M.I.A. / Photo by Misha Vladimirskiy

THE BEST:

Best Performance: M.I.A.
Festival gigs tend towards the tame -- the crowds don't always know the music, the sets are short, and energy gets lost in the giant open-air spaces. None of that mattered to M.I.A. Taking the stage with a posse of B-Boys in glowing neon outfits, the Sri Lankan superstar put on a show that teetered on the edge of glorious abandon. Wearing tight jeans and luminescent bangle bracelets, she threw air horns into the audience, rode on some guy's shoulders slapping five with the people in the front row, banged out rhythms on a plastic bucket, and demanded that security let fans onstage to dance as the giant video screens showed pictures of guerillas blasting away with machine guns. Favorites like "Galang" and "Pull Up the People" might not have received their tightest airings ever, but, especially on the set-closing "Paper Planes," M.I.A.'s music seemed like the soundtrack to the center of the world. -- David Marchese

Best Timing: Fleet Foxes
Robin Pecknold's pastoral quintet took the stage bathed in the soft rays of the setting sun, and the golden light turned out to be the perfect accompaniment for the band's gently mysterious music. Though according to the calendar Pecknold was premature when he sang "Sun Giant's" line, "What a life I lead in the summer," the sentiment was spot-on. Full of ringing mountain harmonies, lush acoustic guitars, churchly keyboards, and burbling rhythms, the Seattle outfit induced a large chunk of the audience to lie down on the grass, close their eyes, and bask in the fading light. -- DM

Best Campy Drag Queen Antics from Someone Born an Actual Woman: Amanda Palmer
Erstwhile Dresden Dolls singer Amanda Palmer updated her Twitter last night to inform her legions that she was skipping Paul McCartney's set to go home and practice for her own. Brava -- the extra round did her wicked act well. Her cabaret never looked or sounded sharper. Flower-power hippies careened onstage as Palmer, festooned in black corset and garters and neon drawn-in eyebrows, swigged from a bottle of red wine (fancy!) and simultaneously snarled through most of the tracks of last year's Who Killed Amanda Palmer? The showstopper hasn't changed -- the Dolls' "Coin Operated Boy," the linchpin of their 'Brechtian pop' shtick -- but she delivered it splayed across her keyboard with fresh, untethered viciousness. Palmer closed with Radiohead's "Creep" on ukulele, led by her brutal, raspy staccato; smart money says she could've mopped the floor with "Live and Let Die," too. -- Stacey Anderson

Best Exhibition of Godlike Powers: TV On the Radio
"Our goal in the next hour is to set the sun!" And would TVOTR guitarist/vocalist Kyp Malone lie to you? The sky dimmed as commanded halfway through their jaunt. While Malone sounded a bit winded at the mic, his community organization was impeccable; the formidable brass, woodwinds, and percussion clusters marched brightly under his flourishes. Fellow vocalist Tunde Adebimpe proved indefatigable from the start, pulling at his plaid shirt during the howls of "Red Dress" and swaying flirtatiously at the cusp of the stage in the hard-spat stanzas of "Dancing Choose" (both from '08's Dear Science). And for a troupe so encumbered by the chaos and criminalities of the world, they still shout out a little mischief; the large projection video screens bookending the stage lingered on the band's setlist but, spoiler alert, it proved wholly inaccurate. Got ya! -- SA

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Best Recession-Proof Dance Party: Thievery Corporation
How many people are on the Thievery Corporation payroll? 100? You probably are and don't know it. The revolving D.C. bossa nova/jazz/classical Indian dance collective never met a singer they didn't like and featured a new vocalist on virtually every song, but kept the disparate elements cohesive, including Perry Farrell at one point (looking clipped and disoriented, with breathy sonar intact). A surprisingly large audience coiled into the main lawn for their pre-M.I.A. set, which got kinetic immediately with "Sound the Alarm." And, as all anthropologists know, discerning Western hipsters love a sitar, and Thievery Corp's string-heavy "Lebanese Blonde" (best known from the Garden State soundtrack) brought plenty of glee. It was a fitting celebratory coda to the ancestry of the song, as the track's original singer, Pam Bricker, committed suicide in 2005. She would have been moved by the swaying, communal love that answered her words. -- SA