It was conceived to help enable $750 million worth of long-delayed repairs and upgrades for the nation’s flagship public space.

Persistent rain couldn’t dampen the festivities in Columbia on Sunday, as Sweetgreen‘s Sweetlife Festival — held last year in a small Dupont Circle parking lot — graduated to considerably more impressive digs at Merriweather Post Pavilion. In most respects, the event was a definite success, as local music lovers balanced healthy salads with copious amounts of alcohol, cigarettes, and other less salutary indulgences while taking in an eclectic, entertaining string of performances highlighted by The Strokes’ long-awaited return to a local stage.

If you’re missing Crystal Castles’ sold out show tomorrow night at 9:30 Club, never fear. Sweetlife Festival announced its full lineup this morning, and the Torontonian duo will be there. So will Girl Talk. And Lupe Fiasco.

The folks behind Sweetgreen, the D.C.-based purveyors of locally-sourced salads and frozen yogurt treats, are hosting the second annual Sweetlife Festival on Saturday, April 30 — and this year’s festival features some major changes. Last year’s event was held in a parking lot in Dupont and featured a headlining DJ set by Hot Chip and performances by D.C.’s very own US Royalty and another band with DC roots, The Love Language. This year’s headliner? The Strokes. The venue? Merriweather Post Pavilion.

To cut through all the verbal foreplay and just get right to it, last night, Kings of Leon put on the best concert I’ve seen all year. Maybe even longer. Not since The Strokes at DAR have I seen a band so well-rehearsed and completely together. And the boys from Tennessee blew Mr. Casablancas and company out of the water. The set heavily favored older material, mainly bringing in songs from their most recent,…

When Telograph (***) played the Six Points Music Festival back in April, they were easily our favorite band in the festival’s Velvet Lounge lineup. We may have compared them to new-wave hipsters Interpol and The Strokes, but Telograph’s great live show made it difficult to categorize them simply as another “it” band. We’re happy to say that their upcoming EP Little Bits of Plastic justifies our initial impression: Telograph is a band to watch. Over…

By DCist contributor Abby Lavin Darlings of Oklahoma City’s glam rock scene (yes, apparently there is one), The Stock Market Crash have earned comparisons to David Bowie, Franz Ferdinand, and The Strokes. As much as we love those acts, being so ripe for comparison can be a red flag that the band is a rip-off. We showed up at TSMC’s show at DC9 last night looking to find out what sets them apart from, say,…

This week we saw more and more news on church parking, took a look inside the District’s restaurants, tried to find the region’s cheapest gas and celebrated the nation’s interstate system. We talked to Deleted Scenes and Alec Gross and the Districts, found some great roast beef, analyzed the region’s ubersexuals and took a stab at Jenna Bush’s new hairstyle. We remembered school lunches, reviewed the news in transit, and saw The Strokes at…

Yesterday the lineup for this year’s edition of the HFStival was announced and headlining the two day festival will be Kanye West and…Counting Crows? Kanye is a no brainer but the addition of Counting Crows, in a headlining slot no less, seems to be a curious one. The band hasn’t released an album of original material since 2002 and tends to have a fan base that skews much older than the Clear Channel approved…

While most of us here at DCist are still basking in the warm, awesomeness-infused light of Unbuckled, there are a few other things going on in the music world. As we’re sure most of you have already heard, the heralds of the hipster era, most commonly known as The Strokes, are bringing their First Impressions of the Earth tour to D.C. Dates have been added to this much anticipated tour slowly, but we finally got…