Sturgill Simpson

Watching Sturgill Simpson play the main stage at Governors Ball feels like a victory for the pockets of country fans in this city who have been quietly supporting country music all along. Simpson is one of those rare outliers whom country purist love to tout, he's not beholden to any radio sound or gimmicks but managed to transcend the confines of country fans and break into some relative mainstream fame. He's still a very humble guy though, dedicating "Living The Dream" to the audience early in the set, citing them as the reason he's living his own dream. His breakout album, 2014's Metamodern Sounds In Country Music, was anchored by "Turtles All The Way Down," a cosmic zen nonsense trip that resonates powerfully, most because of the beautiful, simple line: "Love's the only thing that ever saved my life." The crowd was still pretty sparse for the early 3 PM set, split between the eager, shirtless enthusiasts who would yodel back at Simpson and those who looked a little bewildered, not totally sure what they were hearing. One of the covers that Sturgill is well-known for is The Osborne Brothers' "Listening To The Rain" -- except he spikes it with a huge dollop of T. Rex, mixing in "The Motivator" for a genre-smashing whirlwind dervish of a country-bluegrass-rock hybrid. Huge pockets of the crowd were skunking by the time Sturgill drew the song to a close, and that's the first time in ages I've seen a country crowd move at all. Guess he wasn't just blowing smoke with the "metamodern" part. --Cailtin

Tame Impala

Like Florence + The Machine on the first day of Gov Ball, Tame Impala are a band whose enormous popularity still surprises me. What once could've easily been confined to the circles that populate Levitation/Austin Psych Fest, somehow these guys have managed to transcend some revivalist psych-rock niche to wind up playing a very crowded mainstage set. The first and only other time I'd seen Tame Impala, I was little underwhelmed. This could totally be attributable to where I was standing in Terminal 5 -- a Manhattan venue notorious for, let's say, imperfect sound -- but everything sounded pretty and precise but also very flat. Whatever the cause, the Tame Impala show I saw yesterday was the one I'd been hoping for all along: a lush and loud and confident run through those songs of theirs that perfectly blend gorgeously warped guitar textures with unshakeable hooks. The crowd, understandably, really lost it for highlights "Elephant" and "Feels Like We Only Go Backward" (also the most well-known Tame Impala songs). Aside from a stunning ending with "Apocalypse Dreams" (they played it early in the set last time I saw them; this worked so much better), yesterday was all about hearing some new stuff for me. Currents is one of the most anticipated albums of the year, and "Let It Happen" and "'Cause I'm A Man" both sound incredible already, as well as lending some new changes in pace. In the past, it might've been easy for a Tame Impala show to get lost in too many synth and guitar textures droning on, but the groove behind "'Cause I'm A Man" has made it one of my favorite songs of this year, and seeing it live amongst material from Innerspeaker and Lonerism, it shows the band fleshing out a new, exciting part of their personality. The new album can't come soon enough. --Ryan

The War On Drugs

The War On Drugs played a set right after Tame Impala, and since the two bands construct the same sort of freewheeling, psychedelic guitar rock, there is clearly some overlap between their fanbases. This overlap includes me, and as the crowd surged toward Weird Al's parody-pop and Adam Granduciel's blue-black psych-rock, I ended up getting to their performance in time to catch 2008's "Arms Like Boulders." It's funny, that song is off the one album that Kurt Vile was still in the band for, and leans far more alt-rock than the lusher psychedelic textures Granduciel has pursued since. I'd never heard that older track live, and the rest of the setlist was mostly tracks off Lost In The Dream, which came out last year and was unequivocally one of the best records of 2014. One of the only other song he played that wasn't on Lost In The Dream was a song off 2011's Slave Ambient, the album that made me start listening to this band at all. While setlist.fm is almost always reliable, and reports it was "Come To The City," fellow Stereogum writer Ryan Leas and I are 90% sure it was actually "Baby Missiles." Either way, like many of his songs, both of those tracks build up and up and up until finally careening off into chaos as the lyrics drop out and guitar takes over. During this live performance though, he stretched out that final number with effortless, ferocious exuberance. As I listened to one of the first guitar licks that made me a fan of this band, I tilted my head back and looked up at the open sky. Above the cigarette smoke, above the quivering crowd, and above Granduciel's shuddering psych-rock, the New York sky was bright, sharp blue, no end in sight. Paired with Granduciel's endless guitar patterns, drifting like a knitter's needle left to itself, this felt like a perfect, peaceful moment in a jam-packed, hectic day. His band is important sure, but this man occupies the stage like the stars he emulates -- Dylan, Springsteen -- wheeling out his eternal-fuzz guitar solos with the aplomb of a butler. War On Drugs may well be the most precise psych-rock in the land; classic, contemporary, and unapologetic. --Caitlin

'Weird Al' Yankovic

A Weird Al set shouldn't work as well as it did in a festival setting -- on the same stage that welcomed Mayer Hawthorne right before him and Flying Lotus right after, Yankovic drew a crowd just as big as either of them, and just as passionate, too. He brought such a weird, manic, infectious energy to the stage that I couldn't help but be in awe at him. Half the fun was watching Yankovic himself, of course, but it was also entertaining to look around at the audience reactions. It was obvious there were some people there who had no clue what they were in for -- a group in front of me freaked out when they heard the opening chords to his "I Want It That Way" parody and proceeded to try their best to sing the original words until one of their friends let them in on the joke. The crowd joyfully shouted back "aluminum foil" during his "Royals" take. While some parts didn't play as great for the festival crowd -- like when he took an extended break to run some of his skits, including his Whiplash bit with J.K. Simmons and his 30 Rock parody -- others worked weirdly well, like when he played video of all the Jeopardy! categories leading up to his name-checked one and the audience got progressively more excited as each one was revealed. Weird Al may not be made for the festival stage, but he certainly knew how to hold one. --James

Hot Chip

Hot Chip are one of my favorite simple joys: I never expect one of their albums to change my life, but I always know it'll have a set of expertly crafted, inhumanly catchy songs that I can throw on almost anytime, anywhere, and know I'll enjoy them. Same goes for seeing them live. It doesn't matter what setting or what time of day, a Hot Chip show is exhilarating; unless you have a thing against dance-oriented indie music, it's impossible not to leave their gigs a little happier. Last night at Gov Ball, they played as the sun set behind us, running through a set that hardly let up for its hour-and-fifteen-minute duration. Pausing for a breather only once in the middle of the set with "Look At Where We Are," Hot Chip otherwise ran a relentless party: always-welcome usual suspects ("Over And Over," "One Life Stand," and "Flutes") mixed in with some of their stronger new songs ("Huarache Lights," "Need You Now"). By the end, they had picked up an impossible momentum. "Ready For The Floor" was all the more dramatic for its extended intro and outro, the latter of which bled right into "I Feel Better," which in turn died down and yielded to "Let Me Be Him." That song started up just as it was getting dark and the lights from the stage brightened, a counterpoint to a song that sounds like a sunrise.

But we have to talk about the final song on Hot Chip's setlist. I figured "Let Me Be Him" would be the closer, as Lana Del Rey's and the Black Keys' headlining sets were fast approaching. They went into something else though, something I knew wasn't a Hot Chip song but couldn't place immediately because of the way they'd turned it into their own. And then Alexis Taylor sang "I get up in the evening..." and I realized, "Oh, holy shit, Hot Chip is playing a Bruce Springsteen song." "Dancing In The Dark" is probably my favorite song of all time, and they turned it into an epic dance song with all sorts of their own flourishes, including, incredibly, a tag of "All My Friends," which is one of other favorite songs of all time. This is not something I'd seen Hot Chip do or something I was aware they do. But it was more or less the climactic moment of my last night at Governors Ball, and it was a hell of a thing to hear at the end of the weekend. --Ryan

Flying Lotus

The crowd at Flying Lotus' set was as diverse as you would expect it to be, and the Gotham stage's tent was so packed that people spilled out onto the surrounding lawn to dance. I've always liked watching FlyLo perform, because he doesn't play the hits. Sure, he brings out his own work, but he always rearranges bits and pieces of it to suit a live setting. Some of his arrangements, especially on Until The Quiet Comes, are straight-up experimental, hard to vibe to in a festival setting without a few tweaks. FlyLo wore a mask while standing on an elevated stage, covered by a screen designed to make him look enormous alongside psychedelic projections. Out of all of the pulsing combinations of sound and color that emanated from the stage, a pitch-shifted, sped-up chorus of "Know Yourself" was a stand-out moment. That, and what I think was "Catch Me," FlyLo's collaboration with Kendrick Lamar. It's hard to pinpoint every piece of inspiration that FlyLo pulls out during his sets, and its impossible to write about them without taking the audience's reaction into consideration. I love to people watch, and this hour-long show was a prime example of how down people can get when they don't give two shits if anyone's watching. --Gabriela

Lana Del Rey

Remember when Lana Del Rey made her American TV debut on SNL back in 2012 and her performance sucked so much that it turned into a meme? The same thing kind of happened last night, except this time, I don't think it was LDR's fault. Her performance itself was good; she was more animated than I expected her to be, and she climbed into the walkway and took a selfie with an adoring fan. But if you weren't 20 rows deep from the stage, then you couldn't hear a single fucking thing, which makes this more of a fan review than an LDR review. It's fun to watch LDR play her home turf on such a grand stage, and as she stood in a New York Yankees patterned dress, I couldn't help but remember the videos of her performing as Lizzy Grant somewhere in Williamsburg sometime in the mid-'00s. She started out with the slow-burning song "Cruel World" that sounded so garbled I could barely make out her words despite the fact that I was standing just left of the soundboard. I thought that maybe I lost some of my hearing at the FlyLo set, but it wasn't just me. About three songs in, the surrounding crowd got impatient, a girl turned to her boyfriend and said, "We should just go to the Black Keys, I can't even hear her," a resigned expression on her face. Soon after, the collective crowd began to shout "LOUDER LOUDER LOUDER" which, honestly, probably just sounded like abrasive shouts of "LANA LANA LANA" if you were all the way up by the stage. Thus, what could have been an excellent LDR performance became an excellent fan performance. Since no one near me could make out half of her words, the set became a kind of live karaoke experience. A couple slow-danced next to me as they both sang along to every line of "Blue Jeans" in unison, and later, a girl asked if it would be ok for her to throw confetti all over me during the chorus of "Summertime Sadness." At one point during "Born To Die," I noticed that LDR changed the line "Let me kiss you hard in the pouring rain" to "Let me fuck you hard in the pouring rain," but overall, the sound quality was so shoddy that I didn't even know she performed "Cola (Pussy)," which is definitely a sad moment to miss. By the end of a festival, people are exhausted and not always so nice, but the camaraderie wrought by everyone's mutual frustration was heartening. As the Black Keys' set became so thunderous that it drowned out LDR entirely, I gave up and started to make my way home. Crossing over the bridge back into the city, LDR's vocals finally sounded crisp, the festival's acoustics made better by all of that East Harlem concrete. --Gabriela