Phantogram Dazzle Roots Picnic w/ A "Mouthful Of Diamonds" Live + Full Picnic Video Recap

Phantogram photographed by Seher Sikandar for Okayplayer.

If you were at Roots Picnic 2015 you already knew Phantogram cast a spell on the crowd with their moody, unique brand of indie psyche-pop, for lack of a better genre term. Really, their sound is more noise than psyche. Yet their touch with fuzz, feedback and distortion is so seductive, their compositions so darkly melodic that the end result is hypnotic rather than aggro. This live rendition of "Mouthful Of Diamonds" is a brilliant case in point; glitchy keyboards and a paradoxically soothing bed of grunge-guitar drone dissolve into a lullaby so sweet and sad that by the time they got to the Edge-influenced guitar trill under the refrain of "Mouthful of diamonds / pocketful of secrets..." you can almost hear the capacity crowd of 6000-plus Philly fans hold their breath, afraid to break the song's fragile beauty into a million pieces.

Of course you had to be there to experience how revelatory a moment like that can feel in the midst of the day-long musical riot that is Roots Picnic, a marathon of twerking and fist-pumping to the likes of Rae Sremmurd's headbanging indie trap and The Weeknd's arena-sized gothic r&b set, complete with psychedelic encounters-of-the-turnt-kind light display. Here at Okayplayer, however, we are all about providing context for the tantalizing bits of musical goodness that turn up in the online space. So we went ahead and included our full video recap of the outta control epic-ness that unfolded before, after and to the left of Phantogram at Roots Picnic 2015...so now you can get a vicarious hit of the day's frenetic energy and up-full vibes, from Moses Sumney's opening a capella call to prayer, to a bird's eye view (we got drones n' shit) of Erykah Badu letting her hair down in a knock-down drag-out set with these cats called The Roots. Once you've gotten yourself into the proper brainframe with all that, press play on "Mouthful Of Diamonds" and prepare to be dazzled the way we were. Watch below, and expect more breakouts and highlights of Roots Picnic 2015 to come soon--we have not yet begun to funk.