The sun was shining and the man that came onstage was wearing black slacks and a heavy jacket with colorful strings hanging from it. Jónsi was a colorful character last Sunday afternoon during Coachella weekend. He was filling in the number right before Phoenix (who was filling the number right before Thom Yorke) so the ‘Outdoor Theater’ crowd vastly growing.
Imogen Heap walked onto the Mojave stage on Friday in a gorgeous silver-sequenced dress, fancy tights, and her hair in a huge, messy bun. She started her set from the piano and worked her way around the stage jumping from piano to electric keyboards to cymbals and then drums. She had three microphones — two on her wrists and one around her head.There was a lot of movement, a lot of accessories, and a lot of confusion. This show for lack of a better word was a hot mess.
Thomas Mars (from Phoenix) moves the way Jim Morrison used to and on Sunday he leaped into his crowd, threw himself on the stage floor, and looked to be enjoying every second of the attention he was getting. Mars is a wild man and along with the rest of his band, put on one of the best shows at Coachella 2010.
The Temper Trap really had their chance to shine at this year’s Coachella and boy did they succeed. Sure, they only have one album and somewhat of a hit single under their belt, but at the 2010 Music and Arts Festival, Dougie Mandagi and his amazing band performed for a huge crowd at the Outdoor Theater.
Turning in a slowly-building set of their rollicking and minimalist indie rock cross-bred with a Kinks-styled rock classicism, Spoon turned in an engaging performance early Sunday evening on the Coachella Main Stage, manically bouncing from the stripped and skeletal tracks from their new album Transference (the roiling “Written in Reverse”; the pulsing “Who Makes Your Money,” which featured Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox on guitar) to the full-bodied and horn-lined closer, “The Underdog,” from Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga.
Beginning the Sunday night homestretch of rock greatness—Spoon, Pavement, Thom Yorke—Yo La Tengo’s late afternoon set yesterday at Coachella felt far too small and intimate for the main Coachella Stage, with the band vacillating between fairly listless ballads (paradoxically always a strong suit on their records; see: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out’s “Our Way To Fall”) and charging indie rockers with a laidback insouciance that was a little less than exhilarating.
When rock n’ roll excess is done right, it sounds like Queen. Hell, it’s idiotic, but I’ll even occasionally stomach the eternally (and savvily-intentional) stupidity of a Kiss song. When rock ‘n roll excess is done wrong, however, it comes off as either total disaster or simple bloated posturing/ lunk-headed muscle-flexing.
Saturday night’s Coachella headliners Muse came off as members of the latter camp of the worst kind of rock extremes—it wasn’t a total disaster, it was simply a numbing barrage of noise and laser lights (what year is this, 1986? We’re still doing laser lights? See you at the Pink Floyd laserium show, boys) all simply meant to distract listeners from the fact that depth isn’t exactly a Muse’s strong suit.
You know, you’d think that a band as willfully weird—and nearly 40 years old—might have a tough time filling the gargantuan Mojave tent at midnight on Saturday night at Coachella. But then, one of the main thrusts of Devo’s work has always been the essential oddness of human beings, so it wasn’t much of surprise to see that the aging new wave/ punk band scored one of the most enthusiastic audiences of the entire festival. What was surprising? Much like Faith No More’s set, this oddball group of forward-looking sonic throwbacks nearly stole the entire festival.
Vampire Weekend hit the Outdoor Stage at Coachella on Friday night with the swagger and confidence of a band that had made it—and why not? They’ve sold millions of records (somehow, that many people are still buying records), and despite a heated backlash, have seemingly countless fans. Which is why their set at Coachella was so confounding—they’ve got the hits, the energy, the hooks, and the crazed and ecstatic fans, so why did their set on Friday fail to connect? It felt, as I watched the band play on twin jumboscreens that bookended their stage, that the band wasn’t really playing at all, and that I was simply viewing a live DVD on a massive screen.
