Made in America: Day 2 starts sunny, battles the rain

"Here we go, Chilladelphia."

So said Kenny Vasoli of Vacationers as the band kicked off Day 2 of the Budweiser Made in America musical block party on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia.

Sunday promised lots of music, as long as the rain held off. And while a brief early downpour did not deter fans of weather-delayed rapper Danny Brown, a storm did force suspension of the festival around 6:15 p.m. Would Made in America return? Gates reopened around 7 p.m. The curfew was extended to midnight, and a new set list was announced to accommodate the night's biggest acts: Pharrell Williams, Tiesto, and Kings of Leon.

To go back to that sunny start ... people were still buzzing about the closing act the night before: the commanding presence of Kanye West, who played a mesmerizing, indiosyncratic, explosive set - without, however, the appearance of much-hoped-for MIA curator and sometime touring partner Jay Z.

Besides the weather, anticipation focused on lead acts such as Dutch DJ Tiësto and festival closer Kings of Leon. There was some worry KOL drummer Nathan Followill could drum, since he was busted up in an accident not too long ago.

Aside from that, it started off sunnily indeed, with Vacationer.

'We've been waiting all summer for this, Made In America," said Vasoli of the Brooklyn/Philadelphia "nu-hula" smooth-grooves band, as he got ready to kick off the action on the Liberty Stage. Wearing a '70s throwback Phillies baseball cap and a Dr. Dre Chronic T-shirt, the Abington native and supremely chill dude fronted a five-piece band that shimmied and shook with a mix of traditional guitar-bass-drums instrumentation, programmed beats, and perky xylophone accents. Pulling from the band's beachy second album, Relief, the quintet excelled at creating an aural oasis right there on the Ben Franklin Parkway blacktop. Vasoli, 30, cut his teeth with the long-running local emo band The Starting Line; with Vacationer, he's found a fresh outlet ideally suited to the summer festival season.

Over on the Skate Park Stage, Sunday began smartly, with Brooklyn indie rockers MisterWives. They played an exotic brand of rock with subtle hints of Romany and Japanois.

They brought an already simmering afternoon to a rapid boil with "Imagination Infatuation," a brassy jam.

Brazen reheaded singer Mandy Lee has an intriguing voice, somewhere between Karen O and Björk.

"We were expecting 10 people," she enthused to a growing crowd. "This is awesome."

MisterWives' live act was far jauntier than their atmospheric debut EP Reflections might suggest.

Later, on the same Skate Park Stage, it was an all-Philly affair in the early afternoon, with the bouncy pop songs of Cruisr (recently signed to Vagrant records) giving way to Nothing, Dominic Palermo's dream-pop project, which debuted on Upper Darby metal label Relapse Records this year with Guilty of Everything. At MIA, the band's set, delayed by sound problems at the start and plagued by more midway through, nonetheless succeeded in building shrieking, squealing songs that layered dreamy vocals under sheets of noise while moving momentously forward toward a galvanic finish.

New York band Bleachers opened with "Wild Heart," a song that might have been written for the occasion. "They closed the Parkway late last night," goes the first line.

The band, the side project of Fun guitarist Jack Antonoff, delivered a rich rock sound with a lot of shake, rattle, and roll folded in. On go-for-broke songs like "Rollercoaster," they could have passed for a Jersey Shore band at a last-night-of-the-season gig.

It was all prelude to their big wheels anthem "I Want to Get Better," on which their two-drummer array really paid off. Hate to say it, but this was more fun than Fun.

Kongos, who played on the Liberty Stage, is a group made up of four brothers from Phoenix by way of their native South Africa. They are four sons of John Kongos, the South African rocker who hit the U.S. charts a couple of times in the 1970s (think: "He's Gonna Step on You Again"). The family connection may partly explain their sound, which is tighter than shrink wrap. They play an infectious brand of whatever passes for swamp boogie in Johannesburg.

Of course they add their own alien elements. On "Kids These Days," Johnny Kongos delivered what must have been the festival's first accordion solo. And it was pretty avant garde.
Kongos' full-tilt approach recalled Philly rockers Marah. "I'm Only Joking" rolled on a thundering Adam and the Ants beat.

Oddly, the brothers seemed least enthused about playing their finale, the breakout hit "Come With Me." Fortunately, it's an aural landslide of a song that doesn't require much enthusiasm to produce its fierce impetus.

It's lucky the Liberty Stage wasn't in use after their performance. Kongos are an impossible act to follow.

The rain started to fall as Danny Brown's time slot came up on the Liberty Stage Sunday afternoon. (Reader, my iPhone screen is getting wet as I type this.)

The other notable thing about the start of the Detroit rapper's set: Brown wasn't anywhere to be seen.

Instead, a DJ who seemed to have migrated from the EDM Freedom Stage entertained the perfectly happy, bouncing-around-in-the-drizzle crowd with a selection of skittering, kinetic beats. Perhaps Brown had gone AWOL with AWOLNation, the act scheduled to follow him on the Rocky stage?

Nope, that wasn't it. In good time, Brown bounded out in green and black hair, a beanpole of a live presence, bouncing about the stage like a joking jack as he delivered his hyperspeed Donald Duck-voiced raps like "Smoking and Drinking" and "25 Bucks" with great enthusiasm.

The DJ, it turned out, was Skywlkr, Brown's regular touring accompanist, and while he indeed could have been mistaken for an EDM rather than a hip-hop specialist, he instead served as perhaps the best example at Made In America of how the genres have blended together, with hip-hop artists acting as sonic sponges and soaking up the sounds all around them, or, as is the case with Made in America, on the stage right across the street.

Compton rapper YG received the nastiest intro of the weekend, as he was hailed by his hype man, Slim 400, with a declamation that freely mixed the "n"- and "f"-words.

That semantic linking continued and increased during YG's chaotic, abbreviated performance.
On songs like "I Just Wanna Party" and "Don't Tell 'Em," his West Coast style was notably belligerent, both in content and delivery.

Swilling from a bottle of strong spirits, he spent two solid minutes demanding that the ladies in the audience bare their chests.

YG left the stage 10 minutes before his apportioned time was up. Either he did a sloppy job of planning or he had other things to do. Both explanations seem plausible.

The Made In America crowd seemed evenly split among genders.

Up on stage, though, it was a bro fest.

How much of a bro fest? So much so that Claire Boucher, the Canadian indie electro mixmaster who performs as Grimes, was the only female-fronted act to perform on either of the main stages all weekend long at the Philadelphia half of the festival.

Grimes didn't mention her singularity when she played the Liberty Stage late Sunday afternoon. She just let her music explain what makes her so singular.

Bouncing around the stage in platform ski boots, the blue-haired programmer and singer was accompanied by two dancers, but was otherwise a one-woman show, looping her own voice and manipulating beats in real time on rubbery dance tracks like "Be A Body" and "Genesis."

Urging the crowd to dance, she appealed to independent folks in the place where America was made. "One thing I know about Philly," she said, "is you guys do whatever you want." She also took the time to single out audience members who made extraordinary efforts to get superior sightlines to see her show. "I know it's probably illegal," she said, "but thanks to everybody who climbed a tree."

But at about 6:15 p.m., shortly after Grimes played, attendees at the festival were advised, in big red letters on projected signs, to move calmly to shelter, because a big storm was coming. And it came. And it rained.

A severe weather system rolled through Center City, bringing with it the threat of heavy downpours and lightning. Shortly after the Austin, Texas indie foursome Spoon — one of the most highly anticipated acts of the fest — began their set with "Rent I Pay," word came over the loudspeakers that festival attendees needed to evacuate the ground.

Permission to reemerge was granted an hour later, and Spoon was back on the Rocky Stage at 7:45 after an hour and a half delay. But the unwelcome break interrupted what had been a rock-solid afternoon of music under sweltering conditions.

After the rains let up, Spoon took up where it had left off. Its set had opened around 6 p.m. with "Rent I Pay" from their superb new album They Want My Soul. But Spoon didn't get through a second tune before the rains came down and Day 2 of Made in America went into indefinite suspension mode.

An hour and a half later, the Britt Daniel-led, masterfully minimalist indie rock band was back, reaching back to reopen with "Small Stakes" from 2002's Kill The Moonlight. They bought with them news: The festival curfew had been pushed back an hour till midnight, making room for all the scheduled bands to perform slightly truncated sets.

They also brought more rain, in this case apparently free of the threat of lightning, but more than enough to transform the festival into a soaking event testing the mettle of even the hardiest partiers. The band seemed to appreciate deeply the dedication of fans gathered before them, and may or may not have added "The Way I Get By" to the set list to give Daniel the opportunity to sing the line "we go out in stormy weather."

In any case, Spoon's sharp, angular rock songs sounded great, and the crowd got very wet.

On the delayed Made In America schedule, Pharrell Williams (and his famously funny hat) hit the stage at 9 o'clock, after the soaking rain throughout mashup expert Girl Talk's set had let up.

Pharrell opened with "Lose Yourself To Dance," one of his vocal contributions to Daft Punk's 2013 album Random Access Memories. That  set the tone for a set that got the still-frisky crowd's groove on with a succession of taut, rubbery, pop-funk tunes, including his current hit "Come and Get It Bae" and catalog cut "Flirtin'."

Williams' name may have become a household word only in the past year, thanks to his successes with Daft Punk, Robin Thicke, and the ubiquitous "Happy," but his hitmaking career spans two decades, and he pulled from his entire oeuvre in a well-paced show that drew from his rock band NERD as well as an array of hits he's sung on and produced with his partner Chad Hugo in the Neptunes.

He also took the time to praise the Philadelphia musicians from the perspective of man who's worked with many.

"The best musicians in the word come from Philadelphia," he said. "From Philadelphia international Records all the way up to the Roots to everyone in the band up here tonight, they all have Philly ties."

The final two acts on the Parkway on Sunday night were Dutch superstar DJ Tiësto and Southern arena rockers Kings Of Leon.

The former let loose with a hyper-adrenalized set that kicked off, naturally, with his triumphant techno race up "Rocky" and remixes of John Legend and Icona Pop songs, accompanied by a flashy light show.

The Kings of Leon took the stage at 10:45 — 75 minutes after their scheduled arrival — starting off their festival closing performance with singer Caleb Followill belting out "Supersoaker" from last year's Mechanical Bull in his buzz-saw voice.

With Caleb's brother Nathan back behind the drum kit, after his injured ribs in a recent bus accident caused the band to cancel a series of shows, the Nashville quartet moved on to the rugged blood-is-thicker-than-water blues "Family Tree."

The Kings continued the three years running Made In America tradition of an arena rock sized headliner closing out the Labor Day weekend festival.

In 2012 it was Pearl Jam, and in 2013, Nine Inch Nails. As it was last year, the Rocky stage was thinned out In comparison to the packed space in front of Philadelphia Museum of Art steps for the previous night's headliner for the world of hip and R&B. (in this case Kanye West, last year Beyoncé.)

The extenuating circumstance this year was the rain, which sent people home early in the evening when it seemed like the show might be called off, and again as it poured throughout sets by Spoon and Girl Talk (who was joined by Philadelphia rapper Freeway in one of the weekend's few if not only surprise cameos.)

Caleb Followill noted the dedication of those that remained. "You guys are awesome for sticking around ," the guitarist and leader of the family band said. "We don't get to play a whole set, but we're gonna give you everything we got."

-- Dan DeLuca

For more coverage of Made in America 2014: http://data.inquirer.com/thetalk