The War On Drugs

Continuing their ascendence after last year's stunning Lost In The Dream, the War On Drugs have been on a long touring victory lap, but also found time to sign to Atlantic for a two-record deal. You might not know it from their set at Bonnaroo, just yet -- scheduled in the early evening, they were one of those sets that had a sizable crowd with a lot of people sitting in the back, chilling in scarce shade on blankets. A slow-burn daytime thing before everyone starts going for it as the sun sets. That being said, the Drugs themselves were on fire, as usual, their particular brand of haze a perfect fit for an exhausted afternoon on the third day of Bonnaroo, underneath an unforgiving sun. Lost In The Dream highlights like "Red Eyes" and "Under The Pressure" were reliably great, having long since become road-worn since last March. The highlight, though, was seeing them close with Slave Ambient standout "Your Love Is Calling My Name," a less common inclusion in recent sets that has grown into a bleeding Spiritualized-esque experience. With fleshed-out ranks after the addition of two touring members, the band simply sounds bigger, ready to continue that upward trajectory that last year ignited. In a few years, they could be headlining this thing.

Jamie xx

While it seemed a little out of place and something of a missed opportunity to have Jamie xx playing in the evening instead of at like, 2 AM, his was still one of the more exciting sets of the whole weekend. Having just recently released his solo album In Colour, one of the year's best albums, Jamie xx had a wealth of strong material to bring to a live show, but it remained to be seen what a solo electronic set from him would look like. The flow of it all was perfect: dropping in In Colour highlights like "Gosh" and "Sleep Sound," then blending them in or out of extended, straight house passages. Occasionally, one section would bleed into one of the songs, like when he placed "Loud Places" -- one of the best songs of the year -- over a more hyperactive beat than its album counterpart. There was something perfectly woozy and trance-inducing about seeing this stuff play out in the thick of Tennessee's daytime humidity, even if it was tempting to imagine the experience going on forever into the final hours of the night instead.

My Morning Jacket

This is a home turf for My Morning Jacket. Having seen the band eighteen times preceding this, it still felt like a pilgrimage of sorts -- it might not be their legendary midnight set from 2008, but I was about to finally see this band at Bonnaroo, and there's some history there. Given the context, my assumption was that MMJ would get a little weirder than they did at Governors Ball last weekend. That set was essentially new songs mixed in with MMJ greatest hits, which is perfect for a festival set, but since this was a specific festival set, some deep cuts and some of their sometimes-batshit-always-fun covers seemed like a given. Well, the set was nearly identical to the one they played at Governors Ball; the only changes I noticed were "I'm Amazed" instead of "Big Decisions," "Dondante" instead of "Steam Engine," "Off The Record," and the second half of "Run Thru" tagged onto "Evil Urges." Given that we were at Bonnaroo, it was a little surprising they didn't go deeper into their catalog. (For example, there weren't any songs from The Tennessee Fire or At Dawn, material that would've played fine for a festival crowd here where, presumably, it might've not connected as much at Governors Ball.) But anyway, all that being said -- there is no such thing as a bad MMJ show, or even a MMJ that is anything short of great. This year's Bonnaroo set might've been short on surprises, but that didn't mean it wasn't totally enthralling and exhilarating anyway. These guys are never not at the top of the game, all led by Jim James, one of the true great rock frontmen of this century. New additions like "Compound Fracture," "Spring (Among The Living)," and "Tropics (Erase Traces)" continue to deliver on the promise of their album versions -- that they'd be stunning inclusions in the MMJ live canon. Meanwhile, there's still little else that compares to seeing a field of people react to the pulsing jam from the middle of "Run Thru," the earth-and-dancefloor-shaking climax of "Touch Me, I'm Going To Scream, Pt. 2," or, of course, everything that happens during "One Big Holiday."

Mumford & Sons

Even after nightfall, it was pretty humid at the Farm last night, and easy to keep a perpetual sweat going if you moved too quickly between stages. Lucky for me, I found this nice little alcove backstage where I sat in an air-conditioned tent and had a Coke. Then I went back out into the festival grounds and found a stand that sold jambalaya and fried alligator tail. I mean, I know we're in the South and all, but that's still pretty cool for a festival. So I had a fried alligator tail sandwich with some kind of horseradish/mustard sauce. It kinda took a while to eat due to its spiciness, but it was very good.

D'Angelo And The Vanguard

D'Angelo's set was supposed to be from 2-3:30 AM, but at some point yesterday the schedule got moved up. He'd be on at 1, which meant Slayer got moved up all the way to 10 PM from their initial slot of midnight, which sucked because by the time I found this out, it was too late to catch much of anything of Slayer. Even after being moved up an hour, D'Angelo came on almost forty minutes late, which seems about right. This is D'Angelo: It still sort of feels like an unreality of sorts, a small-time miracle, or at the very least an Event, that this guy shows up onstage in front of you at all in 2015. You cultivate a certain kind of gravitas when you disappear for a very long time and then, after forever but out of nowhere, you drop one of the most acclaimed records of 2014. And standing on a stage too small for his mystique, D'Angelo cultivated that charisma last night, playing to a crowd smaller than that which bled out from the SuperJam a tent over, but was still packed in, paying rapt attention to every sinewy groove he and his band cranked out. (That band, the Vanguard, is incredibly tight, by the way.) D'Angelo swapped between a few incredible outfits over the night -- winding up in a kind of high-fashion poncho that was black with white trim, a black hat, and black leather fingerless gloves. He didn't look like anyone else on this planet, and for most of the night he didn't sound like anyone else, either. It might not have been as worldview-shaking/-reorienting as seeing Nick Cave in the same place at the same time on Saturday night at last year's Bonnaroo, but it was its own singular experience, too, a redemptive late-night set for a day of Bonnaroo plagued by a dud of a headliner.