Once again we find ourselves at the end of spring and once again it’s the time for the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona, May 29th to 31st, arguably one of the very best (if not THE best) music festival in Europe, trying to mix the best of both worlds: The space of a big festival with a line-up that always looks for quality even though in the last years bigger and bigger names have been headlining it.
After the rain that soaked the attendees during the free gigs of Wednesday at the Parc del Fórum, Thursday had glimmers of sun and a more relaxed atmosphere. But that soon changed at the new Heineken Hidden Stage, with the first gig of the festival. Irish noise rockers Girl Band were a refreshing start and they’re a combo that gave some hints of the experimentation we would find along the festival. They’d been hailed as a mix between Nirvana and Queens of the Stone Age (see below) but the voice of singer Dara Kiely reminded of the finest The Fall’s Mark E. Smith (that is, when Smith is not drunk) and the labyrinthine nature of their music has few or nothing to do with their supposed influences. It goes well beyond.
After a quick stroll to meet and greet some old faces in the local music circuit, we headed off to watch Dutch punkers The Ex. New singer Arnold de Boer keeps trying to emulate the intensity of old frontman G. W. Sok but even though they keep sounding interesting at first, they fail to really explode onstage.
Back at the Heineken Stage we wanted to watch one of the best gigs of the festival: Peter Hook & The Light. Bearing in mind the festival mindset, the Englishmen were forced to play a shorter gig so Hooky went back to the original plan of playing an intro of three songs, the Unknown Pleasures record in its entirety and then some encores. After three years of gigging constantly, the band plays incredibly well and the entrance of Happy Mondays’ chorus girl Rowetta to sing Candidate and New Dawn Fades was a curious and surprising experiment.
There’s no doubt Hooky is vindicating the role of Joy Division in modern music while earning good money from it, but the best thing of this project is that he took it very seriously from minute one and that shows. As drummer Paul Kehoe told your correspondent after the gig, “We can’t reproduce all the sounds Martin Hannett created on record, but all of us in the band want give to the audience the same intensity JD had in that time. Of course we’re not copying and pasting the sound on record – that’s not what the live experience means – but we play from the admiration to a band that set an incredible benchmark to everyone that followed. And according to the reaction of the public, we’ve been successful.”
For us, the night ended with CHVRCHES, whose retro synth-pop was the perfect way to start dancing the night away; Chrome with a sort of noise-rock that brought us back to the time of the seminal punk of the dirtiest The Stooges… And to the most surprising gig of the whole festival: Bo Ningen. The Japanese quartet, resident in London and with friends such as Savages, displayed an incredible energetic set of rock noise, Can-nish landscapes and freaky folkie movements like they were mixing traditional Japanese dances with flamenco. Yeah, all very strange and shocking at first, but if you want some real clues of how they sound, think of a crash between Faust and, maybe, Fugazi. Really interesting.
Elsewhere, Queens of the Stone Age showed their most sophisticated side with a compact-sounding set in which they mixed goldie oldies and some of their most recent creations; Arcade Fire probably offered the biggest gig ever in the festival, an enormous carnival that, at least, never forgot the songs that made them what they are now such as “Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)”, “Rebellion (Lies)” or “Joan of Arc”. Plus, the sort of lukewarm Reflektor’s tunes (for some, at least – QRO review) gained strength and didn’t dampen the party mood the whole concert had.
Finally, Neutral Milk Hotel gave a concert for posterity that started with “The King Of Carrot Flowers” and ended with, among others, “Ghost” transforming the ATP stage (formerly, the biggest in the festival) in a real celebration with no need for flashing suits, strange characters and an incredible montage, just like Arcade Fire did a while before.
-words: Abel Cruz
-photos: Jayne Yong and Abel Cruz
