Virgin Festival, Day 2: Morsels for All Tastes

The Brazilian electro-rock group Cansei de Ser Sexy added a splash of color to the festival, decorating the stage with dozens of balloons and spraying the crowd with rainbow-colored confetti. The band's playful, percolating songs (about alcohol, holidays and sex) were bold and bright. And then there was the outfit worn by the group's irrepressible singer, Lovefoxxx: She had on her Sunday best -- a spangly, form-fitting Technicolor bodysuit.

The riveting Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen Orzolek wore a flashy getup, too, prancing onto the stage in a tinsel-covered cape. She also wore a mask, which hid her smeared mascara. The caterwauling singer known as Karen O is a freakish force of nature who dances, twitches, preens, skips, hops, glowers, shrieks, strips, cackles and hurls her microphone onto the stage. And that was just during the rhythmic stomp of "Cheated Hearts." While Orzolek gave the Yeah Yeah Yeahs their edge and star power, the Brooklyn art-rock band's musical teeth came courtesy Nick Zinner's serrated riffs and manufactured, manipulated guitar sounds. Those included whale calls, police sirens, squeaky wheels and fingers running over freshly Windexed glass.

Also for the guitar geeks: Explosions in the Sky, which performed instrumental progressive-rock odysseys -- cinematic, symphonic epics powered by the dreamy, chiming guitars of Munaf Rayani and Mark Smith, who played twin leads. Their lines surged and swelled before, well . . . exploding. The effect was gorgeous and gripping, but the music also became repetitive, one song spilling into the next, which sounded like the second one before it, etc.

Aiden attempted to stand out by artificially raising the testosterone level around the stage. The Seattle band landed a spot on the festival schedule by winning a contest. But singer wiL (no, not a typo) Francis wasn't happy just to be here. He wanted chaos in the crowd beneath him. So he demanded a mosh pit for the post-hardcore band's final song, "I Set My Friends on Fire."

"This is not for the faint of heart," he said. "If you have a heart condition, you might want to step to the back of the audience." The human battering rams in the crowd spent the next few minutes crashing into each other while Aiden played a hard, heavy song full of bruising riffs and howling, guttural vocals.

Other artists took a more restrained approach, with varying degrees of success.

Spoon has one of the best indie-rock discographies of the past decade, with this year's "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" serving as the Austin quartet's crown jewel. Full of intricate twists and turns, the songs succeed because of their subtlety and precision. But subtlety and precision aren't exactly the hallmark of a great festival performance, so Spoon's set was a bit of a letdown. Early technical problems didn't help much -- frontman Britt Daniel didn't even play his guitar during "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb" because he couldn't get it in tune. "That's the problem with daytime shows," he said. "I can't see what my tuner's telling me." When Spoon filled out its sound on "Black Like Me" and "The Beast and Dragon Adored," the band sounded as vital as it does on record.

Regina Spektor didn't worry about fleshing out her sound. In the middle of the afternoon, the Russian-born, New York-based singer wandered onto the vast expanse of the main stage alone and immediately began to sing a cappella -- her voice full, rangy and completely entrancing. It was a courageous move given the size of the crowd and venue. And she never did bring out a band, instead providing her own accompaniment -- mostly on the piano, via supple melodies with odd meters. All the better to showcase her vocal quirks, as Spektor spiked her humorous, sharply rendered character studies and narratives with yelps, warbles, moans, chirps and glottal stops (as on her unlikely hit, "Fidelity"). She also sang a little bit in Russian. But Spektor's pleasant, easily digestible music apparently wasn't quite captivating enough, as more than a few people talked through the performance.

The first hour in the dance tent was the antithesis of the ultra-professional manner in which things went down Saturday. Local underground fave Dan Deacon made a pre-set plea for a D battery, which he needed for his keyboard. There was almost certainly no other act here that asked the audience for technical support. And, in fact, there was no act like Deacon, period. This isn't a guy playing instruments. It's a man-child setting up samplers and keyboards in the crowd, getting everyone to gather around him and then bashing out hyperactive electro-jams. Deacon was like a cult leader, persuading the enthusiastic crowd to chant "Horsey, horsey!" close to a hundred times.

Pittsburgh mash-up artist Girl Talk (real name: Greg Gillis) kept the warehouse party vibe going with a set that saw 20 of Gillis's friends get up onstage to dance -- thus striking fear into the sound crew that was looking to protect hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Girl Talk seemed to be custom-made for today's short-attention-span society, throwing nearly 100 popular songs into his set. He even used songs by other festival artists, using tracks by Wu-Tang Clan, the Police and Smashing Pumpkins in rapid-fire fashion. It was fun, but it was also pure novelty, as Gillis is a pony who seems to have just one trick.