INDIO, CALIFORNIA — Roger Waters, Prince and Justice were some of the big names that sat on top of the line-up of the ninth annual Coachella Arts and Music Festival this year — but the heavy artillery just wasn't equipped to top the bands playing the side stages of the festival before the sun went down.

The nearly two dozen Swedish popsters collectively known as I'm From Barcelona took over the Mojave tent with enormous red balloons and multi-color spontaneous shocks of confetti taken straight out of the Flaming Lips playbook. The band's set managed to embody the happiness and glee the festival truly represents. When the group took the stage and launched into its unique brand of playground pop with "Treehouse," there wasn't a frown among the thousands of listeners in the tent. Before snaking into a conga line that marked the conclusion of the band's performance, lead singer Emanuel Lundgren — with hair and a blazer that matched the gigantic balloons — led the crowd in a chorus of "la la las" in one of those pop-music moments where people had to pause to glance over at their neighbor, to make sure that the performance wasn't a mirage in the Mojave.

Various electropop acts, led by Simian Mobile Disco, also had strong showings at the festival. The duo took a very old-school approach to its set and was constantly juggling wire placements and throwing switches with nary a CD-J or Apple laptop to be seen. While some of the electronic performances felt very phoned in, the group was remixing and tweaking staples from its discography including "It's the Beat" and "Tits & Acid." But the highlight of the performance was an atom bomb of a remix of the Go! Team's "Ladyflash." In addition, British disco maven Calvin Harris played the role of the festival's best hype man, sending a packed Gobi tent into an absolute frenzy while the Melbourne-based Cut Copy backed up its latest record, In Ghost Colours, with an equally solid performance.

But it wasn't a great day for all of the next-big-thing bands - notably MGMT, whose energy only matched the crowd it was playing for. But fans packed its tent because they wanted to hear the hits - so when the group vaulted into "Kids" and "Time to Pretend" at the end of the set, it was finally able to breathe some life into an otherwise drab performance, if only because it felt like the audience gave it permission to truly rock out.

Notable stinkers were also delivered by festival headliner Prince — whose shallow performance felt more like a Super Bowl halftime show with flash-in-the-pan dance moves — and the Breeders, whose set was marred with technical difficulties. Although Kim Deal was charming, it was painful to watch the feeling of disconnection overwhelm and dominate the group's performance.

But it was French electro duo Justice, who closed out the festival, that managed to deliver the festival's worst performance. The entire thing felt like mental masturbation, as if they were performing for themselves, rather than the crowd they barely acknowledged was under the Sahara tent. And while you could clearly see the tools of the trade of every other DJ as they performed, Justice performed behind a gigantic facade flanked by towering stacks of Marshall amplifiers. For all the audience knows, the duo could've simply pressed play on a pre-composed software setlist, which wouldn't be too shocking, considering the performance lacked an honest amount of re-looping and remixing matched by other electronic acts.

Gathering dozens of bands to play in a desert is an overwhelming task to be sure, and promoter Goldenvoice did a solid job of composing the schedule in a fashion that kept the maximum amount of people happy. However, choosing to put M.I.A. in one of the tents rather than one of the open-air stages led to a violent, competitive and dangerous environment and was probably not one of the smartest decisions to make.

Coachella is an overwhelming experience marked with tons of those tiny moments — like Emily Haines calling her temperamental synthesizer a "fucking woman," or Datarock covering "Time Of Our Lives" (yes, that "Time Of Our Lives") while crowd-surfing — that truly make the festival unforgettable. And while the big names by and large failed to provide most of those moments this year, don't forget that next year is Coachella's 10th anniversary, meaning that Goldenvoice will likely be pulling out all the stops to celebrate the occasion.