Strand Of Oaks

Aside from making it to the Farm in time for it, I can think of no better way to have kicked off Bonnaroo 2015 than a set from Strand Of Oaks. Even after seeing the same set at Governors Ball last weekend and Primavera before that, the new lineup's power is undiminished. A lot of early Bonnaroo arrivals seemed to agree, with This Tent already being packed to the point of spilling out into the fields surrounding it and, with the sun still up, bottling all the humidity up under the tent to the point where it felt like a storm just had to break to bring some relief. With another distorted guitar swapped in for their old synth player, Strand Of Oaks' current live sound basically does sound like a storm breaking, songs now expanded and augmented with even more intensely cathartic guitar bursts and mini-epic outros. "Sterling" has become a late-set highlight -- once a ruminative folk song from Pope Killdragon, it's the most drastically transformed example of Strand Of Oaks' Crazy Horse phase, morphed into a patient volcano of a song. Everyone there seemed eager and excited to have Strand Of Oaks at Bonnaroo, and Showalter fed off that energy, proclaiming it one of their favorite shows they've ever done. He crowd-surfed as the dying notes of "JM" echoed from the stage, pumping his fist in the air in triumph.

Courtney Barnett

After her stunning first release The Double EP: A Sea Of Split Peas, Courtney Barnett's official debut album was hotly anticipated, and she delivered on the high expectations earlier this year with Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit. Her current live setup is just her, a bassist, and a drummer, and the shows are a grungy power-trio reading of all the highlights from both The Double EP and the new album. There's a sense of looseness, rawness, and loudness in Barnett's shows that's only hinted at on her records. They play these songs like they're on the brink of shuddering apart and shattering onto the ground, but always keep it dialed-in to the exact place where you know they're in total, masterful control of the maelstrom. As good as her studio recordings are, it's temping to wonder whether Barnett could ever capture this exact kind of energy for an album: a classic sweaty, visceral rock show that's a great wake-me-up on the day you fly down to Tennessee and start your Bonnaroo experience.

Mac DeMarco

Mac DeMarco was one of the last sets of Bonnaroo's Thursday lineup. Not everyone's there yet on Thursday; the main stage has yet to be opened. It's a lower-key preview of what's to come, making a particularly chilled-out, Bonnaroo-friendly artist like DeMarco a fitting ringleader for the first night. Each DeMarco proclamation of “Happy fucking 'Roo y'all!” or “Last time I was at Bonnaroo, it was a crazy night. Hopefully this one's even crazier” met with, as you'd expect, exceeding enthusiasm from the crowd. Speaking of that crowd: a Mac DeMarco Bonnaroo crowd is the sort of one where you'll stand next to dudes with mustaches and long hair, in nothing but overalls and a red Coors trucker hat, because of course that's what a Mac DeMarco crowd looks like. At one point, security pulled a totally naked girl from the crowd and tried to escort her out; she tried to sit on the barricade, and then hugged the security guard when he pulled her up. Welcome to Bonnaroo! As for DeMarco's set itself, it had the same anarchic late-night stoner cartoon vibes as always. Band members babbled over each other between almost every song, doing some mixture of goofy voices, accents, non-sequiturs, in-jokes, and proclamations of "Ornette Coleman is dead! Ornette Coleman is dead!" There was the requisite semi-joke cover, too, this time taking the form of Steely Dan's "Reelin' In The Years."

Tears For Fears

Flanked by a series of small light towers, Tears For Fears walked out to Lorde's gothed-up version of "Everybody Wants To Rule The World," and then went immediately into their iconic '80s hit. That's a hell of a way to build some tension, and then establish a mood right away. That mood was, basically, euphoric: how many other festivals offer you a chance to see Tears For Fears? It's one of those bizarre little bonuses Bonnaroo sneaks in, and the crowd gathered there lost their minds at each successive hit. I mean, these guys have some of the most iconic songs of the '80s, and they still sound totally vital playing them onstage. "I cannot tell you how excited were are to be here," Roland Orzabal said slowly in a totally flatlined voice. "We have a word in England that expresses this amount of joy. [long pause] That word is yabba-dabba-doo," he deadpanned. But as sardonic as they might've seemed then, he and Curt Smith still seem overtaken when playing these songs, displaying real fervor and joy. They played four -- four! -- songs from The Hurting, all of which were highlights (but especially "Pale Shelter"), later closing with the dramatic one-two of "Head Over Heels" and "Shout." (Sidenote: watching Bonnaroo attendees, costumed and on whatever substances at 9:40PM, figure out dances to "Shout" is really something.)

Kendrick Lamar

"It's been a long time since I seen y'all. We got a lot of catching up to do but we're gonna start from the beginning," Kendrick proclaimed early in his set. This was in the midst of what more or less felt like Act I of Kendrick's set, where he blitzed through all the heavy-hitters from Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City. After only tentatively starting to include new material in this year's sets, he still doesn't seem to know how or to want to blend the old bangers with stuff from To Pimp A Butterfly, which was grouped together at the end of the set. None of that really matters. A Kendrick set is an unstoppable force. The man has presence that rivals Kanye's on the same stage last summer. He played the hits because all he has is hits. The early section of the set was take-no-prisoners style: "Backseat Freestyle," "Swimming Pools (Drank)," his run-through of "Fuckin' Problems" for good measure, and that's before we got to "m.A.A.d. City" twice in a row. The latter might have been the feverish peak of the set: there is a very specific, overwhelming power this song seems to have on thousands of people grouped together, and the second time it dropped -- with Kendrick now near-screaming the verses -- had everyone reaching into reserves of energy they probably didn't know they had left at this point. As the set wore on, Kendrick mercifully added in a few breathers, like a mellowed version of "These Walls." That meant by the time "King Kunta" came around, all hell was ready to break loose again. When Kendrick wasn't playing new songs, this seemed like the biggest loss: to know he had a song like this and to imagine the missed opportunity of not hearing it towards the end of a headlining set at Bonnaroo. Well, he did play it, and it's exactly as great in this setting as anyone would've imagined. Pity any musician who has to operate in the vicinity of a Kendrick live set. He embarrasses almost everyone else.

Run The Jewels

It seems just about everyone was over at Kendrick, and the crowd filtering zombie-like out of the What Stage's main fields took a while. By the time I made it back over to This Tent for Run The Jewels, they were in the middle of their first song already and it sounded like I was walking towards a warzone. It doesn't seem to matter how many times you see these guys: a Run The Jewels set is a crazy steamroller of a thing. Playing in front of a screen hosting a series of violently trippy imagery, El-P and Killer Mike did all the same stuff they always do -- the same jokes and intros for songs, more or less the same running order. And yet somehow the degree to which this stuff can get you amped up, even when you know exactly what's coming, is stunning. (Or maybe knowing what to expect next somehow intensifies the experience.) "We're the best motherfucking rap group in the world!" Killer Mike yelled after typical set-ender "A Christmas Fucking Miracle," and before they were coaxed back for an encore after thunderous chants of "RTJ!" It occurred to me at Bonnaroo that weed, of all things, is the drug RTJ is extremely passionate about, the drug they always talk about smoking before gigs, etc. God help us if they ever move onto something harder.

Flying Lotus

Over the years, there has sometimes been an awkward disconnect between the mystic presence of Flying Lotus on his records and the reality of Steven Ellison, the man behind it all, trying to translate that into an energetic live show. I saw him in mid-2012, and he had a hype man onstage, which simply didn't match the mood at all. I saw him sometime within a year after that, and he had a giant screen and armor or something, but would come out from behind the screen and talk, another thing that kind of disrupted the vibe he'd so carefully curated. Last night was the first time I'd seen FlyLo since last year's excellent You're Dead!, and the man has arrived at a perfect synthesis of everything he's about. He plays in front of one screen and behind another, psychedelic imagery overlaid between the two, often to transfixing effect. At one point it all dropped out to a static-y grey, with FlyLo visible as a black silhouette in a glowing mask, before tendrils rose up from the bottom of the screen to subsume him. Later, imagery that looked like a sun exploding in black and white played alongside one of the spacier tracks of the night. Not only is this stuff perfectly fitting for the music, a lot of it is straight-up gorgeous. Like, to the point that during the more ethereal music and more oblique imagery, you almost felt like you could be watching an art installation. That's the key to FlyLo's new live performance: he's found a way to effortlessly switch between that and the party, to play a ninety-minute set that jumps from galactic, psychedelic shit to more straightforward dance music to rap, back to galactic, psychedelic shit, back to rap, etc., etc. Occasionally, the name "Flying Lotus" appeared on the screen in a kind of '80s anime font, Ellison might say a few words, and it worked as a reset button before the next passage of the show. He dropped "Collard Greens," he played an amazing beat that he said he made for Nas ("I'm waiting for him to spit, though"); he played a bunch of his best space-age stuff, and a bunch of other space-age stuff I didn't recognize at all. A security guard stood in the front of the stage, thrashing and dancing around on his own, directing the crowd, and then dancing with Chance The Rapper and other FlyLo friends. It was an experience that was transcendent and fun at the same time; it was everything. The only frustrating thing is wanting to know all the cool shit he plays.