The Firefly Music Festival buzzed into Dover, Delaware for its second year, bringing along the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Petty, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Vampire Weekend, Kendrick Lamar, and its own Dogfish Head pale ale. We spent our weekend in the Woodlands and here’s the best of what we witnessed.
Best Back-to-Basics Moment: ELLIE GOULDING
Forget the fireworks: Sometimes a great festival performance just means a lovely song, a committed singer, and a willing audience. In the middle of her sparkling early evening set on Friday, English singer Ellie Goulding momentarily retreated from her blooming dance-pop for a cover of Elton John’s torch ballad “Your Song.” Accompanied solely by a pianist, Goulding’s voice swooped and fluttered as she clutched her hand to her forehead and, in time, the audience crooned the song’s chorus back at her. It was a lovely, simple moment, and evidence that even at a massive outdoor festival, a performer doesn’t need pyro to win over a crowd. Though she did prove she was capable of moving the fest crowd in a more traditional manner when the airy-voiced, boundlessly energetic Goulding closed her set with a jaunt through her hits “Anything Could Happen,” the Calvin Harris-collabo “I Need Your Love,” and “Lights.”
Best Case of EDM Overkill: CALVIN HARRIS
It was hard to actually see Calvin Harris perched atop his giant console on Friday night, but everything else the Scottish DJ/producer/hitmaker had going on suggested that his physical presence was a bit beside the point. The point? Glowing pseudo-futuristic light projections, jets of smoke, multi-colored strobes, and his own hysteria-inducing dance anthems — “We Found Love,” “Flashback,” “Dance Wiv Me,” a seamless neon string of drops and hooks threaded in between the assaultive battery of effects. Seachlights shot out into the glow stick-wielding crowd, purple pyramids, chevrons, and Millenium Falcon-going-hyperdrive beams were projected onto a screen behind the stage — fitting because the show was like watching George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic explode in front of your eyes. Sure, maybe by the 19th time smoke bombs went off in sync with one of Harris’ drops, the impact wasn’t overwhelming, but then again, we weren’t on anything.
Best Percussion: DJANGO DJANGO
During their early-afternoon set on Friday, the much-ballyhooed, jazzily named British quartet Django Django used an impressive plethora of percussion equipment to spice up their propulsive art-rock. We recognized tambourines, cowbells, shakers, wood blocks, and a halved coconut. We didn’t recognize another half-dozen sproinging, chukka chukka-ing whirligigs and gewgaws. Whatever those instruments were, the band used them to playfully funky effect. Vaguely Beta Band-esque tunes like “Firewater” and “Skies Over Cairo” would charge forward on surf-guitar lines and incantatory melody, tense and coiled, and then… boi-oi-oi-oi-ing! Django Django’s percussion was cartoonish, colorful, and so much fun, nicely undercutting the music’s artier inclinations.
Best Build-Ups: THE JOY FORMIDABLE
There isn’t much cool about the Joy Formidable. Playing before a small-ish crowd on Friday evening at the hidden-away Backyard Stage, the Welsh alt-rockers were dressed like young teachers: singer-guitarist Ritzy Bryan was wearing a floral sun dress and black leggings, bassist Rhydian Dafydd tucked his collared shirt into his jeans, and drummer Matthew Thomas, was, well, we couldn’t actually see him from where we were standing, but we bet he wasn’t wearing anything fancy. The band’s music wasn’t at all polite, though. On melodic maelstroms like “This Ladder is Ours” and “Little Blimp” from January’s Wolf’s Law, and the epic “Cradle” from 2011’s The Big Roar, the band would start with grungy bass and guitar riffs, send them whirring around Bryan’s ethereal vocals, and then ascend furiously from there on to gusts of double-kick drumming and roiling distortion. Even in the vast open-air setting, there were moments when the Joy Formidable filled the sky with sound.
Best Sing-Alongs: TOM PETTY
About a month ago, I saw Tom Petty play a relatively intimate show at the Beacon Theatre in Manhattan when he uttered a phrase that I was in no mood to hear: “We’re gonna play some deep cuts for you tonight.” Okay, Tom Petty may have a vast catalog of underappreciated gems. But live, I want the man responsible for some of the best straight-ahead American rock’n’roll of the last 30 years to bring the radio fire. And that’s what he did on the main stage on Saturday night at Firefly. “Mary Jane’s Last Dance,” “I Won’t Back Down,” “Free Fallin’,” “Love is a Long Road,” “American Girl”: The Grinch himself would get goosebumps hearing tens of thousands of people accompany Petty — as they did on this night — on the choruses of those deathless summer songs.
Best Whoa, Dude-Inducing Set: MGMT
MGMT opted not to show any video footage that wasn’t completely whacked: colored silhouettes of singer Andrew VanWyngarden, keyboardist Ben Goldwasser, and the rest transposed over an onslaught of acid-drenched imagery. We saw birds cruising in outer space, mosquitoes flapping their wings over barren wastelands, Masonic icons, blinking eyes, nude men and women embracing, squiggling geometrics, and wriggling orbs all rendered in saturated hues. It was trippy as hell. The music was pretty good, too. The drifting excursions of 2010’s Congratulations were given firmer, more solid shape live, which in turn prevented older hits “Electric Feel” and “Time to Pretend” from feeling like the aberrations they may yet still prove to be. At this gig, anyway, those songs were just a different flavor of deeply fried.
Best Anything-Goes Attitude: JIM JAMES
Jim James goes for it. Wearing a conservative black suit, white shirt, and tie, the My Morning Jacket frontman galumphed around the main stage on Saturday afternoon, singing songs largely taken from this year’s solo effort Regions of Light and Sound of God. Sometimes he’d stop at a Flying V guitar held up by a stand and squeeze out a yowling solo. Other times he’d bend over at the waist and let loose trilling, wordless muezzin wails. On two occasions he picked up a saxophone and blarted free jazz. Then there was the instance he stood stone-still on stage, the screens on either side of him showing his face in close-up, and he winked. He sang, too, his warmly empathetic voice floating over his band’s lush ’70s-soul arrangements. Always, though, James seemed like he was being fully, completely, crazily, wonderfully himself.
Best Rude Move: YEAH YEAH YEAHS
Though constantly smiling drummer Brian Chase and enigmatic guitarist Nick Zinner had no trouble evincing downtown cool on a broiling Saturday evening on the main stage, neither of them — and likely no performer at the festival — could match Karen O for sheer charisma. Case in point: At the very end of a set that relied heavily, and effectively, on material from this year’s Mosquito, the frontwoman put her microphone down and through her shirt. Then she jammed it into her red pants, unzipped, pulled the microphone’s head and shaft out through her fly, and did the ol’ propeller as the crowd roared in approval. Ballsy.
Best Shtick: EDWARD SHARPE AND THE MAGNETIC ZEROS
Four years on from the band’s debut and Edward Sharpe frontman Alex Ebert’s live shtick is still weirdly entrancing. Raggedly coiffed and worryingly thin in a too-long tank top and too-loose pants, he shuffled around the Lawn Stage like a homeless man looking for a half-smoked cigarette butt, sometimes stopping to do a little soft-shoe to a rhythm only he could hear. He’d sing, in his homespun way, while shaking as if he had the DTs, and sometimes shrug like his lyrics about god, love, and home were private asides to the universe. Ebert’s performance is deeply affected and sometimes corny, but you can’t take your eyes off him. The Magnetic Zeros, complete with horns and banjo, provided fittingly ramshackle, eccentric support on the brassy “Home” and “Up from Below” and more contemplative “Man on Fire” and “I Don’t Wanna Pray,” the latter two from last year’s Home. But the best, loopiest part of the show was a bit of stage banter. “As most of you know,” said Ebert. “You’re all gonna die.” We sure do. That’s why we’re at a festival.
Best Under-the-Radar Performance: THE WALKMEN
Veteran well-dressed rockers the Walkmen were up against it on Sunday evening. They were playing the secluded Backyard Stage scheduled directly against Passion Pit. The group of contrarians watching the Philly-born band may have been small, but they were treated to a big, bold performance. Drummer Matt Barrick, playing with a broken finger, put the rebop into a battery of early-rock rhythms, while guitarist Paul Maroon and multi-instrumentalist Walter Martin coaxed warm, moody tones from their instruments. Frontman Hamilton Leithauser, crooned, muttered, pleaded, and screamed. This was a noirish, moonlit and romantic 45 minutes of music. It just happened to have occurred at 6:30 p.m. in a field in Dover, Delaware.
For more coverage on this year’s top festivals, visit ToyotaSoundwave.com.