This Weekend: Black Keys, Snoop Dogg, Girl Talk, & Many More at Catalpa NYC Festival

The inaugural Catalpa NYC festival takes place this weekend.

There's a new festival in town, and it takes place this weekend: the Catalpa NYC Music Festival, featuring The Black Keys, Snoop Dogg, TV on the Radio, Matisyahu, Umphrey's McGee, Matt & Kim, and many more. The event takes place on Randall's Island, site of many other multi-day music events. And as you'll see from the lineup, Catalpa NYC blends rock, hip-hop, reggae, blues, and electronic music into one festival.

There are four stages, including a reggae stage that offers live music throughout the day. See the Catalpa NYC event info page for FAQs, full lineup, directions, venue map, and much more. Here's the lineup for the three main stages of Catalpa NYC:

Saturday, July 28th:
The Black Keys - 9:30 to 11 p.m.
Felix Da Housecat - 9:30 to 11
Umphrey's McGee - 8:30 to 9:30
TV on the Radio - 7:45 to 8:45
JDH+Dave P - 7:30 to 8:30
Umphrey's McGee - 6:45 to 7:45
Hercules and Love Affair - 6 to 7
Paul Favretti - 6 to 6:45
The Sheepdogs - 5 to 6
DJ Paul C - 4:15 to 5
Zola Jesus - 4 to 5
The Demos - 3:30 to 4:15
The Aviation Orange - 3 to 3:30
My Pet Dragon - 2:15 to 3
Q1043 winner - 1:30 to 2:15
The Rebel Light - 1 to 1:30

Sunday, July 29th:
Snoop Dogg (performing "Doggystyle") - 9:45 to 11 p.m.
Hellfire Machina - 9:45 to 11
A$AP Rocky - 8:45 to 9:45
Polish Ambassador - 7:45 to 8:45
Girl Talk - 7:45 to 9
AraabMusik - 6:45 to 7:45
Matt & Kim - 6 to 7
Hook N'Sling - 6 to 7
Matisyahu - 5:15 to 6:15
Cold War Kids - 4:30 to 5:30
Alex English - 4:15 to 5:15
Dirty Heads - 3:45 to 4:45
Paul Raffaele - 3 to 4
City and Colour - 3 to 4
The Big Pink - 2:15 to 3
Aunt Martha - 2 to 2:30
The Airplane Boys - 1:30 to 2
Bury Me a Lion - 1 to 1:30

Tickets are $100 for each day, or $180 for both. There are additional fees for ferry and parking options, but you can also take an MTA bus there (the X80 special event bus, $5.50 roundtrip, or less if you transfer from subway or bus with a pay-per-ride MetroCard). You can also walk or ride your bike across the bridge to Randall's Island.

I'll be going at least one of the days, thanks to the folks at the Village Voice (I won a Twitter contest about the Voice-sponsored 4 Knots festival). There are no heat waves, hail storms, or tornadoes forecast for this weekend, so the weather should be good to go. (Might be a little rain, but that's nothing compared to the stuff we've had to deal with so far this summer in the NYC area.)

If you're going to Catalpa NYC, enjoy and leave your comments below on how you liked it.

Coachella Announces 2012 Lineup; Expands to Two Weekends

Coachella fans, your wait is over: the lineup was announced last night for the festival's 2012 edition. For the first time ever, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival will be held over two consecutive weekends, April 12th to the 15th and April 20th to the 22th. What's more, the lineups are exactly the same for each weekend (all bands playing on the first Friday are playing on the second Friday. etc.).

You'll see the full lineup in the poster below, and some of it in this post below the poster. (Since the poster photo here is small, see the Coachella site and click on the poster graphic at the lower left corner to see a larger version.) Check out the Coachella 2012 lineup in alphabetical order, with social media links for performers, on the festival's lineup page.

Coachella 2012 has a strong lineup each day.

Headliners for Coachella 2012 will be the Black Keys on Friday, Radiohead on Saturday, and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg on Sunday. And the rest of the lineup is quite strong, too. Here's a brief look at some of the acts performing:

Friday: The Black Keys, Swedish House Mafia, Pulp, Refused, Arctic Monkeys, Mazzy Star, Afrojack, Explosions in the Sky, M83, Amon Tobin, Cat Power, Jimmy Cliff, Girls, and The Horrors.

Saturday: Radiohead, Bon Iver, the Shins, David Guetta, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds, Kaskade, Miike Snow, Jeff Mangum, Sebatian Ingrosso, Andrew Bird, Feist, Firehose, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, St. Vincent, SDTRKT, Kasabian, and Buzzcocks.

Sunday: Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, At the Drive-In, Justice, Florence and the Machine, AVICII, La Roux, Beirut, The Weeknd, Girl Talk, the Hives, DJ Shadow, Wild Flag, and Calvin Harris.

And those are just the acts listed on the top three of the six or seven lines on the Coachella poster. Other highly popular performers include groups that have headlines arena shows or have had well-reviewed albums that showed up on many "best-of" lists in 2011.

This includes Texas psychedelic rockers the Black Angels, the quirky Tune-Yards, British pop-folk singer Laura Marling, and the all-female Mexican garage-rock group Le Butcherettes, whose album "Sin Sin Sin" was named best of the year by Jim DeRogatis of the "Sound Opinions" music podcast.

It's not unusual for defunct bands to herald their return at big festivals, such as Rage Against the Machine did at Coachella a few years back. This year the much-admired post-hardcore band At the Drive-In, which split up more than a decade ago, announced its return with a new Twitter account (@AtTheDriveIn_).

Coachella is held at the Empire Polo Grounds in Indio, California. Tickets go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific time.