Sunday was a short day for me, starting 2-ish for Janelle Monae and ending during MGMT because the Saints game called. Here are the highlights:

By Kim Welsh

Janelle Monae was at least 45 minutes late for her set on the SoCo/WWOZ Stage. Her band wasn’t; it and the sound man methodically worked through a mic check starting with the drums – nevermind the audience. She was so late that I went to a Gulf Restoration Network press conference and got back in time for the end of the set. I gather from those who saw it all that it was worth the wait, and the end certainly was. Her female alien James Brown shtick might have seemed hokey if it wasn’t so funky and high energy; “Tightrope” was the most tightly wound groove I heard all festival, so much so that people were dancing and moving to her vocals as much as any other instrument in the mix.

She left the stage then returned for an encore, during which she followed in Weezer and Cage the Elephant‘s footsteps and left the stage. Running in a fenced off area like Rivers Cuomo or crowd surfing like Matt Schultz is the easy way to visit your people; the diminutive Monae danced to the soundboard and back with only the force of her personality to clear the space in front of her (and maybe a security guy, but I didn’t see one).

Interpol had the thankless task of going on in the sunshine, which is an awfully hard time to play moody, textured dance music on a stage at the sunny end of the pasture. People told me how much they loved the set, but near the front, there was little physical response to the first three songs, not even much absent-minded head bobbing.

JP, Chrissie and the Fairground Boys played the Bingo! Parlour Tent to a few hundred people (which blew a friend’s mind; he kept looking around saying, “This is crazy.”) perhaps because of the last day set flip with the bounce showcase that was originally scheduled for 4:15. JP was John Paul Jones, not the Led Zep JP Jones but a Welsh journeyman, and Hynde sang about their relationship in the song, “My Perfect Lover”:

I found my perfect lover but he’s only half my age

He was learning how to stand when I was wearing my first wedding band

I found my perfect lover but I have to turn the page

But I want him in my kitchen and standing on my stage.

That was a little winceworthy, as was much that involved Jones. When Hynde sang “Your Fairground” from their Fidelity! album, her voice danced lightly through the melody, she reminded us what a remarkable, idiosyncratic instrument her voice is; when Jones sang, the effort was obvious from the first syllable, and it’s a voice you’ve heard a thousand times before. There’s nothing wrong with him, but the contrast only makes it clear that you have to know him to appreciate what’s special about him. They were far more effective singing the non-album track “You’re the One (That I Should’ve Married),” where the poppiness brought out the playful side of her and took the too-earnest edge off him. Hynde started the closing cover of the Stooges’ “I Wanna Be Your Dog” off by announcing that her guitar was out of tune and she didn’t care, which was punk-ish, but it would have been punkier to ignore it entirely and plow on. As she played with her phrasing during the verses, you realized that she’d been on both side of the song’s dynamic in her life; she’d been someone’s dog and she’d made someone crawl. Unfortunately, when he joined her to sing the chorus, that whole subtext disappeared and the song became just another good cover.

MGMT’s Voodoo performance was less willfully perverse than its Coachella show, where it played nothing but the recently released Congratulations! Dressed as members of the Scooby Doo gang, MGMT opened with “It’s Working,” honoring the song’s baroque quality while rendering it as something closer to power pop. The band’s two albums sound very different, but in concert, the songs sound of a piece and gain a little muscle. Not a lot, but enough to make me want to see them when I don’t have to run off and watch the Saints beat on the Pittsburgh Steelers.

One last thought: the weather undoubtedly helped this year’s Voodoo, but this year’s festival bet heavily on youth and electronica and it paid off. After nightfall, there were always people hanging out at Le Plur regardless of who was going to be onstage, and Deadmau5 was as big of a draw as some of the later main stage acts. There were numerous Deadmau5 costumes walking the grounds all weekend including a Deadmau5 Imperial Stormtrooper. And the move of the New Orleans-centric stages to a row across Roosevelt Mall made it easy to stage-shop while there was surprisingly little sideways soundbleed.

… oh, and everybody wondered where the soft drinks were. Red Bull isn’t a soft drink.