The organizers of Saturday’s Virgin Mobile Free Festival saved the best for last. LCD Soundsystem — manifested onstage by brains-and-vox-of the outfit James Murphy-plus-six — closed down the sprawling 11-hour, three-stage, one-ferris wheel, no-T.I. music bazaar with an 85-minute blast of sweaty 21st-century dance-rock that felt taut and commanding after a long, discursive day. All dance tunes necessarily have a pulse, but Murphy’s have a heart, and they’re also wickedly funny. (Murphy was 22 when he turned down a job writing for Seinfeld. True!)

The now-40-year-old who launched his career (as a performer, anyway) with “Losing My Edge” — a hilarious, mostly-improvised monologue that skewers both youth obsession and insecure, know-it-all music snobs while an icy video-game beat grows hot and insistent over the course of eight minutes — dominated a lineup wherein none of the younger acts could touch him.

There was plenty of other thrilling music to be heard. 24-year-old Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews crossbred New Orleans jazz with soul and funk for an early afternoon hour while the sun beat down on the paddock in front of the West Stage. Reconstituted 90s layabouts Pavement, the objects of a fearsome quotient of man-love that has accumulated during their 11-year-absence, played a warm, lazy 19-song set, most of which I could recreate from the lone Pavement album in my collection, the Quarantine the Past best-of. Frontman Stephen Malkmus offered a kind of director’s commentary track on his own performance as it progressed, dryly observing at one point, “Wow, that kind of defined ‘meandering’ in a bad way.”