Not all of the bands on the last day of Sasquatch were relaxed and relaxing—Santigold or Monotonix, for instance—but quite a lot of the acts were, such that you could easily schedule a whole day of soothing, calming come-down acts. Here were a few:

-Hardly Arts bands Pica Beats and Dutchess and the Duke tied for the smallest crowds I saw all weekend at the Yeti Stage, but both bands played well regardless. I caught most of the Pica Beats' set from in front of my laptop in the media area, but it still sounded great, especially "Poor Old Ra," whose outro refrain, "I am the tension/you are the tightrope," still just kills me.

-Black Moth Super Rainbow sounded about like they do on record—a good thing—like a vintage psychedelic record left to melt on a sunny dashboard then reassembled by robots. Bandleader Tobacco played kneeling on the stage in front of a pile of gear including a toy mic plugged into a Moog pedal, which gave him his stretched out vocoded voice, and some kind of remote control; the rest of the band (a drummer, a guitarist/bassist, and two keyboardists) looked like band geeks who all just took mushrooms together one year at band camp. They performed in front of a kind of ersatz TV Carnage montage of oddball video clips.

-Grizzly Bear sounded much bigger than I remembered them being, all echoing choir boy vocals, heavy vibrating bass, crashing drums, fully electrified guitars, easily filling up the Main Stage and its amphitheater. Went down close to the stage for "Little Brother" and "Ready, Able" but couldn't stand standing there on the hot asphalt, feeling green lawn envy, and so returned to where there was grass for their last song.

-School of Seven Bells still strike me as very pretty but too easily forgettable. I could listen to their immaculate shoegaze anytime, but I couldn't recall a single melody right now. At one point, a burst of overly loud, overdriven drum machine came blaring out over a song, only serving to highlight how carefully composed the rest of their set/sound seemed. One song featured some stretched, bent backwards guitar tones that seriously summoned up My Bloody Valentine, only way cleaner and less murky, which I'm not sure is technically an improvement on that sound.

-Beach House: I only caught a few of their songs, but damn if I couldn't have just drifted right off to dreaming sleep on my feet listening to this band. Perfectly, sweetly somnolent.

-Lastly, a note on leaving Sasquatch before the final curtain: A three hour drive on top of three hot, filthy, awesomely exhausting days at the Gorge is a daunting thing, especially when you have to work the next morning, and the ride wanted to leave before Girl Talk and Eryka Badu and Explosions in the Sky, any or all of which may have been amazing. At the time, I thought dude was being a lame-ass, but when we pulled into Seattle near midnight, I realized he had been right. (Also: the drive to the Gorge = all animated, witty banter; getting out = snoring, silence, the slapstick of folding tents and chasing hats across windswept gas station parking lots.)

Grizzly Bear by Sean Pecknold

The last blast of last night for me was Deadmau5 in the dance tent. He dropped a sample of Bill O'Reily's "do it live!" rant; he played his remix of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger"; he played the fucking awesome rave excuse "Sometimes Things Get, Whatever"/"Complicated"; he pumped out a meticulously engineered bass pulse that was just like fish->bass->barrel. Also, maybe there are drugs in that barrel. Afterwards, the crowd kept dancing while the soundguy played a few songs—Kid Sister, Estelle, Kanye West—while they broke down the stage. When those songs stopped and the lights came up, the lingering crowd tried to keep it going with handclaps and water jug thumping. Why can't that dance tent run until at least 2am? Damn.

Update: Two other things I meant to mention about the dance tent (and, yes, it should also be bigger): 1. Kids were sneaking in and out through a slit in the side of the tent; the spot they were sneaking in and out of was totally cramped and impossible, with the angled side of the tent pressing down on your head. 2. At the tent's two massive openings, there was kind of a wall of damp heat—take a step into the tent and the crowd and you felt it fall on you like a hot blanket; take a step back and you felt the cool night breeze.

Animal Collective got stuck with a bum set time, but M83 got the perfect slot, playing their set in the magical, golden hour before sunset, long shadows across the crowd. The band, playing as a three piece, just Anthony Gonzales, their drummer, and their female keyboard player, started with a version of "Graveyard Girl," slowed down, arpeggios running at half speed, drums skipping every other beat. They played "Teen Angst," an oddly long and totally hushed pause in the middle broken by a big drum roll back into the song. They played "We Own the Sky," and the setting, the shade of the sky really reminded me of that fan-created video for the song that came out a few weeks back. The song ended with a kicked-up, big beat finish, hi-nrg synths pulsing like mad in the background, Gonzales getting one leg up on the amp to shred his axe.

They played a perfectly dreamy "Kim & Jessie." They played "Sitting" and "Skin," the former's bedroom rave feeling accentuated with its silly, pitched down vocal sample commanding, in a slightly French accent (it was all cute French accents), "Let's go!" The crowd was going nuts, jumping and dancing by this point. They played the muted, wilting anthem "Don't Save Us from the Flames." They played "Guitar" and "Coleurs," a massive, jumped-up version, the keyboard player stripped down to her undershirt and dancing, encouraging an already kinetic crowd. The song went through breakdown after breakdown after breakdown, building back up again and again in well raving fashion, the washes of reverbed guitar sounding like crowd noise—or maybe it was just crowd noise. The keyboard player ended up breathless, panting, kneeling in front of her keyboard, hands hanging onto the keys. The ended with an ambient number just as the sun was touching the uneven horizon. Perfect.

photo by Piper Carr

Those were the instructions David Barnes gave to the crowd of folks gathered backstage at Of Montreal, preparing us to go onstage as part of one of the band's weird set pieces. (Before the show, the band psyched up by singing an upbeat a capella of Starship's "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." We were supposed to be a tour group being led by a naked man with a pig's head, only we were supposed to act terrified and confused (easy!). Then we were supposed to freeze while the pig-man fought a man with a tiger's head, and then a magician was going to re-pose our frozen bodies. Then we would be lead offstage. It went down more or less like that, only with a couple jokers who didn't hear the script. It was kind of a super-bright blur. I couldn't even tell you what song it was.

I was able to pick out a few of the other songs, though, and they all sounded great, technicolorful and groovy, and with the sound clearer and more dialed in than I've maybe ever heard them. They played "Bunny Ain't no Kind of Rider," "Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse,"—then there was the blur of participation—then they played "Id Engager," "The Party's Crashing Us Now" (big bursts of confetti), their cover of Prince's "Computer Blue," "A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger," "She's a Rejector," probably a lot more, too. The videos were neon strobing and grotesque and "tripppppppy," with a big red pentagram flashing at one point. Some of the costumes were familiar, but some were new—lots of gas masks, and Kevin Barnes in one furry outfit equipped with a tube run up the back billowing out smoke from under the folds of fur. (All the "toxic" smoke was kind of a good fit for the quit now anti-smoking stage.) The set ended with Barnes tossing then smashing the shit out of his guitar, while smoke swirled around the stage and the crowd roared. It was an awesome set.

Top photo by Christopher Nelson. Inset by Jackie Kingsbury.

More to come, but for now:

-The Decemberists' proggy metal riffs sound perfectly ridiculous echoing across the Gorge Ampitheater.

-Mos Def is an extremely stoned, self-indulgent performer even by Mos Def standards. He did a re-interpretation of "The Message." "Look around you, look all around you," he said. "The dream is real...I mean, look."

-The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are fucking awesome. Matos has written that Karen O seems to have only recently come into her own onstage, but I think she's been pretty fucking commanding for a while now, slumpy sophomore album aside. Her every "ah" was perfectly exaggerated, like she was drinking an unbelievably refreshing beverage. Her neon green tights were the exact same color as the xbox logo; I wonder if that was coordinated—probably not. Her outfit, a kind of neon Native American poncho over a dress made of tennis-bal-sized gold sequins, turned from day-glo to glow in the dark as the sun faded. There was a giant eyeball behind her and it didn't distract from her for a minute. She sang "Black Tongue," a scorching hell of a song, with a little bit of a valley girl inflection. The drummer played with a grinning enthusiasm of Max Winbergian proportions, even when he slipped at the end of one song and seemed to almost fall forward over his drum kit. Nick Zinner looked unbelievably cool, his hair perfect, always, with a little bit of a John Spencer Blues Explosion look to him. They have and played a grip of great songs, other highlights of which included: "Heads Will Roll," "Zero," "Y Control."

-Bon Iver sounded electric and epic for the brief minute I was walking by their stage.

-Crystal Castles sounded like pure ass. Sorry for erroneously recommending them, but, at least towards the back, Alice Glass' tuneless screaming sounded like a half second off from the music—not a good look. Their version of "Atlantis to Interzone," which they might call something else when it doesn't have the Klaxons lyrics to it and which they opened with, still sounds pretty sick, though. Also, the dance tent was overflowing, impossible to do anything but watch the strobe strafe over the crowd and onto the wall from afar.

-Mad Rad fucking killed it. You might not like what they do, but they do it fucking well. They came out sporting giant, oversized cut-outs of their faces. "Donut Truck" sounded all icy, bubble-popping synths and tom rolls. "We met on Capitol Hill," P Smoov said between songs. "We don't really play around there anymore...it's a long story." Buffalo Madonna got shirtless, panting, screaming, red-faced, into the crowd, back up on stage on all fours, then up on the scaffolding and the fucking roof! They got the crowd moving at noon in a major way; lots of pogoing for "My Prodcut." They played a new song for the first time, "Electric Jesus," with Madonna singing in an exaggerated, blown-out baritone over 8-bit synths and 808 snare snap, writhing like some poor man's Prince, pausing for a sort of Shakespearean sermonly interlude. "This next song is about weed and pussy," they said, introducing "Crack the Blunt." He looked like a god damn gargoyle barking up on that roof. Fuck.

-Looking down on the crowd for Street Sweeper Social Club all you could see was a sea of fists pumping in unison, against The Man. (Fuck that Man, dude.) One song sounded kind of "Square Dance Rap" meets Primus. Guh.

-The Walkmen somehow manage to sound both faded and rousing at the same time, always projecting moneyed East coast cool, killing it with "In the New Year" and that unfuckwithable "The Rat," whose bridge/coda must be one of the most beautifully bitter lyrics ever.

-Henry Clay People are playing a cover of Operation Ivy's "Knowledge" segueing into Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side" into Bowie's "Heroes" into "I Wish I Knew Then What I Know" into "Baba O'Reily" into "The Plan" by Built to Spill into "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Wow (but bad wow).

Yeah Yeah Yeahs by Jackie Canchola