Saw both weekends this year, all six days, start to finish, except for Sunday week 2 after 8pm.
Of course, the big discussion this year will undoubtedly focus on the overwhelming influx of EDM-only fans among the attendees and what that portends for the future booking of more rock-oriented acts, but for this non-EDM fan, there was still enough great rock, rap, metal, pop, indie, smart electronica, and soul to make for a highly satisfying Coachella experience.
Performance were consistently solid all week long, really have to get to bottom 10 of my list before we're talking about "bad" performances...but there were no legendary sets this year (the first Coachella I've attended where I have made that claim), and the little guys consistently out-performed or out-charmed the big dogs this year. If you skipped the early hours in 2014, you missed a lot of the best stuff.
Here's my combined Week 1/Week 2 ranking of every act I caught for at least a couple tracks.
Apologies to Crosses, Bastille,The Head and the Heart, Solange, Warpaint, The Naked & Famous, The Dismemberment Plan, Little Dragon, and Factory Floor, whom I just didn't see enough of this year to include in this ranking.
http://www.ranker.com/list/coachella-2014-ranked/david-mcquillen,
Beck Hansen
After Bo Ningen, I start to have quibbles with the rest of the performances, though most were still excellent.
Beck was by far my favorite of the big name main stage evening sets.
He sings an octave or two higher live than he does on record, which took some adjusting to, and his band, though lively, felt a touch loose...but he remains one of the best songwriters of the last twenty years, and his set list was fantastic...culling a top track from almost every album in his discography.
Tons of fun, but no artist is greater than the Coachella timekeepers in this era...and when they pulled the plug on him for running three minutes, he and his band treated the audience to a spontaneous, defiant side shuffle dance before exiting triumphantly.
Bryan Ferry
Fantastic set, full of deep cuts from the early Roxy days, great backing band led by a tremendous guitarist and a female saxophonist who just crushed those old Andy Mackay brass lines. Multiple tracks from Siren, always my personal favorite of Roxy's albums, and the band's rendition of Avalon - to die for!
Frank Turner
Simple rowdy UK pub-rock performed magnificently...best start to finish flow of any set I saw. The band's energy was off the charts, as was crowd's energy, and Turner proved to another in that long line of wonderful, verbally sharp UK front men, witty and warm with his between song banter but never overstaying his welcome.
The Knife
Without question the most bizarre set of the weekend (with really only GOAT and Pet Shop Boys challenging), The Knife's long awaited, heavily and amateurishly choreographed set often felt more like Blue Man Group-styled performance art than an actual concert (the band only played 4 or 5 songs live, the rest of the show the leisure suited-act just danced and aerobicized to pre-recorded numbers), but at the end of the day, it remains one of my most vivid Coachella 2014 experiences...odd, often goofy, but unique. A show I'll remember for the rest of my life, and one that reminded me what a great freakin' album 2006's Silent Shout is.
Be sure to check out some youtube videos for this one.
The Replacements
Crazy, crazy, imperfect set, but much fun, so spontaneous. Westerberg blew out his back, seemed heavily medicated, and performed vast portions of show from a couch whilst Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong filled in, taking lead vocals on three songs and trying to keep up with chord changes on the rest. At times it was an absolute mess...but the banter was hysterical, and when the band hit Bastards of Young, Left of the Dial, and Alex Chilton late - the best stuff I heard all weekend outside of Future Islands.
Future Islands
When I first saw Future Islands' name on this year's poster, I thought to myself, "Better late than never." This was a band that should have been on line-up a couple years earlier.
But then their awesome new album Singles dropped. So guess what, PaulTollett timed it just right!
The band - absolute road warriors the last half-decade, couldn't have been more on their game, and the middle stretch of show - from In Evening's Air's Tin Man into the first four tracks from Singles was easily the most spectacular 20 minutes I saw either weekend (went to their show both times)...the most impassioned performance of the festival, all in service of wonderful songs. Festival goers this summer - DO NOT MISS THIS BAND!
Bo Ningen
As I said in my festival summary, if you slept in in 2014, you missed out...and no miss was bigger than Japanese metal/shoegaze/noise act Bo Ningen.
Small, slender, with waist length hair and adorned in eastern robes, they were the very picture of androgyny as they took the stage and politely introduced themselves. What came next was anything but polite...a massive, propulsive, impossible to pin down but intoxicating wall of noise. Extremely fluid, their three long songs shifted between moments of metal, noise, shoegaze, prog, and punk effortlessly...all at peak volume.
One of the best early day sets I've ever caught at the festival. An absolute surprise!
Jagwar Ma
Another of the exciting live/electronic mergists rating high on my list, Jagwar Ma has a wildly different, far more playful sound than DARKSIDE...combining the massive bass drops of mainstream EDM w/ the paisley psychedelia of the late 80s Madchester rave scene.
The result is a pop-dance synergy that's near impossible to resist...for a while. Loved the first thirty minutes of this set...last fifteen, where it felt like the band began relying more exclusively on simple EDM bass drops to keep things going, started to bore...but overall, still one of my favorites of either week.
DARKSIDE Week 1
I love electronic music, but make no mistake, I'm a rock 'n' roll fan first.
But this set from DARKSIDE, a due composed of experimental dance producer Nicholas Jarr and guitarist Dave Harrington, proved I shouldn't have to chose. The top performance from a number of acts that suggested the real excitement in electronic music right now is in the merge with live instrumentation...their late Saturday set was a masterpiece of mood, only elevated by the horrible dust storm raging outside the tent.
No set either weekend moved from passages of extreme quiet to overwhelming volume better.
GOAT - Week 1
One of my favorite acts coming in, I actually had the pleasure of meeting the mysterious, masked members of Swedish psych-rock/world music jam band GOAT in their unmasked alter-ego for the night before as they were sound checking at the legendary Pappy & Harriet's.
We didn't stay for that set (we caught The Afghan Whigs earlier outdoor set, then headed home), but couldn't have been happier with the GOAT set we saw early Friday.
The closest approximation to an old school Woodstock band out there, Goat raged through a number of awesome Santana/Hendrix/Ten Years After-esque jams. I do feel they need to add a real vocalist, aside from just their lively, chanting chanteuses, to take their music to the next level...but man does this band deliver the goods in the funky psychedelia department. So much fun.