Upon ascending The Zoo’s staircase, the pleasant melodies of multi-membered local folk group The Gin Club are evidently an enticing prospect for the considerable crowd of earlybirds at St Jerome’s Laneway Festival. It’s a strange sight to see every corner of The Zoo bathed in the first day of autumn’s brilliant sunlight, filtering in through the window. Frontman Ben Salter announces defiantly that they’re only playing “new songs” today, from their album Junk. “It’s actually a double album!”, adds another Club member with barely-contained excitement. They each have every reason to be proud and excited for the year ahead: the fruits of their labours sound cohesive, memorable and above all else, damned enjoyable. After a couple of comparably heavier tunes, Salter remarks with a grin that the band has “almost unanimously dropped acoustic guitars for epic space-rock jams”. Whatever their direction, the large audience of friends and fans in attendance – many of whom are sampling their first imported beer of the day – will undoubtedly follow.

The first international band on the Car Park Stage, Manchester Orchestra, sound just as tight as their Clap Your Hands Say Yeah support set two nights ago. Singer Andy Hull constantly reminds the crowd that they’re from Atlanta, Georgia, as if to dispel any geographical misconceptions. Tracks from 2007’s I’m Like A Virgin Losing A Child go down a treat, as the sun thankfully retreats behind clouds for much of their set. Keyboardist Chris Freeman shows rhapsodic passion for the dramatic sounds being produced all around him, as he alternates between seated headbanging, tambourine thrashing and backup yelling duties – which may or may not have been a product of courage in powdered form, according to eyewitness accounts closer to stage. Five-minute opus I Can Barely Breathe is the pièce de résistance amid an entertaining set that ends with the sombre, emotive Where Have You Been?. Bubbles are blown into the air from the midst of the crowd, who show their appreciation for the band’s first tour of Australia.

Right next to the Outpost Stage is an indoor cinema, consisting of a sloped room facing a large screen that displays a live feed from the stage during bands, and Michel Gondry videos seemingly all day in between. The on-site bar and utterly chilled atmosphere combine to create an area I’d rarely leave if I didn’t have bands to see elsewhere. Inflated pool toys, cushioned milk crates, couches and helium balloons adorn the open space; aside from the ever-present sound of breaking glass at the bar area, it’s the perfect (and often-populated) area of choice for shaded recluse from the outside heat.

The Vasco Era are that rare kind of band that almost defy description in the live arena. Sid O’Neil spends most of his time onstage after I Heart Hiroshima, warming up his vocal chords and carefully tuning (and re-tuning) his Fender steel guitar. He eventually looks up, greets the crowd with a grin and asks if they’d like to hear Bob Dylan or Elvis. My shouts of ‘Elvis!’ are in vain; his treatment of Can’t Help Falling In Love (With You) is phenomenal, but alas. O’Neil strums through Dylan’s Girl From The North Country, before his bandmates – drummer Michael Fitzgerald and bassist-brother Ted O’Neil – join him onstage to tear through tracks from last year’s J Award-nominated Oh, We Do Like To Be Beside The Seaside. Picture three hairy dudes from Apollo Bay, Victoria absolutely throwing themselves into their gloriously ugly blues-rock and you’re not even close to what The Vasco Era represent live. Their set evolves from lukewarm to supernova-hot over the course of their allotted 45 minutes.

“Let me just drink this beer, then we’ll have a little party,” proclaims Sid, who responds to the crowd’s chant to ‘scull!’ before launching into When You Went. An anonymous friend joins them onstage to play guitar, and later – during the deliriously shambolic set closer Honey Bee – to thump the bejesus out of an onstage tom. The blood pouring from the back of his head – the result of Ted’s wayward bass headstock – is similar to that flowing from Fitzgerald’s busted knuckles, as his drumming continues to shake the stage and lighting fixtures with reckless abandon. A drumstick splinters off into the crowd, most of whom are torn between cheering and seeking shelter from the blues-rock hurricane onstage. Allow me to summarise this glowing review in a blunt manner: next time The Vasco Era play in your town, your attendance is compulsory. They are one of the strongest live acts in the country, and the knowledge that their incendiary performance today only spread the Vasco-awareness brings a huge grin to my face. Truly, one of the sets of the festival; days later, I’m still shaking my head at the brilliance of it all.

The dense crowd facing the Car Park Stage is visual proof of the newfound pulling power of Perth’s The Panics. Three albums into their career, they’re now the recipients of accolades and popularity that I knew they deserved several years ago, after hearing This Day Last Year on Triple J. While watching them – from a great distance – open with Something In The Garden from 2007’s Cruel Guards and follow with My Best Mistake, I make the personal realisation that I’ll never again see them in a small venue. Of course, such a transition has been apparent for months – they’ve only gotten bigger since their sold out Zoo show last November – it’s just a little confronting to see their popularity before my eyes in the form of thousands of newfound fans. I mentally wish The Panics the best of luck in the future endeavours, before turning my back on them and walking toward the Outpost Stage.

The stony faces of this Melbourne four-piece for their first few songs gives the impression that they’d rather be elsewhere. Thankfully, Damn Arms soon lighten up while splicing new tunes amid older material like Test Pattern and The Cormorant, the latter of which stands among the best tracks to emerge from the relatively new Australian electro-rock movement. It’s simply six minutes of noisy bass-driven, synthesiser-infused brilliance. Simon Parker must be commended not only for his extremely active skinwork, but for sharing a cigarette with his side-of-stage sound technician mid-song. Tim Sullivan tentatively leaps out onto the speaker stack, bass in hand, before retreating to the microphone and deadpanning his dedication of The Not So Progressive Punks to “the cops that we saw earlier, watching a guy dig a hole.” Special mention to the disgustingly hilarious moustache of keyboardist and vocalist Yama Indra, and the filthy moustache-in-the-making of guitarist Ian Jackson. Their new material is sounding more and more like the Midnight Juggernauts, but since they’re taking the rest of the year off to write and record I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that they can produce a follow-up as original and impressive as last year’s debut, The Live Artex.

The Car Park Stage is less densely-populated following the conclusion of The Panics, but not by much: it seems most in attendance are long-term fans of Okkervil River or new converts via word of mouth. They play a set heavily geared toward their fifth and latest album, The Stage Names, which satisfies a pedestrian fan such as this reviewer just fine. Singer Will Sheff breaks the G string on his acoustic guitar soon after they take the stage, but he’s having such a great time that he doesn’t care for a replacement. The cheery disposition is certainly contagious across stage: smiles from fellow band members are reflected throughout their large audience. Indeed, the vibe while standing in the middle of the crowd is excellent: everywhere I look, there’s people laughing, singing along or just plain enjoying themselves. Awesome. Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe, For Real and Unless It’s Kicks are the only tracks I recognise, and they’re all delivered with fervent passion and absorbed with glee by the adoring audience.

United States hip-hop duo Cool Kids were generating a great buzz over at the Outpost Stage before I’m whisked away, though I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were holding back much of their energy for their afterparty at Barsoma. Over at the Car Park, Canadian six-piece indie pop outfit Stars have a decent swell singing along to their lush instrumentation and emotive lyrics. I’m only familiar with 2007’s In Our Bedroom After The War, which is well-represented during the latter portion of their set that I manage to catch. The shared vocal duties of Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan combine on tracks like The Ghost of Genova Heights and Take Me To The Riot to provide a pleasant soundtrack as the sun retreats below the horizon.

The unashamedly 1960s-styled pop of Little Red on the Outpost Stage is the first performance to welcome in the night. Spotlights scan the laneway’s facades as the crowd joyously responds to the Melbourne five-piece’s offering of wholly enjoyable, almost child-like songwriting. It’s hilarious to watch punters trekking across from the comparably morose instrumentation of Canadian indie rock supergroup, Broken Social Scene: they instantly pick up on the clean guitar, funky bass and tambourine, and start grinning and dancing wildly. The band themselves play the part extremely well, dressed in matching white business shirts. You couldn’t beat the smile from the face of Taka Honda as he watches his bandmates four-part vocal harmonise from behind his kit. Triple J hit Waiting receives a huge response, and provides one of the night’s unexpected highlights. Little Red have recognised their niche and capitalised upon it; walking away from the Outpost Stage, the chorus of Coca Cola is lodged in my brain: “my one and only advice is coke, coca cola and ice.” Pure fun.

The difference between the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah performance I witnessed on Thursday night and at the Outpost Stage tonight is surprising. Put it down to greater crowd interaction and appreciation rather than any noticeable musical improvement; whereas it took the crowd at The Zoo most of an hour to warm to the band, the audience here tonight is with them from the first guitar riff and tambourine rattle of Heavy Metal. Singer Alec Ounsworth introduces a few surprise Broken Social Scene guests, first during the pounding, bass-heavy Satan Said Dance and later during the smooth progression of In This Home On Ice. The impressive onstage lighting system is put to full use for the first time tonight: watching hundreds of LEDs shimmer while singing along to the synthesised refrain to By The Skin Of My Yellow Country Teeth with most of the crowd is one of the festival’s greatest moments.

Immediately following the conclusion of that fantastic song, many punters scamper over to the Car Park Stage on a hope and a prayer that Feist hasn’t yet performed the infectiously catchy tune written by her friend, New Buffalo. Alas: we’re crestfallen to discover not only that 1234 has already been played, but it’s damned near impossible to hear anything from the stage from a distance. We’re surrounded by festival-goers chatting and laughing; for all we know, Feist and her band could be playing a wicked cover of Khe Sahn and we’d be none the wiser. I’m informed that there were power outage issues during the Broken Social Scene set earlier, and sound techs were still trying to solve the problem while the show went on. Tough times.

It’s now time for perhaps the most glaring timetable clash of the festival: while electro-heads with dilated pupils push for prime Presets positions at the Outpost Stage, those with artier tastes head for the Car Park Stage to witness Gotye in solo mode. The stage is again marred with sound problems for much of his set; the output receives a stark increase in volume around the half-way mark, prompting the crowd to cheer and the hapless side-of-stage sound tech to throw his hands in the air. From the outset, it was a tall order for one man with a sense of humour, his laptop and a stack of drums to keep the crowd entertained, yet Gotye – for the most part – succeeds. There were extended periods where, while looking around the crowd, the shared sentiment of ‘boredom’ was all but tattooed on the foreheads of hundreds of those facing the stage. If Gotye didn’t have such damned good songs, he’d be in real trouble.

After opening with The Only Way, wherein he switched regularly between keyboard, drumkit and bongos, Gotye ran through most of 2006’s Like Drawing Blood, largely to the satisfaction to the crowd. He proceeded to mash up Faux Pas’ mash-up of Get Acquainted after donning a fake moustache and sunglasses, and throwing in an amusing MC Hammer breakdown; still, it was an uphill battle to win over the mostly passive crowd. The set finally hit a peak during a moving performance of The Only Thing I Know, which highlights Gotye’s fantastic drumming talent and emotive lyrics. He delivers an anecdote about the Adelaide leg of the festival, where he made some girls cry after “forgetting” to play Hearts A Mess – “Adelaide gets short-changed once again!”. The co-festival headliner frustrates once more by performing a non-standard version of his most-loved song that’s short on choruses, meaning that the crowd barely gets a chance to sing along to the song that Gotye admits “doesn’t even feel like mine anymore”. Seven Hours With A Backseat Driver concludes an unfulfilling set that didn’t come close to satisfying this reviewer’s expectation of a headlining slot: hell, if nothing else, I’m willing to bet that The Presets would have been fun.

Minor quibbles and technical issues aside, Brisbane’s 2008 Laneway was an undoubted success. I’m all the more appreciative of a well-organised and catered-for event after attending the travesty that was the Brisbane Soundwave show the weekend before. At Laneway, the bars were numerous, efficient and well-stocked; the security was adequate (read: barely seen and certainly not required as crowd moderators); the layout of the stages eliminated most instances of sound pollution between bands, and most importantly, the audience themselves were friendly and generally thrilled to be in attendance. Fans of the broad sub-genre of independent music were spoilt for choice among this year’s varied line-up. There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction gained after spending a day witnessing talented musicians in their element, and in this manner, St Jerome’s Laneway Festival decidedly delivered.