After the Rain, a Night of Rock

Kings of Leon, who would have headlined Governors Ball on Friday before rain ended the night early, gave the event a rain date on Saturday night on Randall’s Island. The band squeezed onto the main stage just before Guns N’ Roses.

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” said Caleb Followill, the band’s singer and leader, after joking that Kings of Leon was back to being “just the opening band.” That made rock with guitar muscle even stronger on Saturday’s agenda at Governors Ball.

Kings of Leon, which played its sturdy, modernized Southern rock, is not flamboyant onstage. It just plays through the songs, letting the music â€" the grain of Mr. Followill’s voice, the breadth and drive of the riffs â€" carry the concert. It easily did: the unswerving beat (hinting at dance music) in “Knocked Up,” the buildup and U2-like “whoa-oh-oh” singalong of “Use Somebody,” the patient guitar meditation of “Closer,” the springy hint of ska and urgent lyrics of “Sex on Fire.” The band introduced what it said was a song it had never performed that reached back to the frenetic strumming of its early days when it was often compared to the Strokes.

In its performance, Guns N’ Roses brought the rock-star struts, rowdy fashion statements and pyrotechnics of 1980’s-vintage stadium rock. When Axl Rose first remade Guns N’ Roses as a band of sidemen rather than a group that had built its songs and career together, he ended up with sterile technicians. Now he has a band that reclaims nostalgia-enhanced memories of the band’s 1987-1991 heyday by expanding the lineup to hit even harder.

It has three guitarists â€" Ron (Bumblefoot) Thal, Richard Fortus and DJ Ashba â€" instead of two. It has two keyboardists â€" Dizzy Reed, the only link with the 1991 band, and Chris Pitman â€" instead of one. And its bassist, Tommy Stinson, and drummer, Frank Ferrer, share a wallop, sometimes underlined by fireworks onstage. The three guitarists can reach back to blues and soul, shred at top speed and play wailing hard-rock guitar-hero solos. Mr. Thal hardly lets a lead phrase go by without a pitch-bending wiggle of the whammy bar.

Guns N’ Roses did not reveal new songs. Its most recent album, “Chinese Democracy,” brought together nearly all of the current members but that came out in 2008. Yet they wrung all they could out of the older songs. Mr. Rose, whose high, electrocuted-tomcat wail gave Guns N’ Roses its edge, sounded oddly dulcet during the early part of the set. Then his yowl and screech returned.

The band filibustered the songs a bit â€" ”November Rain,” with Mr. Rose at the piano, got Pink Floyd and Elton John excerpts as a prelude and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” had extended guitar passages â€" and guitarists got to show off while Mr. Rose was backstage changing jackets, T-shirts and hats. Charging through songs like “Nightrain” and “Paradise City,” Guns N’ Roses delivered 1980’s rock excess, rowdy and unrepentant.

Governors Ball on Satuday also had a hip-hop contingent that was as triumphal as Guns N’ Roses. Nas, headlining on the other large stage doubled as the wise elder and current contender. He summed up the life of the urban ghetto with songs from his 1994 album “Illmatic,” and went on to explore pleasure and politics. Kendrick Lamar traded the self-questioning of his recordings for the shouting and cheerleading of live hip-hop; the audience happily supplied words whenever he gave them a chance. Azealia Banks, dressed in a cutout fluorescent garment, rattled off high-speed rhymes that flirted, boasted and picked catfights over throbbing, skittering tracks, while concert-goers pumped their fists.

There were other takes on rock through the day. Divine Fits, the band led by the songwriters Britt Daniel (from Spoon) and Dan Boeckner (from Wolf Parade), played songs in which each note, chord and word sounded chiseled. A set by the sardonic two-man Canadian punk band Japandroids was followed by the three-guitar surge of the Canadian punk band, its name not printable here, that is led by the singer Damian Abraham: flintiness followed by earnestness, sparseness followed by full-bodied blare (Mr. Abraham spent most of the set in the audience).

And there was another track, too: the patterned repetition of Minimalism. Animal Collective, whose set was cut short by equipment failure â€" the band said it got no sound check â€" spun its songs into dizzying, overlapping, euphoric incantations. Alt-J, from Britain, dug into the resemblance of folky picking and electronic ostinatos, mingling guitars and electronics. Dirty Projectors’ songs surrounded David Longstreth’s lead vocals with intricate, staggered, Minimalistic guitar and vocal lines. Moon Hooch â€" two saxophonists and a drummer â€" played a live version of dance music, with repeating riffs and excursions that always settled back into the beat.

There was more dance music, making Minimalist repetition functional as a physical force: from Icona Pop, two women who switched between harmonizing as vocalists and controlling the synthetic beats that backed them, and from Robert DeLong, a singer, songwriter and one-man band who uses electronic loops and controllers to back songs that are structured with the verses and choruses of pop.

The disc jockeys Paper Moon and Griz also applied dubstep’s cutting synthesizer tones and destabilizing bass lines to the blips of trance and electro (Paper Moon) and even, in Griz’s set, to oldies like “Tequila.”