The original idea was to limit my day to Saul Williams, Love & Rockets and Nine Inch Nails, but even after stopping at the bar after my 10am soccer match -- yes, I managed to play soccer for an hour in the morning in the midst of all of this walking and standing, and I played pretty darn well, actually -- I was ready to go a bit earlier.

Nelson Faulkner
So, with two extra hours of festival to fill, I paged through the guide book and realized I had seen Faulkner on London Live, and the comparisons in said guide book to Jack Johnson are totally unfair, because they completely miss all the percussive elements to his playing style, which is more reminiscent of Michael Hedges, Kaki King and Stuart Davis. I'm totally a sucker for that shit, so I loved it. His self-effacing banter was pretty engaging as well, and he closed things out with a solo acoustic (!) version of "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Amadou & Miriam
I was still planning the low-impact afternoon, so I grabbed a good beer and a seat over in the beer garden. They had two big screens showing the main acts that were on at the time, which were Chromeo and Amadou & Miriam. They had the sound up for Chromeo, which was unfortunate, because they kinda sucked. The other screen looked much more interesting, so I hoofed it over to the Petrillo Music Shell, where Amadou & Miriam were proffering some silky smooth and totally infectious Afropop. I probably ended up catching only the last fifteen or twenty minutes, and while I probably could have seen twice that much had I not been dawdling, it was enough to put a huge smile on my face.

Eli "Paperboy" Reed & The True Loves
To the uninitiated, this would seem like some pretty smooth retro funk and soul, but this is one of those cases where they suffered greatly from comparison to Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings from the previous day. They weren't even on the same playing field.

Saul Williams
I had heard so much about Williams, that I wanted to get in pretty close for the set, and made the mistake of starting conversations with the evening's dilemma of Kanye vs. NIN. Seeing as how Trent Reznor produced the most recent Saul Williams record, it was pretty much no contest. The set suffered a bit from sound problems early on, and Williams' vocals were hard to make out for at least the first fifteen minutes or so, which is problematic for someone who is so often described as a "street poet." Some of the spoken word stuff between songs still came through, and then there was one tune that started out with a spang-spang-a-lang jazz beat that flipped into a reggae/dancehall thing for the choruses that was awfully cool. Still, I had this conflicting reaction of thinking the band was pretty good, but not really doing it for me. A friend had been so enthusiastic about Flogging Molly that I figured I could sort of catch two-thirds of the set from each of them if I hustled.

Flogging Molly
The recurring theme on Sunday was bands I wasn't planning on seeing putting huge smiles on my face, with Flogging Molly being the third instance. The relentless combination of traditional Irish music and punk rock produced what seemed to be the friendliest moshing and crowd surfing of the weekend, at least that I saw. The band is just fun, and I actually prefer them to The Pogues as a live act, because of that absolute breakneck pace.

Love & Rockets
Then it was time to pick a spot for Nine Inch Nails and wait. Unfortunately, that meant enduring Love & Rockets. They just sucked. Hard. Daniel Ash's twelve-string was painfully out of tune on "No New Tale To Tell," but that's just the tip of the iceberg. There's nothing quite so painful as watching a band that's time has passed not realize it at all, and Daniel Ash clearly has no self-awareness whatsoever, given his misplaced onstage swagger. Then, these three sort of marshmallow men came out during the last tune, and I'm still trying to figure out what that was all about.

Nine Inch Nails
Wow. Just wow. I had never seen Trent Reznor live before, so I didn't entirely know what to expect. This wasn't just a rock show, this was a spectacle, on par with classic Pink Floyd or modern Flaming Lips, and even the latter is more of just a bizarre party. Nine Inch Nails was a machine, and the visuals were absolutely stunning.

I had the good fortune of staking out a spot next to a guy who had seen upwards of 70 Nine Inch Nails shows, which provided some interesting context from time to time. At one point, he asked if I had ever done acid, and went on to tell me that the next bit with the lights was as close as I would come without actually partaking in said substance.

Some reviews have complained about a lull during the instrumental material from Ghosts I-IV, but that's where the big screens may have actually done a disservice to the crowd. I had a pretty perfect spot to watch -- about two-thirds of the way between the stage and the sound board, dead center -- and it was the big picture of the whole stage that was commanding attention during those passages, not the close-ups that they were showing to the masses that were gathered further back. I didn't feel that the momentum let up at all, but I like quiet, intense instrumentals more than the average music fan.

Then, of course, there were the jackhammer beats and searing riffs on the heavier stuff, with the ubiquitous Josh Freese holding things down like a rock. A very heavy rock with impeccable time. I thought there was even one tune where he added a bit of swing, opening up the pocket in ways I wouldn't have expected on a Nine Inch Nails tune, although I don't remember which one it was.

By the time I was able to take myself out of the moment and see how much time had passed, it was already well past the hour mark and almost at the end of the regular set. I can quibble a bit about still not really liking "The Hand That Feeds" as one of the last songs before the encore, but "Hurt" erased any qualms I might have had. This was, flat-out, one of the best shows I've ever seen. Somewhere in the top five, but I'm not entirely sure where. A great end to the weekend that just left me in awe for quite some time.

Bands I would have liked to have seen: Office, The National

Much easier getting in on Saturday. Interesting to note that my AT&T service seemed to be working better from the time when I arrived up until about 3pm, which is where the crowd must have reached critical mass and jammed up the data network.

The Ting Tings
Massively entertaining set from yet another duo, with yet more backing tracks. I've seen Kate White be accused of not actually playing her guitar, but didn't see any evidence that this was the case. Were there more guitar parts than what she was playing? Sure, but she seemed to be contributing. Otherwise they would have only had to tape down the volume knobs and not the pickup switches. My one quibble -- and it's a smaller quibble than you would think given the particular complaint -- isn't that Kate White can't play guitar, it's that she can't sing. Most of the vocals are more sing-song talking/shouting, and the one time she tried carrying a tune on the title track from We Started Nothing, it sounded pretty terrible. That being the case, the set was short enough that the vocal stylings never got annoying, and again, the songs were pretty damn infectious. I turned one of them into a soccer cheer for the Fire, but more on that elsewhere.

Dr. Dog
My biggest problem with these guys is that the lead guitarist/vocalist seemed to spend more time on his impeccably retro look than he did on his guitar tone. I've seen other coverage bemoan the sound mix for these guys, but I don't think it was the fault of the front of house guys. Some of the tunes were engaging in that sorta bland, jangly indie pop way, but overall, nothing to write home about. This band did, however, inspire me to coin the notion of the "hipping point," which is the point at which a hipster combines so many different ironic elements to their style that they look utterly ridiculous, exemplified by Dr. Dog's drummer sporting what looked like a train engineer's hat, a handlebar mustache, and a sleeveless Journey concert t-shirt.

Ferras
I did technically see this band, but it was only about half of their last tune. Cute blonde playing guitar stage left, but that's pretty much all I've got.

The Gutter Twins
These guys, on the other hand, know guitar tone. A wonderful, if somewhat incongruous in the bright sunlight, set from Mark Lanegan and Greg Dulli. The common theme I've seen in the reviews is just how evocative their music is. I think DeRogatis said they sounded like a whiskey-soaked NYC alley at 3 in the morning, but to my ears, it's more of a desolate, western highway at about the same time. I think "desolate" is the operative word here, but the music isn't as depressing as that would make it sound. The songs were well-written and well-played by a band that knew what it was doing. All of which reinforced the notion that Saturnalia will be somewhere at the top of my list of favorite albums at the end of the year.

MGMT
I had gotten a heads up from a friend that this indie buzz band wasn't quite as good live as they are on record, and I have to say, he was right. I saw an online review of this set point out that without the studio production, they sound like 10cc or maybe the Alan Parsons Project, but the name that came up in our group was Supertramp. Kudos for an indie rock band that actually has guitar solos in songs, though.

Booka Shade
Caught about five or ten minutes of the electronica duo in transition. Not really my thing even late at night in a dark club, let alone at 4pm in the afternoon.

DeVotchKa
Not being terribly impressed with MGMT, we headed north and caught maybe the last 15 or 20 minutes of DeVotchKa. Or maybe we stumbled into a Jewish wedding. It was kind of hard to tell, and I mean that in the best possible way. Lots of exotic instrumentation, and a female sousaphone player, which is something you don't see every day. With a bit of that gypsy vibe, I had to wonder if the band suffered from playing a day after Gogol Bordello, who may not have set the bar higher as much as in an entirely different ZIP code.

Explosions In The Sky
Sometimes I catch myself thinking I know enough about music to go into one of these festivals without reading any previews, and almost always regret it. This time I prepared myself enough to have seen this band mentioned several times, and I was rewarded with a wonderful set of expansive, atmospheric instrumentals along the lines of bands like Mogwai. Some friends and I just sat out on the grass and let the waves of crescendoing, reverb-drenched guitars wash over us. When you consider that the temperatures Saturday were much more reasonable than on Friday, this made for one of the more serene moments of the weekend.

Jamie Lidell
Then it was back to the south end of the park to catch just a bit of Jamie Lidell, who I had confused with Jason Collett for some reason. Totally different people. Collett is Canadian, and Lidell is the one who loops the crap out of his voice in real-time, which he balanced out with songs backed by a full, if somewhat oddly dressed, band.

Battles
I was really looking forward to the hyperactive math rock of former Helmet drummer John Stanier and his bandmates, but I absolutely could not get my head around it. I've seen a lot of breathless reviews of their set, and I feel like these people must have been on a different planet. Maybe I was too close to the stage, so that I couldn't hear the parts mesh together. Maybe I have to be in a certain frame of mind for that kind of crazy busy playing. It's not like I didn't know what I was getting into. I have the record. I like the record. Live, it just absolutely didn't work for me.

Broken Social Scene
After only lasting about fifteen minutes at the Citi stage, it was back to the north side of the park to catch some of the catchy Canadian collective and their indie rock stylings. I get the sense that I'd enjoy them more if I knew their material a bit better.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings
Had I not soured on Battles, I might have stayed on the other end of the park and camped out for Rage, but seeing Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings made me glad I ended up where I did. Classic, old-school soul, complete with the backup band starting out on their own before Jones made her entrance. After soaking up the soul for about a half-hour, I just had this big, stupid grin on my face.

Rage Against The Machine
I started out almost all the way house right back behind the soundboard, then edged a bit forward for the opening of the set, pretty far away from the maelstrom right up front Even so, there was this intense surge of bodies pushing away from the stage, either a result of the gate crashers on the west side of the park, or from the birth of a mosh pit up and to my left that required the displacement of at least a hundred people. After that happened, I was able to get about even with the front of the sound board, still way over to house right.

The show was incendiary, with the band alternately exhorting the crowd to rise up, then asking them nicely to stand back. Everyone talks about Tom Morello and his arsenal of weird noises from his guitars, but holy crap, that rhythm section is an absolute beast. Brad Wilk may be the second coming of John Bonham, he's simply that powerful and that totally spot-on in creating a pocket. This was probably the farthest away that I was for a set, and I still managed to get one or two mostly non-blurry pictures.

Bands I would have liked to have seen: Does It Offend You, Yeah?, Foals, Wilco

Here we go again. While I didn't make it to see The Raconteurs, their new album, Consolers of the Lonely, could have been an overarching theme. Flying solo for this festival this year felt weird. Yes, I could go see what I wanted when I wanted, but that doesn't mean I had to like it.

Yeasayer
I was hoping to get through the gates in time to see Rogue Wave, but a last-minute meeting and a 75-minute wait made that impossible. As it was, I only caught about half of Yeasayer's set, and it was a good start to the weekend. The downside of being the first band is that I really don't remember all that much, other than that I enjoyed them. I recall liking the range of textures and sounds coming from both the lead guitarist and the drummer, who was relying heavily on a Roland SPD-S. This may or may not inspire me to finally figure mine out.

Louis XIV
Reminded me a lot of Jet, in that they're mining a certain AC/DC vibe, although there was also a bit of a mid- to late-80s metal vibe. Just without the spandex trappings and the balls-in-a-vise singing. In the end, they didn't hold my attention, so I skedaddled down the hill to the MySpace stage about halfway through.

The Kills
I've seen this slashing-guitar-and-vocals-over-programming duo before, and they ushered in what seemed like a lot of acts relying heavily on backing tracks. At this point, the heat was really bad, and you could tell the band was feeling it, resulting in another emerging trend of ending sets just a bit early.

The Black Keys
The second duo of the day, and I still don't get the rabid appeal. Of the Black Keys, not duos in general. I guess it has to do with the ferocity of their playing, but someone pointed out at some point during the weekend that it almost seems like you're watching these guys jam in their garage. I'm not going to remember anything about any of the actual songs they were playing.

Cat Power
Another performer that lots of people get excited about, but was a bit underwhelming to me. Competent, yes, but not terribly gripping. Some of this may have been unfair comparisons to female indie-pop-ish singers I've seen on the same stage in years past, particularly Feist and Dresden Dolls. It could have been the heat at this point, along with the unfamiliarity with her work, but it didn't resonate, and the bigger picture here is that I could have just parked it at the AT&T stage for Radiohead and not really missed that much.

Bloc Party
The last time I saw this band -- the same show where I saw The Kills, I think -- I was really disappointed with the drummer, so I was pleased to note that his time, while still not great, was much improved. I liked how they got the crowd to do the intro to "Price of Gas," which sounds more like boots marching on the record. And while I've seen others deride the new single "Mercury," it kind of grew on me by the end: I liked the syncopated beat at the beginning and the way the vocals were being manipulated and looped. They seemed to do more material from Silent Alarm than Weekend in the City, or it may have just seemed that way since I don't actually have the latter album. Overall, I don't care if all the angular guitars are lifted from Gang of Four, I still dig the tunes.

Radiohead
I was talking to this guy next to me who proclaimed to be a huge Radiohead fan, and then went on to postulate that they might open the show with "14 Step." Missed it by that much, as they opened with "15 Step." The first two times I saw this band, I think I was pretty captivated by the Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood, but this time, it was utility infielder Colin Greenwood and the impeccable rhythm section of Phil Selway and Ed O'Brien that really impressed me. I was excited when they ripped into "The Bends," even if the tempo seemed a bit slow, and Yorke got a bit yelpy at the end -- his vocal style seems to have evolved since that song was recorded, and it might not quite fit as well as it used to. But still, come on, "The Bends"! Accompanied by fireworks!

It's almost a downside of having seen Radiohead two times before, because while songs like "The National Anthem" and "Paranoid Android" were still amazing, they didn't carry that "oh my God, I can't believe what I'm seeing/hearing" novelty. Having context is a bitch sometimes, but then again, "Bodysnatchers" as a set closer still packed a wallop. At the end, Yorke asked if we were all still out there, because we were so quiet, but he hadn't been standing out in the heat for eight hours straight.

The strong start and strong finish to the day more than made up for the lull in the middle, which was also buoyed by my discovery of the chicken tamales at the Adobo Grill tent.

Bands I would liked to have seen: Rogue Wave, The Enemy UK, The Go! Team, Gogol Bordello, CSS