Dirty Projectors and MGMT Close Day Two of Fun Fun Fun Fest With Psychedelic Jams

With SXSW and October's Austin City Limits music festival usually grabbing all the national attention when it comes to live music in Austin, the three-day Fun Fun Fun Festival ended with a bang Saturday night heavy enough to put it on the map. As Brooklynites the Dirty Projectors were mesmerizing the audience with their voices and jittery guitar work on the main stage, Gwar were proving that they are more than worthy of a "lords of mayhem" title.

"We're missing Gwar! This sucks," Projectors frontman Dave Longstreth told the audience. While Gwar slashed at each other with their pseudo-dungeon gear on the adjacent stage, most of the festival crowd had moved to catch the Projectors' set. The beautiful weirdness that is a Dirty Projectors song cannot be achieved without the angelic yodels of singer/guitarist Amber Coffman, keyboardist Angel Deradoorian and vocalist Haley Dekle. While songs like 'Knotty Pine' bear a tiny trace of '60s sunshine pop, most of the Dirty Projectors' songs during their Saturday night F3F recalled the experimental rock of the Talking Heads. 'Stillness Is the Move,' 'Temecula Sunrise' and 'F---ed for Life' were among the hits played off the band's 2009 breakthrough 'Bitte Orca.'

To keep an efficient pace at Fun Fun Fun fest, two stages are set up, side by side, where one band sets up while another plays. MGMT would make use of the empty stage to their right during their headlining set on Saturday. During their hit 'Kids,' guitarist James Richardson meandered over to adjacent platform. Singer/keyboardist Ben Goldwasser and singer/guitarist Andrew Van Wyndgarten joined him, much to the pleasure of fans, who -- only seconds before -- had been far from the action. The set started off with the reading of 'MGMT #3,' a cryptic poem written by an old bearded fan. The jammy-ness of their slow-psychedelic 'Congratulations' tracks like 'Flash Delirium' and most notably 'The Handshake' blended smoothly with their pop songs 'Electric Feel' and 'Time to Pretend.'

This year, MGMT have featured an extremely tight musicianship that changes each set, leaving fans thirsty for a bootleg or live album. Saturday night, they even managed to throw in a cover of Magazine's 'Burst.' One member of the crowd was so pumped that he bum rushed the stage in one of those idiot-zen moments that ends with being violently pulled down of stage by security.

But hey, this is Fun Fun Fun Festival. Everyone is entitled to some of the fun fun fun that MGMT brought.