Best in fest: Five highlights from Best Friends Forever

It was a sentiment that pretty much defined the weekend.

“Don’t wanna mumble what I’m trying to say,” howled Cursive’s intensely animated frontman Tim Kasher, who carries himself like an exclamation point trapped in a man’s body. “I wanna scream it from my foaming mouth.”

Kasher’s words neatly encapsulated the vibe of the emo and indie rock Best Friends Forever music festival, which wrapped year two at the Downtown Las Vegas Events Center on Sunday.

Friday night, Cursive was the first band up after an hour-and-a-half rain delay, taking advantage of the crowd’s pent-up energy. They performed their seminal third record, the equally majestic and explosive post-divorce concept album “Domestica,” with Kasher inhabiting the songs like a method actor and indie rock’s hardest headbanging cellist, Megan Siebe, practically warring with her instrument.

“We did it!” Kasher beamed upon concluding the record, performing amid a steady drizzle that didn’t do their gear any favors. “And none of our equipment is really working at all.”

Could have fooled us.

On Sunday, Cursive returned to same stage and time slot to play their fourth album “The Ugly Organ,” a masterwork of barely-controlled chaos that downright overwhelmed live.

Take together, Cursive’s performances were among the festival’s best.

A few other highlights:

Homecoming queen

And now for something you don’t see at a Rilo Kiley gig very often — make that ever.

“I think that’s the only time I’ve seen crowd surfing at one of our shows,” frontwoman Jenny Lewis noted with a smile almost as wide as the stage she was standing on.

You could understand the crowd’s enthusiasm: the L.A. alt-rockers, who reunited this year after a decade-and-half hiatus, hadn’t played Vegas since 2007. They drew the biggest crowd of the weekend on Sunday.

For Lewis, it was a homecoming.

“I keep thinking of my parents having sex,” she shared. “I was born and conceived here.”

She then dedicated bittersweet waltz “Does He Love You?” to her mom and dad, who performed as Vegas lounge act Love’s Way back in the day.

Rilo Kiley’s catalog is magnificently all over the place, by turns rootsy and cosmopolitan, beatific and biting, Lewis’ voice going from breathy to booming as the band navigated concussive funk, plaintive folk, strains of doo-wop and a whole lot more during their fantastic hour-long performance, which came and went in a blur.

“Now some days, they last longer than others,” Lewis sang on the homespun “With Arms Outstretched.” “But this day…went too fast.”

So did this one.

Top Jimmy

“You can not waste a single night,” Jimmy Eat World frontman Jim Adkins sang for only the second time in 14 years.

The song was “Believe in What You Want,” a seldom played highlight of a special rarities set that the group closed the festival with on Sunday.

“We’ve been a band a real long time and we have a bunch of songs that haven’t played in a real long time,” Adkins said early in the show. “So here goes some of them.”

Jimmy Eat World then launched into “Clarity,” the title track of their third album, released in 1999, which they hadn’t played regularly in over a decade.

They also aired the slow-simmering “Table for Glasses,” which they’d performed only once since 2011, and a heart-racing “Call It in the Air,” which hadn’t been a part of the band’s setlist since 2003.

It was “Clarity,” though, that the band revisited the most, playing 10 of its tracks.

That album of polished, radio-ready emo was overlooked upon its release, though it proved to be a turning point in the band’s career.

To wit, Jimmy Eat World closed the show with their 2001 break-out hit “The Middle,” which they wrote after getting dropped from their previous label thanks to the poor sales of “Clarity.”

“Hey, don’t write yourself off just yet…” the first verse begins.

Saturday night’s alright for reuniting

J. Robbins’ guitar registers like an elbow to the face.

He often leans back on his heels when he plays, rolling his shoulder as if dodging blows, only to deliver them with his instrument.

On Saturday at the Third Street Stage, Robbins revisited Burning Airlines, the band he formed in 1997 after the dissolution of post-hardcore greats Jawbox. Burning Airlines did indeed burn bright — and briefly — calling it a day in 2002 after two albums.

But while this wasn’t a full-on reunion — Brooks Harlan subbed for original bassist Bill Barbot — the trio put the hammer down on 13 cuts from the band’s catalog nonetheless, Robbins’ dissonant guitar lines propelling the songs forward, adding torque and thrust to the their propulsive post-punk like the afterburners of a jet engine.

Burning Airlines capped a three-band run of stellar reunion sets on Saturday.

Prefacing them on the Third Street Stage was Midwestern emo quartet Hey Mercedes — coincidentally, Robbins produced their 2001 debut “Everynight Fire Works” — who were back at it after seven years, their radiant, power-pop-leaning songbook brightening the night in unison with the heat-lighting flashing across the sky as they played.

Next up on the main stage, New York City’s Texas is the Reason ended a nine-year absence with hard-charging post-hardcore performed with heads down, knuckles white, the band harnessing squalls of feedback and bulldozing bass lines into mushroom clouds of noise and melody.

“You still with us?” frontman Garrett Klahn wondered of the crowd at one point. “It’s been 30 years, man.”

He didn’t really have to ask on this night.

Jaw dropper

“You can dance to pain.”

So observed Jawbreaker frontman Blake Schwarzenbach during his band’s main stage headlining set on Saturday, where he gave the crowd plenty of angst and anxiety to shake a leg to.

”Watch this pot and it is sure to boil,” he sang during a show-opening “I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both,” turning up up the heat from song one.

That tune’s from “Dear You,” Jawbreaker’s fourth and final album, which sold modestly when it came out in 1995, leading to band’s break-up.

But it’s since grown into a genre touchstone — “Rolling Stone” ranks it #4 on its list of the 40 greatest emo albums ever — with Schwarzenbach’s soft scrubbed vocals and melodic savvy buying anthems of alienation, heartache and coming-of-age ennui.

It was the record that the band mined most heavily on Saturday, performing six of its tunes, including an adrenalized “Save Your Generation,” a song about growing up without getting old.

“There is plenty to criticize / It gets so easy to narrow these eyes,” Schwarzenbach sang. “But these eyes will stay wide / I will stay young, young and dumb inside.”

And really, that’s what this weekend was all about.

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.