Rap Rock and Music

The All Points West Music and Arts Festival aimed at separate sides of the brain for the first two of its three days at Liberty State Park here. Friday, headlined by hip-hop from Jay-Z and rock from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Vampire Weekend, was for the left brain: verbal, analytical, conceptual. Saturday, featuring rock from Tool and My Bloody Valentine and Gypsy-punk party music from Gogol Bordello, was for the right brain: intuitive, holistic, more attuned to sound than to messages.

Friday was full of cleverness and constructed personas. (Its three headliners, along with the rappers Q-Tip and Organized Konfusion and the rock band the National, are all New Yorkers.) Saturday, from the three guitars and two drum kits of ... And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead in early afternoon to the pounding, droning, churning finale by Tool, was about reveling in the power of noise.

It was the second annual All Points West, the East Coast project of Goldenvoice, which produces the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. The event, which was accessible from Manhattan by efficient ferries, is a work in progress.

Stages have been moved since last year but still aren’t ideally situated. Performers on the midsize Bullet Stage had to compete with sound from the main stage (the Blue Comet) as well as from a dance-music disc jockey nearby and from a sponsor’s speakers. Magnificent views of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline were given only to the performers and the video cameras behind them; audiences faced away from the water. Prime viewing areas and the paths between stages became mud pits after the deluges, something Coachella doesn’t have to worry about in the California desert.

Saturday’s concert was, literally, a blast when My Bloody Valentine performed. Its songs, which once layered distortion atop three-chord songs and lovesick lyrics, have turned even noisier since the band reunited last year. Unfortunately at All Points West vocals and melodies were almost completely buried in the exhilarating surge of chords. As usual at a My Bloody Valentine set the music culminated in a sustained roar — about 14 minutes long — as the full band strummed and pummeled the instruments on a chord dissolving into cacophony in “You Made Me Realise.” It conjured some elemental cataclysm, a purely visceral rock experience.

Tool, by contrast, had mapped out every jolt in its music. While video screens showed creepy, death-white anthropoids in constant metamorphosis, Maynard James Keenan sang with baleful melancholy about dread, fury and desolation over music that clanged and churned, melding hard-rock brawn and progressive-rock precision in gorgeous bitterness. St. Vincent, led by the guitarist Annie Clark, had its own eruptions of noise as Ms. Clark’s enigmatic pop songs, tinged by turns with 1960s whimsy and minimalistic patterns, rode upheavals of distortion from her guitar.

Performers facing soggy crowds on Friday worked hard to entertain. Jay-Z was a last-minute replacement for the Beastie Boys; one member of the group, Adam Yauch (a k a MCA), needed surgery for cancer of the salivary gland. But Jay-Z brought his full tour production, including a band complete with rock guitar and horn section, his sidekick Memphis Bleek and a video display with montages of his rise from the Marcy Houses projects in Brooklyn to his current status as a hit maker and mogul.

It’s a triumphal tale that Jay-Z delivered with fastidious variations of meter, vocal tone and backup, whether he was keeping rap-rock alive or bouncing syllables off an exotic sampled vocal. He started the set graciously: rapping the Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.”

Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs displayed the words “Get Well MCA” on her arm throughout her band’s set, while other adornments came and went: a glittery shawl that she wrapped around her face like a burqa, a black jacket with “KO” on the back in studs. Although the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ lyrics sometimes hint at strife, loss and longing, the songs were outright romps, with Ms. O skipping, strutting and twirling across the stage. The band socked out its grooves, switching frequently between its older post-punk guitar riffs and its newer synthesizer pulses, and Ms. O was all smiles. “It’s not wet enough up here!” she cackled.

Vampire Weekend remains nerdy and proud of it. In crisp, perky new wave tunes with an occasional hint of African guitar for embellishment, Ezra Koenig sings about collegiate characters, and a few songs that weren’t on the band’s debut album didn’t stray far from it; one was called “Ladies of Cambridge.”

Tucked into Friday’s lineup were two reunited hip-hop groups from the 1990s: Organized Konfusion, in its first performance in more than a decade, and the Pharcyde, which has been reconvened for a few years.

Organized Konfusion, the duo of Prince Po (from “poetry”) and Pharoahe Monch, was a connoisseur’s hip-hop group. Though it was never a commercial success — the reason, Prince Po suggested onstage, was that its songs were “too intelligent and too crazy” — its albums raised the ante on complexities of meter, rhyme schemes and wordplay. Prince Po’s voice has grown raspier, yet both rappers were bouncing syllables every which way in rhymes that were smart, funny and telling — like “Stray Bullet,” written from the bullet’s point of view. Unfortunately pelting rain kept the reunion’s audience sparse.

The Pharcyde’s easygoing beats and earnest aspirations — “I want to kick something that means something,” its members rapped — were neatly performed but soon overshadowed by the rapper who was next on the bill: Q-Tip, whose old group, A Tribe Called Quest, was very clearly Pharcyde’s model.

Friday also featured pensive rock from the National — with elegantly constructed, slow-building songs of disillusionment — and smart, sullen rock from Cage the Elephant, which revs up its sardonic frustration to the verge of hardcore. Friday’s lineup also included the festival’s demographic anomaly: Seasick Steve, a bearded, grizzled, foot-stomping slide guitarist born in 1941 who sings about his life as a hobo, although he also (as Steve Wold) produced indie-rock for Modest Mouse in the 1990s. In recent years he has become a festival regular in England, and a song about running away at 14 from an abusive stepfather — an accelerating, John Lee Hooker-style boogie — had the All Points West audience cheering.

In a more rigorous left brain/right brain separation All Points West might have scheduled Fleet Foxes — who reveled in wordless, cascading vocal harmonies — Saturday. And it might have moved Kool Keith — a rapper with off-the-wall rhymes and multiple personas, including the raunchy Dr. Octagon — to Friday. Ice-T, a fan, joined him onstage, rapping along with Kool Keith and stepping forward for a little gangsta rap of his own.

Sunday’s scheduled headliners were Coldplay and Echo and the Bunnymen. Perhaps, after the left-brain and right-brain stimulation, their kind of romantic pomp was meant for the heart.