Laneway Festival Brings Eclectic Selection of Artists to Meadow Brook

Led by headliners The National and Sigur Ros, St. Jerome's Laneway Festival's North American debut Saturday was a hit. 

Thousands of fans flooded the grounds of Meadow Brook Music Festival on Saturday for the daylong indie-rock festival that originated in Australia, with 24 bands spanning five stages.

New York-based indie-pop act Haerts opened the festival on the fest's Roscoe Stage at 12:40 p.m. with an energetic set of dreamy, synth-heavy pop. Haerts frontwoman Nini Fabi said the band had traveled throughout the night from Chicago for its early set, but the band showed few signs of fatigue as it powered through a 40-minute opening set to kick off the day's festivities.

My Brightest Diamond, led by multi-instrumentalist and Detroiter Shara Worden, took the stage at the Meadow Brook pavilion for an early set of theatrical indie-rock with a dash of cabaret.

Australian singer-songwriter Chet Faker drew a sizable crowd to the relatively small confines of the festival's Meadow Stage for a set of soulful jams highlighted by a cover of Blackstreet's "No Diggity." 

One of the breakout artists from the festival, however, might have been Scottish pop-rockers Chvrches, who drew the first large crowd of the day with a mid-afternoon set on the pavilion stage. 

Armed with synthesizers and '80s-influenced dance beats, Chvrches' sound felt right at home in the area that Madonna had made a home growing up. 

Icelandic rock outfit Sigur Ros co-headlined the fest, performing a set of ethereal, amphitheater-filling tunes led by Jónsi Birgisson's trademark falsetto.

Cincinnati, OH-based The National added another festival headlining gig with Laneway after a summer of leading such high-profile fests as Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza. 

Vocalist Matt Berninger recounted to the crowd a Detroit-area show earlier in the band's career, at PJ's Lager House, where the only attendee was the venue's janitor. On Saturday, the band played to a sprawling Meadow Brook crowd fresh off a No. 3 Billboard debut of its latest album, Trouble Will Find Me.

Berninger threw plenty of energy into his often somber songs, including crowd favorites "Bloodbuzz Ohio," "I Should Live in Salt" and "Don't Swallow the Cap." Shara Worden from My Brightest Diamond joined the band for "This is the Last Time." A highlight of the set, however, was "Fake Empire," the opening track off the band's 2007 breakout album, Boxer, which concluded in a mess of horns and noise.

In addition to a who's-who of independent music artists spanning the globe, the spacious festival grounds are populated with live visual artists, whose wares were put up for sale throughout the day.

Alongside two of the festival's main stages, artist David Corneail invited the public to help paint one of his projects, which he had started with black outlines. The concept, he said, was to reflect Detroit's recipe for future success—by everyone contributing.