Swans Drop The Beat

The era of big festival reunions may finally be drawing to a close, as reunited Coachella bands like Ride and Drive Like Jehu drew tiny, depressing crowds to tents the size of aircraft hangers. With Jehu in particular, it was just sad, and I couldn't bear to be one of the 80-or-so people filling out that room for long. Swans, who are technically a reunion act even though they're doing the best work of their careers right now, brought a crowd just a tiny bit bigger than Jehu's, and they had to contend with closing the Gobi tent, playing at the same time as the Weeknd and Axwell ^ Ingrosso, the Swedish dance duo whose euphoric thumps kept bleeding through the tent walls and trying to kill Swans' vibe.

But Swans made a bad situation work by leaning into it, stretching out and droning for extended stretches. Really, Swans shouldn't be bringing out huge crowds, at least when it's not their show. They tend to play new music live rather than anything the crowd might've heard, and I think the endless warm bass-heavy ambient piece they played was intended for another album. All their layers of sound were genuinely pretty during that stretch, and they cast a spell. But then, without warning, the band suddenly lurched into a deranged blues stomp, catching the entire universe off-guard. I saw people run out of the tent as soon as the thunderously loud beat kicked in. It was awesome.

Ezra Koenig Hits The Stage With SBTRKT

I hadn't been planning on watching masked dance sophisticate SBTRKT, who was playing the neighboring tent at the same time as Drive Like Jehu's set. But I left Jehu early because it's hard to get excited in a huge empty tent, and I walked past SBTRKT's stage just as Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig was taking the stage to sing his part from SBTRKT's 2014 single "New Dorp. New York." Koenig is fun to watch in any circumstance, and he's especially fun in this one, doing what amounts to guest-rapper duty. He's got a confidence and swagger that can only come with leading a successful band for years, and he brought the sort of performative panache that not many of the weekend's dance sets could claim.

No Family's Safe When Perfume Genius Sashays

Perfume Genius' Mike Hadreas might be the realest punk on the whole Coachella bill. He had a tough spot -- outside on one of the big stages while people were still filing into the festival. But he brought a serious intensity to the early afternoon -- taking the stage in a minidress, fishnets, and makeup, staring down the small crowd who'd assembled to see him. For the early part of his set, it was just him and one collaborator on keyboards, singing delicate songs -- this on the same stage that Steely Dan had populated with probably 100 musicians the night before. But when Hadreas got into the explosive full-band music from last year's Too Bright, he started doing this amazing wriggle-strut across the stage, a dance as confrontational as it was celebratory. In a situation that would've made most musicians look tiny and insignificant, he found a way to leave a hard, larger-than-life impression.

Bad Religion Keep Playing After Getting Cut Off

Bad Religion were always the intense young nerds of the first L.A. hardcore wave, and these days, they look like the biggest dads on earth. Frontman Greg Graffin is a biology professor on his off-days, and he looks more like a biology professor than a punk singer. But Bad Religion have spent decades racking up an absolutely bulletproof catalog of punk rock singalongs. Newer songs like "Sorrow" and "Fuck You" sounded right at home next to their classics, and a big-but-friendly circle pit -- the only moshpit of any kind I've seen all weekend -- opened up immediately and kept going for the whole set. The band crammed 18 songs into what was supposed to be a 50-minute set, and when the festival finally shut off their sound during set closer "Fields Of Mars," the kept playing anyway, leading a singalong without amplification. They may be dads now, but they're still punks.

FKA Twigs' Undulating Arm-Dance

Up against Jack White and Tyler, The Creator, twigs still packed out the Gobi tent. And she did it without pandering, letting her music throb and insinuate rather than smacking anyone over the head. If anything, she made her songs even weirder in that live setting, using arrangements even clankier and more off-kilter than what's on her records. The music was great, but the real reason to go see twigs is the waye she moves. Twigs was a dancer before she started making her own music. And when she's onstage, she does this fluttering, hypnotic thing with her hands, looking less like an on-the-rise singer and more like an avenging Hindu deity. She is something to behold.

Clean Bandit's Euphoric Singalong

Clean Bandit are a British pop-house group with a cellist, a violinist, and a massive global hit in the ecstatic "Rather Be." I watched them on a whim, and they ended up being one of the best things I've seen at the whole festival. Their music is hooky and breezy and ridiculously pleasant; it is a good-vibes machine. And when they closed out their set with "Rather Be," I saw big groups of ridiculously happy kids all around, singing the song to each other and looking generally delighted to be there. It was beautiful.

Father John Misty Breaks Character

In his shamanic lounge-lizard Father John Misty guise, Josh Tillman has become a sex symbol of sorts. He knows it, and he uses it for maximum irony. Case in point: The deconstructed lapdance. Late in his set, Tillman asked for a volunteer from the audience. He brought up a young woman named Amy, then asked if she'd be willing to make an extremely strange dream come true. Then, while his band went into a cover of Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man," stagehands brought out a giant wicker chair covered in balloons, putting it at center stage. They surrounded it with giant teddy bears, flowerpots, and people in white robes and terrifying elephant masks. As the confused-but-game Amy sat down in that chair taking it all in, Tillman sank down on his knees in front of her and sang the song straight to her, doing his version of the onstage-lapdance gimmick that people like Janet Jackson and Nicki Minaj have done. By the end of the song, Tillman was sitting on Amy's lap, staring into her eyes, and stroking her hair. And for a brief second during all this absurdity, Tillman finally let his whole character break, letting a quick chuckle escape. And then it was right back to the character.

Run The Jewels Bring Out A Prodigal Coachella King

Any Run The Jewels set is a great Run The Jewels set. Killer Mike and El-P know that they are on a ridiculous roll and that they're making the best music of their lives, and they bring an insane level of energy to every show, mirroring the franticness of their music. But they also have a sense of when to make big moments happen. And for the occasion, the pulled out all the stops, bringing out almost every collaborator that it would've made sense for them to bring out: Despot, Boots, Travis Barker, the cooler-than-hell Gangsta Boo. The biggest of those moments, though, was the first: Zack De La Rocha, a man who headlined 1999's very first Coachella festival with Rage Against the Machine, absolutely beaming with happiness when he rushed out for his "Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck)" verse. De La Rocha has been something of a recluse in recent years, but he hit that stage like he'd never been away. There are rumblings that El-P is working on a new album for De La Rocha, which would be awesome. But is there a way we can just get him to join Run The Jewels full-time? Would anyone be upset about that?