Until you’ve seen them play before an arena crowd, it’s hard to know just how much Dave Gahan is the heart and soul of their live shows.

For a guy who once said, “The god of darkness has ordained that I shall not laugh,” Moses Sumney is pretty damn funny. “Sorry I was late. I’m from L.A.,” he quips to raucous laughter from his audience, two songs into a set that should have started late on a Sunday night but instead began on a Monday morning.

Sometimes you have to take what you can get, and when it comes to music festivals, you can never get it all. With too many acts spread across too many stages, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day.

When musicians sit on the cusp of breaking out, there’s a sweet spot lasting only a moment. The collected songs are strong enough to draw larger audiences, and each performance is an electrifying experience, but the world has yet to catch up.

As far as planning an evening of contrasts goes, you couldn’t do much better than putting Calexico and Ryley Walker on the bill together. The former comes with nine albums and more than 20 years of raucous, high-tempo history, the latter is a man and his guitar.

As The Crow Flies found Chris Robinson revisiting his Black Crowes catalog to thrilling effect in Philadelphia.

“People try to tell you that the Internet is bad,” Josiah Wise, the tattooed, septum-pierced man behind serpentwithfeet, tells his audience. “But they’re wrong.”

On a bustling night in Philadelphia, Jess Williamson brought love to Johnny Brenda’s.

When Green Twins came out last year, reviews spent as much time labeling Nick Hakim’s debut as they did discussing the music. Let’s have a go then: Hakim channels old school soul through modern psychedelically tinged elegiac folk, creating a feeling smooth on the surface and disconcerting underneath.