The event is now in its twelfth year
At half-past one in the afternoon, Manchester Academy 1 is close to capacity and Anna von Hausswolff is playing one of the loudest and most intense sets that the venue must have hosted all year.
The experimental Swede’s latest album is entitled Iconoclasts, a fitting term for somebody who, across an hour-long lunchtime set, finds room for both dark alt-pop and punishingly loud electronica, all whilst the audience are still wiping the sleep from their eyes.
This is Manchester Psych Fest in a nutshell; now in its twelfth year, it is beginning to look less like a one-day celebration of psychedelia and more like an attempt to cram a first-rate, weekend-long alt-rock festival into a single day. There is so much choice on offer across twelve venues that the only real issue are the clashes; it’s impossible to see everything you’d want to.
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This year, in its biggest expansion to date, the festival takes in not only the likes of the Academy, The Ritz, Projekts Skatepark and YES but also the 3500-capacity Apollo. Proceedings open there for the day with a set by Mercury Prize nominee Gwenno, who made the best album of her career, Utopia, last year. At Psych Fest, nothing is off the table, and so we hear songs both in her native Welsh and her ancestral Cornish; in the latter case, a charming folk song extolling the virtues of cheese. The real highlights, though, are the synth-pop cuts from Utopia, particularly the title track and closer ‘Dancing on Volcanoes’.
Once she’s finished, an already busy Apollo swells to close to capacity. Perhaps the real reason that the organisers needed a venue this size is the meteoric rise of Angine de Poitrine, who are surely the most unlikely musical success story for some time. The Canadian duo wear absurd masks, communicate with each other and their audience in a bizarre language of their own invention, and play weird, off-kilter math rock that ordinarily does not engender the type of reaction they got at the Apollo when the curtain rose at 5pm yesterday.
Which is to say that this reviewer has not heard so much screaming from a concert crowd since Taylor Swift at Anfield two years ago.
It is not just a case of style over substance, either; beneath the carefully-curated, polka-dotted image is a genuine machine of a band, who do so much with so little; guitarist Khn de Poitrine uses a loop pedal to extract taut, maddeningly catchy lines from his double-necked microtonal guitar, whilst drummer Klek de Poitrine possesses such a mastery of strange time signatures that you suspect that he might actually be an alien. Huge mosh pits open up for ‘Sarniezz’, ‘Fabienk’ and ‘Sherpa’; it does not feel like an exaggeration to say the Apollo has never seen anything quite like it in its 88-year history.
The early evening offers up any number of options; Psych Fest has become increasingly genre-fluid in recent years. At The Deaf Institute, though, Dreamwave are true to the festival’s name, a Bristol four-piece who play a storming set scored through with their own brand of psychedelia, one that meets at the junction of garage rock and dream pop.
A similarly difficult band to pin down in stylistic terms are Adult DVD, a Leeds six-piece who play one of the outstanding shows of the festival under the flyover at Projekts. It’s a relentless hour of furious punk meets electro, like LCD Soundsystem gone feral, and it bodes well for their long-awaited debut album, which finally arrives later this month. They are already big in Japan, unsurprisingly on this evidence.
A short stroll back to the Apollo sees one of the festival’s nominal headliners, The Beta Band, take the venue’s stage for the second time in eleven months. They packed it out last October as part of a first UK tour in twenty years; the crowd is thinner tonight, so stacked is the lineup, but they still play to a healthy crowd. They are the perfect band for this festival; clever, inventive, ostensibly an indie rock outfit but frequently drifting off into thrilling instrumental jams.
There is epic space rock (‘It’s Not Too Beautiful’) and atmospheric trip hop (‘Squares’), as well as the customary massive singalong for ‘Dry the Rain’, made famous by a scene from High Fidelity in which John Cusack plays its anthemic chorus over the speakers at his record shop, bewitching his customers into buying the band’s classic album The Three E.P.’s.
As midnight approaches there’s more heartbreaking decisions to be made. Todmorden’s own Working Men’s Club are debuting new material over at the Academy, and one of Manchester’s most exciting new bands, Martial Arts, are hitting the stage at The Deaf Institute’s Lodge.
Happening at the Ritz, though, is a show with a real sense of urgency; Mandy, Indiana are one of the great Manchester bands to emerge of late and their second album, Urgh, is one of the best of the year. They make pulsating, experimental noise rock that comes to life in searing fashion on stage, not least because of the commanding presence of vocalist Valentine Caulfield, who is on firebrand form, powerfully calling for a free Palestine and, particularly strikingly, railing against toxic masculinity on ‘I’ll Ask Her’ – the only song that Caulfield, who is French, has written in English.
The back half of the set feels like an exorcism of the world’s ills, as she jumps into a chaotic crowd still dancing twelve hours after they picked up their wristbands. It’s a fitting way to round off another triumphant year for this most vital of festivals.
