The Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival is a uniquely beautiful expression of humanity. On one hand, you’ve got 75,000 fans coming together on remote, traffic-choked Southern California roads to converge on a complex of polo fields to take in music on five mammoth stages. On the other, there’s the music itself, and Coachella — situated right outside Palm Springs — is the pre-eminent festival of indie-minded music in North America.
The Post’s music blog, Reverb, covered Coachella via three live dispatches from the desert — complete with near-comprehensive photo essays by Reverb shooter Joe McCabe. Here are some of those memories and pictures from last weekend’s sold-out festival. For more, check out .
Day 1
Massachusetts’ Passion Pit is built on singer Michael Angelakos’ freaky falsetto, and the band played a lively, fun set that peaked early with “The Reeling” and “Moth’s Wings” before closing with the obvious “Sleepyhead.”
Them Crooked Vultures later rocked the festival’s main stage with a strong and steady, if predictable, set of Queens of the Stone Age- sounding rock. But LCD Soundsystem brought the party with a night-defining, full-band set that highlighted its new jams from “This Is Happening,” coming out May 18.
Fever Ray, the much-hyped Swedish artist Karin Dreijer Andersson (formerly of the Knife), gave us one of the day’s most memorable sets — a heavy-handed mixture of sweeping, gothic-laced electronic music and dramatic, if vague and poorly lit, costume action.
Day 2
As Aterciopelados frontwoman Andrea Echeverri guided her sprawling band into a set that was surprisingly upbeat — ideal for the festival atmosphere — the crowd paid her back with a dance party that rivaled the one going on a few hundred feet away at the MGMT show.
Muse’s headlining set on the main stage was as bombastic (and over- the-top) as you’d expect, with big sound, mountainous rock hooks and the most complicated lighting rig of the entire festival.
The day’s best set came from Jack White, Allison Mosshart and their deafening group, the Dead Weather. The combination of White and Mosshart is a beautiful, debauched thing, and their older songs — “I Cut Like a Buffalo” included — nicely brought them into the new material that fill “Sea of Cowards,” their second full-length, due out May 11.
Day 3
We got to the festival grounds as the sun was reaching its peak for the Los Angeles act Local Natives, who filled a tent with pop-kissed indie- rock sweetness that lasted the entire 45 minutes. From the familiar, melodic guitars of “Wide Eyes” to the affable harmonies of “Airplanes,” Local Natives gave the giddy, sun-soaked crowd a reason to move and get even more sweaty.
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke closed one of the stages with a lively, full-on set of songs that spanned his solo record, “The Eraser,” along with a few Radiohead tunes thrown in for good measure — including a transcendent “Everything in Its Right Place.”
But when Gorillaz took to the stage to the tune of “Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach,” the Snoop Dogg track off their latest LP, it was clear who the day’s draw was for many. Snoop represented via music video on the mammoth screen behind frontman Damon Albarn and the rest of his group, which included Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of the Clash. The band played the instruments live out front — and not behind a screen, as they have in the past.
Ricardo Baca: 303-954-1394 or rbaca@denverpost.com; Twitter @RVRB
