Crack

Back for its second year, Manchester's Parklife festival is already generating a buzz of as one of the North’s most reputable inner city festivals. Situated in Platts Field Park, a green space within the predominately studenty area Fallowfield, the crowd was an encouraging blend of kids embracing the end of exam mash up and older generation native Mancs, who strut around with a certain authority as veterans of the city’s rich party heritage.

Ambient post-dubstep duo Mount Kimbie warmed the day up with an afternoon slot. As the sun came out and the dampness from the mornings heavy rainfall evaporated, Kimbie provided the perfect soundtrack as they blended through the blissful, ethereal sounds of tracks from their album, Crooks and Lovers, and their recent Carbonated EP. Fervidly wacking away at V Drums and fiddling with a live electric guitar, Mount Kimbie performed with enough kinetic stage presence to keep the crowd transfixed throughout the hour long set.

The sound at the festival’s Main Stage was feeble and quiet throughout the day. Pretty much everyone, except those at the very front, had to endure the sound of muffled beats leaking from nearby dance tents. Suffering particularly badly from this were eccentric art-rockers Everything Everything, whose debut album Man Alive occasionally verges on brilliance, especially in songs like Suffragette Suffragette, when delicate melodies are embedded underneath jerky riffs and intricate time patterns. But here they sounded no different to the generic post-Franz indie bands which saturated the British music scene in the mid-noughties.

Later on, a massive crowd gathers at the same stage for Kelis. The sound team didn’t manage to crank up the volume and some of the diva’s tricks of hyping up the crowd feel kind of cheap, like teasing the audience with the intro of Tinie Tempah’s Pass Out only to cut into one of her lesser-known tunes. But when the inevitable happens and she eventually drops Milkshake, everyone goes absolutely ape shit.

Judging by the amount of people wearing plastic DOOM masks, the alternative hip-hop figurehead’s set was clearly one of the most eagerly anticipated performances of the day. But bizarrely, DOOM was booked to play a 6pm slot in one of the sites smallest tents. Due to shockingly poor sound, his set opener, the classic Accordion, was painfully anti-climatic, with both Madlib’s gorgeous beat and DOOM’s gravel voiced delivery and witty wordplay sounding pretty much incoherent.

DOOM and his hype man put out a lot of energy, goofing around and playfully tussling with each other on stage, but the audience reception was luke warm. In the later half of the set the sound cleared up a little allowing DOOM’s voice to pierce through the mush, but by this time the tent was visibly less packed.

For the festival goers looking for a place to rave, The Crosstown Rebels tent was the obvious destination. Featuring a mouth-watering line up including the likes of Art Department, Jamie Jones and the hilariously deranged Seth Troxler, the tent served as a station of relentlessly banging house and techno which was hard to peel yourself away from.

As the event officially finished at 11pm, the crowd poured out onto the streets of Fallowfield. But there didn’t seem to be a single person intent on going to bed. Whether it was at club, someone’s house, student halls, or outside a takeaway, everyone knew of an after party and Crack indulged. For an inner city festival still finding its feet, Parklife suffered, like may other inner-city festivals, with clear noise restrictions. Problems like this seem to consistently hamper the urban festival. But as a festival, the sharp line-up and inner-city variation of Parklife brought a host of big names together in musical unison.


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Words: David Reed

http://parklife.uk.com/parklife.php

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