for the weekend. Getting there would now require an hour-long bus transfer from Oceanside to downtown San Diego and back.

Yeesh. That ride was still better than the four-plus hours it took some L.A.-area fans to make the weekend drive in triple-digit heat, however. And CRSSD’s good spirits made even the most challenging commutes seem worth it.

The festival has instantly become a fixture in the SoCal electronic-music universe. This owes a lot to its very adept organizers, the Goldenvoice-affiliated FNGRS CRSSD (a sister company of the EDM events production firm LED), and to the inherent pleasures of having a manageably scaled fest -- last year had around 15,000 fans -- on the radiant San Diego waterfront.

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Some small issues from the March debut remained, namely that sound bleed between back-to-back stages. But after Saturday night’s opener, it’s clear that CRSSD is one of the brightest lights to come out of the post-mega-EDM era in SoCal.

Vibe is a tough thing to quantify at a festival, but CRSSD has already come into its own. More proletarian than Coachella, smarter than EDC but more welcoming than warehouse-land, it’s distinctly San Diegan and a friendly change of pace from L.A. club culture.

On one end of the field, L.A. future-soul vocalist Gallant played with a dynamism and confidence beyond his rising-act status. St. Lucia fielded a full live band to add some crunch and velocity to its sizzling synth-pop. The Parisian producer Tchami sauced up his house music with little R&B flourishes, and the lively Bonobo went unusually deep and moody for his set just as night settled in.

The ever-cryptic Zhu showed no sign of losing momentum behind his hit “Faded.� Obscured by veils of projections, he knew how to play the crowd around snippets of his marquee and bits from fellow late-night-lurker the Weeknd. But his sets have found a coherent and racy energy that should make him a favorite at fests like this for a long time.

We would have loved to have seen more of Jamie XX and headliners the Flaming Lips (the latter was a left-field choice of headliner for a dance fest, suggesting CRSSD already has broader genre ambitions).

It would have been nice to stay for Sunday night to see the popular tropical-house maven Kygo, the great jazzy experimentalist Nicolas Jaar, the hard house of Bicep and cheeky disco of Todd Terje. But we had a bus to catch if we were going to get onto that last train back out of town.

Follow @AugustBrown for breaking music news.

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