I guess you could call my relationship with Coachella an obsession at this point. I’ve made the trek out to Indio, California four out of the last five years, and I spend the months leading up to the festival on the message boards trolling for rumors about who might be the next band added to the lineup. The music is always fantastic and is the primary reason to go, but there’s something slightly magical about Coachella that sets it apart from the other festivals out there. Perhaps it’s because it signals the start of the summer months, or because of the breathtaking scenery, or the smiles plastered on everyone’s faces for three straight days, but there’s a sort of incredible energy that lingers in the air all weekend long. It’s something you have to experience to understand, as my cheesy clichés do it no justice, and it makes Coachella the undisputed champion of American festivals. Now, onto the music:

The Good:

Roger Waters’ festival-closing set was a dream come true for anyone who has ever had a Pink Floyd phase of their lives (which probably came between the ages of 15 and 18). It featured surround sound, incredibly intricate videos, giant flames, fireworks, explosions, lasers and a monstrous inflatable pig. Oh, and he played some songs too. The set opened with a slew of Floyd hits, with a couple of Waters’ solo tunes mixed in, and after a short break was followed by Dark Side of the Moon played in its entirety. The encore of “Another Brick in the Wall” and “Comfortably Numb” was the perfect end to a perfect weekend.

Man Man’s Saturday afternoon set was one of the highlights of the festival’s best day. I was blown away when I first saw these guys about a year ago, and this show put that one to shame. Honus Honus and company banged, screamed, jumped and threw stuff around in what could best be described as organized chaos. Amazingly though, with all the insanity happening onstage, they always manage to hold the songs together and make them sound damn good. If you haven’t seen this band live, go NOW!

Goldfrapp’s newest album is a bit of a downer, so I was worried about what their live show might bring, but as soon as they took the stage I knew that all of my worrying was for naught. Maya Goldfrapp is about as transfixing a performer as exists in music today. Even battling technical difficulties, she managed to have the crowd eating out of her hands in a set that mixed old hits like “#1” with the newer, slower numbers. There was even a slowed-down, slightly countrified version of “Ooh La La,” which might sound awful on paper, but was incredible to behold.

The Verve’s Urban Hymns will forever hold a place in my heart, so this is a band I’ve been wanting to see live since before they ever broke up. After 10 years of waiting, they did not disappoint and definitely didn’t seem like a band playing a reunion show. They were locked in and sounded fantastic. Richard Ashcroft looked like he hasn’t aged a day and guitarist Nick McCabe created awesome shoegaze-y walls of sound on nearly every song, giving them a little extra oomph. The fact that the setlist drew heavily from Hymns didn’t hurt either.

“Wow” is the easiest way to describe Portishead’s Saturday evening set. I stood transfixed for a full hour, unable to move or look away as Beth Gibbons’ transcendent voice washed over me. As the dark, haunting music pulsed around me, I felt transported to another world. Their setlist was a fantastic mix of songs from their excellent new album, Third, and their old hits, primarily from Dummy. My only complaint (and it’s an oh-so-minor one) is that they didn’t play “Only You,” which was the song that really turned me onto the band.

With one short, hour long set My Morning Jacket showed that they just might be the “Next Great American Band.” Jim James and his boys blasted through a set that was light on the jamming and heavy on the new songs. The setlist drew mostly from the upcoming Evil Urges and the fantastic Z and left out most of the back catalog. These guys skip the gimmicks and go straight to the rock, and monstrous guitar solos were flying left and right. James’ incredible, unique voice and his gigantic stage presence are quickly turning him into one of music’s best frontmen.

I’m From Barcelona channeled both The Polyphonic Spree and The Flaming Lips in their grin-inducing Sunday afternoon set. The 16-or-so member group got the audience going with massive balloons, handclaps, singalongs and choreographed dances. When so many people onstage have so much energy and look like they’re having such a good time, it’s nearly impossible not to get sucked in, especially when they’re playing outrageously catchy pop songs.

Also putting on excellent shows were Kraftwerk, Jens Lekman, Midnight Juggernauts, The Black Lips, The Teenagers, Bonde do Role (with their two new frontwomen), Stars and the Shout Out Louds.

The Bad:

MGMT and Does It Offend You, Yeah? suffered similar fates on Saturday and Sunday afternoon respectively. Neither band has enough good songs to keep an audience interested for a full set, and instead of distributing their singles evenly throughout their sets, they saved them for the end. Unfortunately by the time MGMT got around to “Time to Pretend” and DIOYY played “We Are Rockstars,” half of their crowds had lost interest and moved on. I was especially shocked by just how boring the first half of MGMT’s set was.

The Breeders’ set was perhaps the biggest disappointment of the weekend for me. Their sound was terrible and they didn’t seem to care, screwing up left and right and laughing about it. I figured at least their classic songs would have to be good, but even my favorite Breeders song, “One Divine Hammer” sounded horrible and I couldn’t bear to continue watching. I had to leave halfway through as to not further taint their image in my mind.

I really had no idea what to expect from Aphex Twin, but it was certainly not an hour-long DJ set comprised mostly of bland drum & bass while Richard Dean James sat in a chair and didn’t look up once. I love his older material, but he didn’t play any of it, and while he’s an excellent DJ, the set just had very little life to it.

Battles, another set I was really looking forward to, came out extremely flat in the first half of their set and managed to lose a good chunk of their crowd to the neighboring Black Kids. Things were finally starting to pick up when they played “Tonto” and “Atlas” back-to-back, but instead of riding that momentum into another rocker, they decided to inexplicably end their set ten minutes early.

Sound problems plagued the medium-sized Mojave Tent all weekend long. I saw the Black Kids, Goldfrapp and Spiritualized all get bogged down by sound issues to varying degrees. Saturday evening, start-time was delayed by over a half an hour, seemingly an insignificant event, except that it forced me to miss Islands, a show I was really looking forward to, later in the evening, as their start time was pushed back to conflict with Kraftwerk.

The Sahara (dance) Tent used to be home to just DJs, but in the last few years, bigger, non-DJ acts have started to play in Coachella’s largest tent. This year Hot Chip and M.I.A. played there with decidedly mixed results. These acts brought entirely too many people into what quickly became oppressively hot, crowded messes. Paramedics had to be called in during the M.I.A. show due to people getting crushed and passing out, and apparently Justice, who closed the festival, was as bad, if not worse. While the light shows and sound may have been fantastic, these acts either need to be on bigger stages or have other interesting acts playing at the same time to keep the crowds under control in the future.

The Purple:

It was pretty funny how the buzz about this year’s Coachella lineup went from “worst lineup ever” when it first came out to “this is an amazing lineup” after Prince was added a mere three weeks before the festival. The Purple One did not disappoint.

His set opened with Morris Day coming out and doing “The Bird” and “Jungle Love,” highlighted by some fantastic dance moves. Next, Sheila E. joined her former band mate for “Glamorous Life” and an instrumental that featured some incredible drumming by Ms. E. Next came the hits, including “1999,” “Cream,” “You Got the Look,” and a slowed-down, mellow version of “Little Red Corvette.” The next thing I knew, Prince was bringing down the house with a cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” and everyone was losing their minds.

The show featured no videos or fancy lightshow and felt more like a party with friends than a concert for 60,000 people. Prince clearly didn’t want to things to end and could be seen pleading with the bigwigs before returning from a brief encore to play an abbreviated version of “Purple Rain” and a sped-up rendition of “Let’s Go Crazy” which finished just in time for him to get off the stage by 1AM. Prince told us that Coachella was the “coolest place on earth,” and hell, if he says it, it must be true. I’m not arguing, and I’ll be back again next year.

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