Liverpool Sound City @ various venues, 1-3 May

Sound City, you’ve got a lot to answer for. As The Skinny emerges bleary-eyed from yet another instalment of Liverpool’s biggest ‘showcase festival’ (whatever that means), we reflect on the lack of sleep, the booze, the regrettable one-too-manies and we wonder: what exactly do we remember?

Well, Cleft for one: Manchester’s most affable mathletes get things off to a thunderous start on Thursday evening. They’re knowing when they need to be, and just plain loud the rest of the time, as opposed to the much-fancied Darlia. Their Nirvana dynamics go down a treat, and they’re pretty close to being decent, but the longer you stare at the gap between ‘yeah, s’alright’ and ‘superstardom beckons’, the more it seems like a yawning chasm. Much more reassuring is the very lovely Gruff Rhys, whose pastoral ballads come replete with a Powerpoint presentation, just in case you were struggling with the themes of his new record.

Elsewhere, Rosie Lowe’s smoke-damaged soul, The Wytches’ bad-trip psych and Jon Hopkins’ effortless sense of tension and release come up trumps, but the day belongs to the tunbling garage stylings of Courtney Barnett. Her lucid slacker ramblings – part Lou Reed, part You Are Free-era Cat Power – set hearts-a-racing and feet-a-moving, and when they’re not charming, they’re positively delightful.

Hooton Tennis Club set Friday in motion in a pleasantly laconic, Flying Nun-referencing fashion, ahead of things getting a lot louder thanks to Korean trio Asian Chairshot, whose bare-footed, yodel-punctured heaviness lurches all over the place and sets the stage rather nicely for the pretty-neat Vault of Eagles. Somewhere between PJ Harvey’s moody blues and QOTSA’s swamp-drenched riffola, they deserve far better than the paltry few that turn out for ‘em.

So off we head to the Cathedral to watch Albert Hammond, Jr delight the assembled throng with his rather un-Strokes-y oeuvre. Very slick, very pro, very… well, whatever. Somebody boot him back into his garage, please. In any case, the day’s best crowd reaction goes to Wolf Alice – experts in grace, thrillingly intricate verses and the odd guitar squall here and there. Nothing as troublesome as, say, a proper chorus, but it’s a darn good show.

There’s little left to do but soak in the brutal fuzz of Royal Blood and dance ourselves silly to The Hold Steady, still the world’s greatest purveyors of beer-raising hijinx. Oh, OK, there’s the ashen fabulousness of Factory Floor’s mesmeric industrial house, which sends us into delirium before we finally have to crash out, exhausted.

So what will Saturday bring? All-out phenomenon from the reformed Radiophonic Workshop? Devo-informed herks’n’jerks courtesy of Leeds’ finest Cowtown? All of this and more, it turns out.

Embers are The Big Music on steroids, compressed into four-minute boulders that seem destined to be catapulted on to bigger stages before too long. God Damn also deal in volume, albeit of the thrillingly metallic kind, while new local experimentalists Apres-Ski dazzle with drizzled improv genius. There’s no doubt that Public Service Broadcasting have a good gimmick: all those rickety information film reels and narrative samples add up to an inauthentically retro chutzpah. It’s all gimmick, of course, but that’s enough for now.

All that’s left is for the magnificent Big Ups to bring Sound City to a close with their manic take on vicious post-punk. Their thoroughly noisy set climaxes with frontman Joe Galarraga diving into the swell of the mosh pit, the rest of the band feedbacking and laughing in a pile on the stage floor. Wonderful.