Kevin Bronson on April 18th, 2016

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Bronson’s Day 3: Sia, Calvin Harris, Beach House, Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, Autolux, Cold War Kids, TOKiMONSTA, Meg Myers, The Heavy, Prayers, De Lux

*Updated below

Coachella 2016 in three letters: Sia.

The 40-year-old singer’s festival-stealing hour on the main stage Sunday night was part pop and part performance art — and maybe more than a little bit punk’d. It shed a whole new light on the title of her acclaimed new album “This Is Acting.”

Performing from a small white pedestal, wearing a white bag dress and with her face obscured the entire set, she performed seven songs from the new album, two covers and four others while the monstrous screens flanking the stage showed videos featuring incredible modern dance vignettes, featuring the likes of 13-year-old phenom Maddie Ziegler (Sia’s “Cheap Thrills,” “Chandelier,” “Big Girls Cry” and “Elastic Heart” videos), Kristen Wiig, Tig Notaro, Paul Dano, Gaby Hoffmann and Ben Mendelsohn. They put the songs’ emotions in motion.

Onstage, those videos were being re-enacted — but not by all the people in the videos. So from a distance, or from the wings of the main stage, the huge crowd might have thought, “Holy Knocked Up, that’s Kristen Wiig” up there.” But it wasn’t, as can be deduced from viewing the online stream of the concert.

* Via Twitter, Sia later said that the female dancers in the performance were Ziegler and Stephanie Mincone. “There was some confusion!” she added. Additionally, the male dancers were Wyatt Rocker, Nick Lanzisera and John Litzler, and the productions was directed by Sia and Daniel Askill and choreographed by Ryan Heffington.

Even with her set sandwiched in between the bombast of Major Lazer and Calvin Harris, it would have been easy for Sia to hold her own with a more traditional presentation. But this staging of her emotive music was next-level, and from our vantage points, scarcely anybody who was there at the beginning left before it over.

||| Also: More highlights from Day 3 from Andrew Veeder.

Sia’s set capped a wildly eclectic Day 3, which from beginning to end went like this:

11:45 a.m.: Never assume the logistics of getting in and out of Coachella will be the same two days in a row. Even the simplest of tasks, like parking your car. “You need to park in the other lot,” two guys in a hurry are told at the entrance to the lot they’ve used two days in a row, a lot with cars currently in it and space for more. A detour later …

1:05 p.m.: A slightly breathless dude comes within earshot of the Gobi Tent in time to hear the final notes of Steady Holiday’s set.

1:10: Next door at the Mojave Tent, L.A.’s De Lux are raging toward the finish, their Talking Heads-indebted post-punk inspiring bobbing heads and bouncing bodies. Then Sean Guerin jumps off the stage, sprints up and down the pit high-fiving railbirds, hurdles two barriers and ends up on grass in a delirious spasm. Sunday is off to a fine start.

1:40: “It’s Sunday and it’s time to say your Prayers,” vocalist Rafael Reyes says with playful menace as the San Diego-bred “cholo goth” duo kicked off their set in the Mojave. It’s one of the most intense sets of the wekeend, tattoo for tattoo. With synth man Dave Parley dishing out a blaring industrial backdrop, Reyes rips through songs on their “Young Gods” EP and the follow-up, the just-announced “Baptism of Thieves,” with Reyes sermonizing between songs. “Don’t allow bigotry, hatred, greed and selfishness to divide us,” he says. “There’s too much of that out there.”

2:40: You say “Stax” to most of the Coachella crowd, and they think it’s an iPhone app, or a maybe plug-in for Logic. U.K. quintet the Heavy’s set in the Mojave Tent threw back to that sound, with Kelvin Swaby playing the smooth frontman everybody obeys. He wants claps, you clap. He wants call-and-response, or for you to help with chorus? Sure thing. The Heavy played songs from their new album “Hurt & the Merciless” and finished strong with the omnipresent (because it has been used so many times in TV and commercials) “How You Like Me Now?,” which sounds as fresh as when we first heard it in L.A. six years ago.

3:45: Meg Myers, typically intense, overcomes some sound glitches to deliver some mid-afternoon bite (“Go,” “Lemon Eyes” and at the end, “Head Head Heart”), but we wonder about the man in the VIP with his 3- or 4-year-old daughter on his shoulders, and whether the young lass will ask him about the lusty, naughty bits in set opener “Desire.”

4:35: Early arrival in the Sahara Tent means accidentally meeting a young couple from Tokyo who figures their trip to Coachella has cost them $5,000 American. They are giddy.

4:50: Jenny Lee, aka TOKiMONSTA, kicks off an all-over-the-map set in the Sahara Tent that challenges the crowd — some of whom sport her new promotional black masks with bunny ears — to follow her shape-shifting electronica and surprising segues. The biggest roar came when Anderson .Paak appeared for two songs. The second, “Put It Down,” got everybody up.

5:40: Neither brutal sun nor fussy gear that plagued new guitarist Davey Quon can prevent Cold War Kids from making their appointed rounds at the Outdoor Theatre. “For anybody from Southern California,” says frontman Nathan Willett, “this is a great moment.” In other news, “Hang Me Up to Dry” is now 10 years old.

6:05: A man tip-toes away from Cold War Kids to the nearby Gobi Tent, where L.A. trio Autolux is making their atmospheric, experimental noise hurt so good. “Pussy’s Dead” is the title of their new album, and the music is dark and challenging and, in the tint of the desert sunset, apocalyptic. In other news, “Subzero Fun” is now 12 years old.

6:55: The food at Coachella is a lot better than it once was. Not to sound like a promo or anything, but really.

7:30: The USC marching band is on the main stage with Major Lazer, upping Coachella’s marching-band game, since it was a high school band that played Big Gigantic’s tent gig two years ago. It’s Major Lazer, though, and the crowd is massive, and it’s nice to somebody playing something. We march on.

7:40: Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros goes into the crowd to commune with fans and then leads everybody in a sing-along of “Home.” Beyond the cult of Ebert’s personality, the Magnetic Zeros’ songs find a sweet spot with crowd in the (mercifully, considering the past two days) gentle breeze. A friend claims to have cheek cramps from smiling so much.

7:55: Just the last five minutes of French psych-pop outfit Melody’s Echo Chamber makes us curse the scheduling gods for not being able to spend all 45 minutes with Melody Prochet and crew. Reminder to revisit this band crush at a later date.

8:18: With Major Lazer still bleating from the main stage, Beach House gamely begins their set in dim light at the Outdoor Theatre, backdropped by a simple light display mimicking a starry sky. And heavenly it is. “Beyond,” “Wishes” and, after the main stage quiets, the chiming “PPP,” as the Baltimore band soundtracked many a makeout session on the spacious lawn. For the loners, it felt like the best timeout ever from the festival’s pop din. “This is such a wonderful part of the country,” Victoria Legrand says, “so magical, loving and mystical. Thank you for supporting us.”

9:00: Sia begins, and after many fans move to a better vantage point, holds the crowd rapt for a solid hour.

10:08: Thankfully nobody’s paying anybody who works here to write about Flume.

10:55: Human jukebox Calvin Harris starts late, and with the first blast of sound and splash of lights, youngsters still on the fringes sprint toward the main stage. It peaks with Rihanna’s appearance for “We Found Love,” in front of a crowd many Coachella veterans said was the biggest ever for a single set.

11:30: Absolutely. Mesmerized. By. Nosaj Thing. Thanks for being there.