Swedish House Mafia and the Weeknd closed out the first weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival with a co-headlining set that somehow managed to both attract the largest crowd of the festival and underwhelm at the same time.
Of course, you could say Coachella was lucky to have a Sunday night headliner at all after Kanye West, or Ye as he’s now known, abruptly pulled out two weeks before he was slated to perform.
Swedish House Mafia has always been scheduled to play the festival, but as a late-night electronic dance music set after Harry Styles headlined Friday night.
The Weeknd, who wasn’t getting closer to a Coachella stage than sitting in his couch watching the YouTube livestream until he was pressed into duty, and reportedly promised a big pile of cash, to fill the Ye-sized hole in the lineup.
Details of what was supposed to happen were scant, though we knew it was scheduled to start at 10:20 p.m., but didn’t actually begin until 10:55 p.m.
Swedish House Mafia, the Swedish supergroup of DJs Axwell, Sebastian Ingrosso, and Steve Angello, played first, the trio standing in the shadows atop a platform behind a table and their gear.
EDM performers often aren’t the focus of their shows, the DJs letting the abstract videos on the screens around them carry the visual interest. And that’s not a problem for the tens of thousands of fans on the field who erupted in joy as each track built to a peak before the bass dropped and released all that musical tension.
I’ll admit I’m a minority view on how enjoyable their 40 minutes was — not particularly in my opinion To be fair, it went down swimmingly, or dancingly, with the vast majority.
The Weeknd’s arrival injected more personality into the show, though he’s also a bit of a remote figure as a performer. The Swedes also only left him with 25 minutes to perform before the midnight curfew thanks to the length of their set and the time wasted in getting things started.
For his first two songs, live debuts of “Sacrifice” and “How Do I Make You Love Me?” were both done with Swedish House Mafia. From there he shifted into better known hits, such as “Can’t Feel My Face” and “Blinding Lights,” both of which sounded great.
By then, though, a stream of fans were headed for the exits, skipping out on songs such as “The Hills” and “Party Monster” that followed, the finale, “Moth To A Flame,” with Swedish House Mafia once more.
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