Day two of this year’s Liverpool Psychfest kicked off in fine style with Newcastle’s The Glass Moths laying it on thick with their organ drenched, extended workouts. You have to make the effort to get in early to see the opening acts at these things, at least when you’re already in situ, and the rewards for the early birds were here today across all three rooms. Temple Songs tore it up in the Camp with their set very much being at the frantic, manic end of the psych spectrum whilst Rennes’ Sudden Death Of Stars were first on stage in daylight in the Furnace (a criminally early slot for a band this good) and wowed the lucky souls who’d made time for them with their sitar-infused, tambourine-heavy output.

Local quartet Strange Collective were next up at the Blade Factory, with their guitarist having just high-tailed it over from a wedding. Bringing to mind the Beta Band at times they plough a nicely fuzzed-up furrow when they get into their stride. Traams were then briefly witnessed back at the Furnace, leading to one of the weekend’s regrets that we’d not seen more of their thrillingly intense 30 minutes. By now most people had made it out of bed so upon heading back round the corner it was only possible to take in the fact that Cantaloupe had attracted a substantially larger crowd than saw them at Threadfest in May so things look to be going well for them. Islet rounded off the pre-dinner session for us back in the Camp (Nueva Costa were unfortunately a bit too weedy for us and a great amount of the other punters it seemed). Starting off by wandering through the crowd with handheld glockenspiels it was clear that the bigger venue afforded them the scope their ideas required to a better degree than witnessed at Long Division in the middle of the month.

Post-scoff our first stop was back at the Blade Factory but Cheval Sombre came across as being rather too much low-key acoustica for the moment so the visit was brief. Likewise Orval Carlos Sibelius, deemed “too Britpop” by Mr. Allen, got little of our attention in the same hall a couple of hours later. Far more up our street in the same space was Theo Verney, who can pretty fairly be hailed as a UK Ty Segall. As expected after seeing the band’s Long Division performance (albeit with I think a different bassist) they were ideally suited to the smaller and far more intimate confines of the Blade Factory, inspiring crowd surfing and general energetic movement amongst the front few rows of the audience. Big things should deservedly come the band’s way. September Girls were the final act we took an interest in at the Blade Factory but again we were at the tail end and so could see no more than the tops of their heads. Sound-wise though they were as expected from multiple listens to Cursing The Sea and far better than the moronic “Calendar Girls” comment made by some passing fool.

The larger two halls panned out for us largely as one LOUD and one quiet for the nighttime sessions. The Furnace hosted returnees The Lucid Dream whose thundering crescendo of sound & strobes provided one of the undoubted highlights of the two days but then things calmed right down with the harmonious sounds of Grumbling Fur, a solo-filled but rather straightforward set from Sleepy Sun who were hard to hear at the rear of the hall and were not the same exciting prospect as when last seen in Edinburgh a couple of years ago. Quilt, however, with their balance of male & female vocals were another highlight in a night that produced a few of those. Their light undimmed after a month on the road in Europe they were another oddly under-viewed act but pulled off a deeply affecting performance. Closing out our involvement with the Furnace came Woods, whose set featured all the songs you could have hoped for from Bend Beyond as well as a good dollop from current album With Light And With Love and their back catalogue.

The Camp therefore was clearly then the place to be if you wanted to endanger your hearing tonight. Lay Llamas enjoyed some of the best visuals of the day as their set wove, Live At Pompeii-like, from mesmerising to cacophonous. The backdrop technology failed for a short period during Anthroprophh’s set but by this point it was all about your ears as the pounding backbeat and extreme solos took on a physical form to churn your guts. Teeth Of The Sea took things further off down the track towards techno whilst simultaneously making excellent use of brass and maintaining the guitar solo quotient on a classic flying v. By this time the projections were of quite a menacing nature and the sound was flattening out the heads on the pints.

Gnod, augmented by Dave W. of White Hills, added further mayhem & madness to the already volume-laden atmosphere. Like watching Kim Fowley fronting space rock escapees from an off-world cult, the disparate Mancunian bunch elevated things to a whole new level of freakery. Who knows what they actually played – such things as discernible songs were no longer important by this point.

White Hills themselves were the final act of the night for me (so I’ve not a clue about the kerfuffle that apparently went off around the Goat show) and they topped off the entire event to perfection. Energetic, appreciative of the audience, waffle-free and fantastically overdriven the trio thrashed and fuzzed their way through to 01:30 as if their lives depended on it. The crowd were far to polite at the end to clamour for further songs (aware maybe for a change of event time constraints) but if any act that appeared here during the day’s 14 hours deserved an encore it was these guys. 

Our full set of photographs from this year's event can be viewed on Flickr.

Twelve months have wrought a few changes to the Liverpool International Festival Of Psychedelia. The Camp & Furnace venue now has a usable upstairs area, meaning there was a larger merch space and all food sales are now in the (fully cordoned off) exterior area, making for more audience space in the Furnace area. At least one more bar had been added inside as well as interior toilets, the Gents of which even had functioning sinks by day two. A lack of available tap water in the Blade Factory & the impossibility of bringing water bought on site back in whether opened or not were the only niggles across the weekend, other than those moans crowds always express about portaloos.

Most importantly the sound in the Furnace was vastly improved (i.e. clear & bright) from what was on offer last year. This made for thoroughly enjoyable sets in here on the Friday from Amen Dunes, the Allah-Las and the extremely youthful Pow! Amen Dunes’ expansive though Mogadon-strength sound benefited greatly from the space afforded them whilst the Allah-Las kind of went the other way, given that their sound is far more pop than psych and much lighter because of it. Pow! though were a riveting, short sharp punk blast to the system. Band names seldom come more apt.  

Our experience began though with catching the final couple of numbers in Spectres’ set in the Camp – a fitting introduction to proceedings given how fuzz-drenched their efforts were. Attendance was clearly up on last year (especially on Day Two) & this was nowhere more evident than in the Blade Factory. Whereas in 2013 you could more often than not wander in there at anytime during a performance and at least manage to see those on stage, let alone worm your way to the front of the crowd with not too much effort, this time around you were left craning your neck from back at the bar within less than a song’s length for practically every act.

As a result we heard far more of the filmic sounds of local act Barberos and the extended stoner wig-outs of Black Bombaim (like Spectres another perfect exemplar of the event’s core element) than we were able to catch sight of. Porto-based Jiboia, with their ethereal vocals allied to a Casio-&-kitchen-sink approach to their musical element, Proved very popular later on. Klaus Johan Grobe was the final act of the night in here, enjoying a dedicated crowd & a more intimate space than he was afforded last year which allowed for a greater appreciation of his work this time around.

As expected the light shows in all three performance spaces were of the high quality in evidence in the past. Whilst the oil employing effects seemed to have been handed over to machines in the Camp the projections at the rear of the stage were as retina defying as could be hoped for and the Furnace stage lights relied on far fewer eye level strobes, making for a less confrontational and more inclusive atmosphere. The Vacant Lots, The Early Years, Young Husband and The Besnard Lakes therefore all benefited from backdrops ranging from the sinister to the insane via the spaced out.

The Vacant Lots’ electronica-meets-original-rock ‘n’ roll sound was a big hit whilst London’s Early Years continued their return to live performance with as intense and motorik a set as you’d expect from these original pioneers of the capital’s resurgent krautrock scene an almost unbelievable eight years ago. Young Husband are more than just a pair of good sideburns – classic shoegaze influences were artfully melded with their own melodic leanings provided the perfect jumping off point for The Besnard Lakes to carry the crowd over from Friday to Saturday. What, after all, is there not to like about a band whose bass player sports an Iron Maiden guitar strap? Jace Lasek was clearly eager to get into it as the soundchecking compelled him to ball "quit fuckin' around an' let's do this!" Harshly described later as sounding like "late-Simple Minds with more bombast" theirs was a set of power & melody that left the lighter elements of their sound on the shelf for the duration. An uplifting climax to the opening day.