Longitude 2013: Saturday: The Verdict

Sure, the quip comes after the delicate ache on 'My Lighthouse', but the rest of the set finds him prowling the stage sporting a stylishly teased haircut and pair of jet black Ray-Bans. He's also teasing us when, having rolled out the likes of 'Becoming A Jackal', 'Set The Tigers Free', 'Home' and 'The Pact', he makes it known that he will now only play new songs.
It's a lie - 'Twenty Seven Strangers' and other debut material will arrive - but it's no threat: tracks from {Awayland} are more than welcomed. Of those, 'Judgement Call' and early arrival 'Nothing Arrived' have insistent, golden melodies, and the daring 'The Waves', which ends up as a real thrasher tonight, might be the highlight.
The sun can obviously let rock journos get ahead of themselves (or maybe it was the O'Brien shades distracting Hot Press), because earlier in the day there there was plenty to get lost in. Two Irish bands, Le Galaxie and Funeral Suits, were some of the first players and real stand-outs. Le Galaxie make the case that their high-octane, sugar rush electro doesn't only work past midnight, and Funeral Suits show on the Woodlands Stage that bigger slots and bigger stages await.
Of the foreign contigent, MØ ( aka Karen Marie Ørsted) make a glorious racket on Stage 2. The Scandinavian star has been compared to Grimes, and she certainly has a similar ethereal charisma about her, but her band take things into rockier territory, offering up slinking basslines and nagging, gnarled guitar hooks as a counterpoint to her angelic vocals.
The Main Stage soon welcomes Local Natives, who give us some glorious four-part harmonies and the news that Villagers gave them a dig out and lent them their keyboard. Not such rock star behaviour after all.
The Maccabees are next, a band who once jostled for position in that post-Libertines bunch of British guitar-slingers but have gone the distance, thanks chiefly to excellent last album Given To The Wild. That's not to say the crowd don't go wild for the early likes of gonzoid first single 'X Ray', all spurred on by beaming, animated guitarist Felix White. There's even a verse of 'Happy Birthday' for drummer Sam Doyle, before it's time for 'that red keyboard from Villagers' to play its second set of the day.
As the sun goes down, and the main arena completely fills up, we get our the headliners. Vampire Weekend are at a point where, not only have they made one of the finest records of the year, but they now have a extremely stacked back catalogue. Tonight's show is that most thrilling of things: the chance to see a band at a moment when they simply can't put a foot wrong. Lead singer Ezra Koenig (who, in his fetching shorts, clearly packed for the sun) has spoken about their work to date forming a trilogy of sorts and, over the course of this show, that makes sense. Connections can be made from track to track. So opener 'Cousins' is a propulsive start and 'A Punk' will later dip into that same fast-flowing water to keep the crowd buoyant. Electro-tinged singalong 'Giving Up The Gun' from 2010's Contra meditates on aging, subject matter this year's stately 'Step' completely nails.
On and on, the quality keeps coming from the New Yorkers. Chris Tomson's drumming is both powerful and playful, whilst Rostman Batmanglij continues his production role on stage, making them sound much bigger and more complex live than they have any right to as a mere four-piece. 'Diane Young', 'Horchata', 'Oxford Comma'... each uniformly excellent. 'Ya Hey' is a massive singalong that just so happens to have a theological undercurrent, and they dare to open their encore with the beautiful character study 'Hannah Hunt'. As we've been saying all year: big and clever. At a time when so many groups of this size make a career out of producing faux-emotive yet ultimately hollow facsimiles of songs, it's a nice thing to be able to say about your headliners. Vampire Weekend end, as they always do, on 'Walcott'. It's a song, you see, "about leaving". Longitude doesn't want them to go.