Benga – Diary of an Afro Warrior, DJ Fresh – Escape from Planet Monday, Skream – Skreamizms Vol. 5

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We flopped happily far up front at mainstage as lengthening shadows set the mood for My Bloody Valentine. Management was handing out earplugs at the gate and small wonder, since toward the end of “You Made Me Realise,” guitarists Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher (the latter impassive as a Xanax-bombed soccer mom) loosed a gorgeous fifteen-minute-plus feedback annihilation that was easily the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in decades of doting on amplified music. It was less a solo than a hideous (and hideously effective) evocation of nightmare; a compressed and aestheticized variation on the opening bombardment at the Somme, another historic din that produced few actual causalties.

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Watching X and My Bloody Valentine put into perspective all these kids making noisy pop music by recalling the rich and fabled genealogy of this newfangled uprising and putting a sincere (albeit wrinkled) face on sounds that were once something controversial and that today’s babies take for granted… it must be oddly pleasant to play a show you never would’ve been asked to play in your own heyday, knowing that tropes you helped invent are propelling smooth-skinned foals into stardom from what middle-aged critics are carelessly referring to as the “outside” or the “fringes” while you wonder where the hell that leaves you?

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L.A. RECORD put photographer Lindsey Best through three dessicating days at the Coachella fun factory and she returned with this giant pile of beautiful photos and without any evidence whatsoever of sun damage to herself. Captured in full glory here are TV On The Radio, Leonard Cohen, M.I.A., No Age, Antony and the Johnsons, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Morrissey, Lykke Li, Public Enemy and many more!

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Although we have yet to toy around with the Coachooser, we present here (via Goldenvoice and Coachella) the set times for this weekend:

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