The animations on Sidemenu starter template are far from being smooth (besides the sidemenu itself).
You can see when you click on an item of the playlist and it loads the playlist.html page.
I found a strange behavior that makes these animations super smooth. Modifying the menu.html file to have no animation on the nav-view, adding nav-transition="none" to <button class="button button-icon button-clear ion-navicon" menu-toggle="left"> somehow makes the transition smooth and fast if you first click to open and close the sidemenu.
Maybe this can help the developers finding out what makes those transitions appear laggy.