Get a taste of Coachella with The XX, Vampire Weekend, many more

Coachella is simultaneously awesome and a little overrated.

Yeah, it can be a lot of fun, but you really have to work for it, from the ridiculous lines just to gain entry into the parking lot to the hourlong wait, if not more, to get in once you’re there to the challenges of finding a hotel this side of the Mexican border if you don’t book a year in advance.

But, here in Vegas, you can get a taste of Coachella without any of the hassles, as a slew of bands that will be performing at the festival are also playing here.

Float in space with Brit psych rockers Spiritualized (today, House of Blues at Mandalay Bay), whose untethered jams numb the body like an enswell. How To Destroy Angels (Saturday, The Pearl at the Palms), featuring Nine Inch Nails mainman Trent Reznor and his wife, Mariqueen Maandig, are also fond of cultivating moments of anesthetizing atmosphere and then disrupting it in grand, clamorous fashion.

While the spare, delicately spun indie pop of The XX (Tuesday, The Joint at the Hard Rock Hotel) will slow pulses and reduce the crowd to a hush, the frisky, hot-blooded electronica of Hot Chip (Thursday, Boulevard Pool at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas) will likely engender the opposite reaction.

New York City’s Vampire Weekend (today, Boulevard Pool) channel Paul Simon’s mid-’80s Afrobeat explorations into an indie rock context; their city mates the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Saturday, Boulevard Pool) explode forth with frontwoman/human cannonball Karen O. giving both sweet and shrill voice to inde-art-dance rock that can be sweaty, sentimental and serrated all at once.

Iceland’s Of Monsters and Men (Wednesday, Boulevard Pool) often get favorably compared to Arcade Fire with their full-bodied, forward looking folk; Brit post-punk hybridists Foals (Saturday, House of Blues) maybe contribute the most gloriously anthemic moment of the weekend with the deliriously overblown “Inhaler” off their latest record “Holy Fire.”

Leave it to the mesmeric Beach House (Monday, House of Blues) then, to calm things down. “What comes after this momentary bliss?” singer Victoria Legrand asks on “Myth,” from the band’s 2010’s disc “Bloom.”

But when this song is spinning, there’s little reason to think that far ahead.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at
jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.