Setting the stage for the arrival of Coldplay’s new album, “Viva la Vida,” the British group is making the first single, “Violet Hill,” available for free download for one week starting today, and has announced free concerts in London and New York City around the time the album comes out June 17.

The shows will be June 17 at Brixton Academy in London and June 23 at Madison Square Garden. Tickets will be available through a contest on the band’s website, which also will be the platform for downloading the single before it’s available from digital retailers on May 6.

The new album, the follow-up to Coldplay’s multi-platinum 2005 collection, “X&Y,” is widely considered one of the year’s biggest releases and was produced by Brian Eno and Markus Dravs.

- Randy Lewis

While Roger Waters floated the pig in the sky at the Main Stage, the Saraha dance tent gave shelter to the other Coachella that only wants to bliss out to chronic BPM overload and strobe-light ecstacy. Simian Mobile Disco, the British purveyors of analog concrete, provided an intriguing set that jumped between lush and austere. “It’s the Beat” from last year’s joyously titled “Attack Decay Sustain Release” was the cardinal number, building and then dissemenating several layers of keyboards before snapping back to taut squeals and hard beats.

Chromeo was 20 minutes late, which didn’t do my weary legs any favor. Perhaps that’s why their set didn’t quite charm me. These talkbox pranksters are a little like Prince if raised by robots, which is a fine place to start but Dave 1 and P-Thugg could use a little more meat on the bone, a little more social commentary. Chromeo, it’s good to borrow from Purple, but you should also borrow from Pink. That said, “Needy Girl” struck all the appropriate tangy notes.

But getting back to pigs for a second, it was revealed in a quick chat with Paul Tollett after Waters’ set that the pig, once it had served its time, had been cut loose and is out there floating somewhere, wherever the winds take it. Perhaps it’ll make an appearance over the 10 tomorrow, guiding us all back home.

–Margaret Wappler

Photo by Karl Walter / Getty Images

There was a nasty rumor circulating about a rape in one of the trailer bathrooms in the VIP area (one of our Soundboard writers, Jessica Gelt, even heard it directly from a uniformed security staffer), but according to Indio police spokesman Ben Guitron there was no report made or investigation underway.

Guitron said that, as of 10 p.m. on Sunday, there had been exactly 100 arrests, most for alcohol or drug offenses, at Coachella 2008. There were two on Thursday (when the campgrounds opened), 29 on Friday, 35 on Saturday and 34 on Sunday. There were no violent felonies reported. We expect to have numbers on injuries and other medical-tent stats shortly, but Guitron said there were no major incidents.

– Geoff Boucher

When the Coachella folks announced Roger Waters’ headlining slot tonight, accusations of a dad-rock coup ran rampant. In a world of albums known only through Rapidshare links and concerts experienced entirely through a camera lens for Flickr purposes, what kid is going to sit through two-and-a-half hours of back-to-front Floyd?

Well, judging by the morass of gently-crisped young things splayed on the lawn right now for Waters’ set, plenty of them. We asked a few what Floyd means to the Kids These Days, and if their dads would be pleased to see them gape-jawed at the Giant Pig all over again.

Ellis Marte, 18, from San Francisco: “I watched the Dark Side of Oz, so that’s how I know most of Floyd. I like it a lot, over the last four years a lot of kids got into classic rock. They think it’s cool again, especially kids who play music. They look to classic rock for inspiration.”

Caitlin R., 21, a USC student: “I texted my dad to tell him I’m here. He said he was jealous. Roger Waters proves that people who are older can rock out too. There’s a lot of new technology in music today, but there’s also a lot of appreciation for what this meant at the time.”

Vanessa Madrigal, 19, favorite band — Metric: “I think all the old people came just for this. I know Roger Waters but younger people don’t really listen to him. This sounds like it has a lot of emotion, we usually listen to more poppy stuff, but these lyrics are more deep.”

Kaitlin Binnewies, 20, Sacramento: “I’ve never heard any Pink Floyd, but I’m surprised it’s this good. None of my friends knew who [Waters] was. I think it’s great fun. It’s bringing all the people together, I feel there’s something for everyone here. ”

Bettine Nguyen, 20, Irvine: “The lyrics and stuff are really chill. I was here last year for Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rage, and this is so completely different.”

– August Brown and Jessica Gelt

“We’re going to take a little break,” Waters just announced just before the first in-set intermission in the history of the festival.

Related item: Waters is, at age 64, the oldest headliner in the annals of Coachella.

 – Geoff Boucher

On Saturday night, Prince was still playing when a sizable percentage of his audience started streaming toward the parking lot. On Sunday, some Coachella organizers were saying privately that one reason might have been the excruciating traffic jam on Friday night when a boneheaded blunder by some staffers had a key exit point closed when it was supposed to be open. 

The result: Some people sat in their cars for two hours before even getting out of the lot. “I think on Saturday night some people were just so burned by the night before that they left early,” one mid-level staffer said. ”I think it hurt Prince. On Saturday night the situation was much, much better. ”

– Geoff Boucher 

The new speaker towers that line the perimeter of the main stage were added specifically for the Roger Waters set that’s sending waves of thunder and shimmer across the Empire Polo Field right now.

Production-wise, the set by the Floyd auteur is the most expensive in festival history. Major pyro, smoke, lasers and huge screens showing slick montages of images from the Floyd dreamscapes. Oh, and backstage there’s an inflated pig the size of a school bus, and a floating astronaut.

Coachella founder Paul Tollett predicted this would jump to the top of his personal “best Coachella set ever” list, joining Rage Against the Machine’s reunion last year and Saturday night’s purple party with Prince. Classic rock at Coachella? When pigs fly.

– Geoff Boucher

The L.A. outfit Autolux (Eugene Goreshter and Carla Azar) play gauzy, inward rock held together by Azar’s steel-bolt drums. For their 5 p.m. set at the Outdoor Theater, when the sun pretty much morphed into a death star hell-bent on burning every exposed square inch of skin, Autolux held their own but didn’t wow the somewhat dazed crowd. At their best, these guys can sound like a long lost cut off of Sonic Youth’s “Daydream Nation,” but after so much mannered fuzz, you just want them to destroy something, take a bat to their own work.

Emily Haines, the passionate frontwoman of Metric, seems like the kind of girl who probably stained at least one diary page in junior high with a speck of her own blood (some sort of oath, surely). It’s that edgy, vulnerable quality that makes her a little scary and magnetic, a perfect singer to keep your eyes locked on. And how could you not when she’s wearing a silver one-shoulder leotard? If last year’s lady performer attire was the gauzy white dress, this year’s is the leotard.

Haines says the craziest stuff, especially when buying time during technical difficulties, such as this narc-baiting line: “Who’s a stoner? I think acid is coming back, I keep hearing about it.” Then she launched into a new song, “Satellite Mind,” tense and focused and a good sign that Haines has ironed out some of her inconsistencies. She closed with “Monster Hospital,” the paranoid disco-punk single off the album “Live It Out.” The five girls next to me, who sang every lyric to each other, couldn’t have been happier — one of them, wearing a tie-dyed toga, covered her sweaty friends in glitter, their own sticky, sparkly finale.

– Margaret Wappler

At first, you didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at Jason Pierce’s audacity. Spiritualized was mounting an acoustic show, with a lovely string section and everything, as the sun set on the Mojave Tent, at the time unfortunately flanked by thumping dance music. Ear-shattering feedback plagued the first couple songs, and it seemed a train wreck was imminent.

Spiritualized recovered with aplomb, finishing with a long stretch of sublimely beautiful pop. Anyone who witnessed the band’s recent shows at L.A.’s Vista Theatre knows the power of Pierce’s music to transport, and for nearly an hour Sunday, his two-thirds-full tent was a musical oasis.

All smiles afterward.

– Kevin Bronson

The last sound heard at My Morning Jacket’s Main Stage set was a garbled, terrifying shriek of voices, electronic glitching, bomb-raid guitar feedback and God knows what else. In an instant, it was the total sum of a set from a band that’s looking more and more like it can do absolutely anything.

MMJ shed all the stock “Southern Rock” comparisons on “Z,” which drew from sparkle-eyed disco and James Brown crackle as much as their grain-silo lonesome prairie-rock. The live album “Okonokos” documented the absolute monsters they are live. And if the cuts from their forthcoming “Evil Urges” are any indication, they may make those once-silly “American Radiohead” comparisons apt. The rhythms are sparse and more syncopated, nodding at deep soul and even hip-hop at points. The country songs are more romantic and spacious, and the rockers smoke harder than ever. The band’s been experimenting with electronica rhythms and samples that sound unexpectedly fitting in their high-lonesome wail, and Jim James has never been in better control of his freakishly athletic voice, which has the desperation of Otis Redding with an ethereal purity all his own.

As culture loses more and more faith in new rock bands’ ability to stir bodies, emotions, minds and radio plays at once, My Morning Jacket seems to be one of the only bands that can do each convincingly. No matter your cultural vantage point, MMJ alludes to it with Pentecostal fervor, but one run through with a sadness and majesty that maybe only the Good Book itself gets quite right. It might make them the best American rock band today.

– August Brown