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I may have missed one but I saw 61 bands this week lol
One member of the party won't be 18, so we can't hit those levels. I think we could do as much as any of them would want though. Figure to do a couple tourist days around the festival.
A very loud yes, had tourist/beach days on and around the fest two years in a row now, and it quickly became my favorite fest. Something for everyone in both the city and the fest. We flew out on Monday did the fest Wednesday - Saturday and do city days Tuesday, Sunday, Monday. 100% worth every euro
I may have missed one but I saw 61 bands this week lol
One member of the party won't be 18, so we can't hit those levels. I think we could do as much as any of them would want though. Figure to do a couple tourist days around the festival.
I may have missed one but I saw 61 bands this week lol
One member of the party won't be 18, so we can't hit those levels. I think we could do as much as any of them would want though. Figure to do a couple tourist days around the festival.
depends how underaged they are but ive been doing festivals since i turned 15
One member of the party won't be 18, so we can't hit those levels. I think we could do as much as any of them would want though. Figure to do a couple tourist days around the festival.
depends how underaged they are but ive been doing festivals since i turned 15
Oh the main festival I'm not worried about. It's the Ciutat shows at the clubs that they can't get in.
Oh the main festival I'm not worried about. It's the Ciutat shows at the clubs that they can't get in.
fake mustaches
Their mom recently took the younger one to an all ages show. He got asked for his ID and panicked bc he left it in the car. When they told the venue worker that, they responded that they thought he was 21, and that's the only reason they asked. Given this, he might stand a chance 😆
That Charli setlist looks so much better than the 2022 one, which was a great show already. I see why it’s so high on everyone’s list.
tbh I think the best part is that she didn’t have dancers, she’s one of the few performers to have the charisma to just march around on a stage with a microphone and make it work.
Any chance anyone here has videos of PJ Harvey in the rain? Her official stream is up but can’t get a good look on how bad the rain is.
I can provide an email if anyone can assist. Thanks!
I've got pics and short video that show how much and how quickly the sky changed during her set, because of the storm arriving and sun setting simultaneously. And you can see the umbrellas and all people were using. They're just ok photos. Took them on my phone cuz my Olympus isn't waterproof and I had to put it away for those couple hours.
I wrote a piece, better than Pitchforks in my humble opinion, to highlight my favorite acts I've seen this week. With seeing like 50, 60 acts.. It was very hard to round it up, so I'm also giving some shout-outs. Coulda been longer, but wanted to make it easy for the eye aswell.. Enjoy.
Post by Fitter Happier on Jun 4, 2024 16:20:56 GMT -5
I don't even know where to begin. About to fly home to Pittsburgh. Still haven't processed it all. Mrs. Fitterhappier and I had just as good as a time as last year. Moments that stand out off the top of my head is running over from Vampire Weekend and my jaw absolutely hitting the floor when Beth Gibbons played Roads. Really took my breath away. The Ratboys>Stella Maris>Phoenix run on Wednesday with some of y'all! Dancing my ass off to Arca right in front of the sound board then running it back with some of y'all again at Charli! The rain was pretty rough but we did that PJ>Mitski>SZA run and don't regret it at all. The National from 5-6 rows back (Mrs. Fitterhappier's favorite band and a live act that never gets old for me). I could go on and on and on. But this has really taken the place of my favorite festival and I'm already scheming of how to get back next year. Hopefully something that will sell my superego aka Mrs. Fitterhappier, e.g. The Cure, Robyn, Fiona Apple, Bon Iver...
Imagine this. Let’s say it’s Tuesday, about noon, in Barcelona. Let’s say that earlier that day, you had woken up too early for your flight from Paris because it was at Charles de Gaulle and you assumed it would take a long time to clear security since it was an international flight after all (it did not). Let’s say that you embarrassed yourself at the airport train station by fumbling around and taking too long at the ticket station because they didn’t have the train pass you wanted, everything was written in Catalan, and no matter how many buttons you pushed the machine wouldn’t accept your credit card. Let’s say you get to your hotel, maybe more like a glorified hostel, and you set your bag down only to find out you and your roommate only got one key to share between the two of you for the week. As you sit there in your windowless room, pondering the situation, you think for a moment, but then you say: “Well, I guess we should just go to Biercab now then.”
Welcome to Primavera.
So I’d been to Primavera before in 2019 but that was a whole different animal, for reasons both structural (Bits was open, and the bridge was fully accessible to all), and personal (I went with my family, we stayed at a hotel three blocks away from the entrance, I didn’t do any Ciutat shows). Having caught the bug of having more disposable income as I enter into my 30s and becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the way American festivals were going, my sights naturally turned to Spain. After all, the Spanish are sophisticated people with great taste who do things like drink gin and tonics or eat dinner at 9 PM or openly try and steal an entire pizza from you on the final day of a music festival. Why wouldn’t I want to go back to a festival that’s clearly booked with more care for its lineup and with total disregard for how long you might want to sleep on any given day? The answer is because I really, really wanted to go to Glastonbury really, really, really badly and didn’t get tickets. So I ended up here! Overall, of course, I had a fantastic time at Primavera, but it remains quite possibly the most exhausting festival I’ve been to if you try and do it all. Even with Bits totally gone! You’ll probably do more walking at Glastonbury, but it’s a day shorter and you’ll also do a lot more sitting at bars and a lot less going to sleep at 8 AM.
So, anyway, where was I? Oh, right, starting the time honored festival tradition of binge drinking. Theo, myself, and later hoffm83n headed to BierCab, the venerated Barcelona beer bar that I loved going to both times we went. Super friendly staff, super great beer selection, shockingly super great food. We then parted our separate ways and I headed straight to Laut for the first Ciutat show of the weekend. Laut was an odd venue, a literal hallway with a bar and a coat check in the back. I arrived in time for Daniela Pes, an Italian performer with a really commanding voice and some cool synth playing. I was in the back of the hallway for this show, and it felt like I was somehow a mile away; during the set break I moved up closer and after walking about 10 feet or so I was in front of the stage. Reflecting on it now, I still have no idea what the capacity of this venue could possibly be, but it was not a lot. But this made the show feel more special so I didn’t mind. Then Mabe Fratti came on with her full band; this was my first “holy shit” set of the week, an unholy symphony of distorted guitars and plucked cello to create some truly unexpected harmonies, with a sound unclear if it was aiming for shoegaze or jazz and ending up somewhere in a truly great middle.
However, unsatisfied with seeing just one show in a night, I headed down the street to Paral·lel 62, a really, really good venue to catch Sweeing Promises and Les Savy Fav. I’d seen both these bands before and ended up switching my opinions on them, almost certainly because the settings swapped. I saw Sweeping Promises play a freezing outdoor show at Music Frozen Dancing 2022 and by that time was too cold to enjoy the set; this time inside in summer they were beaming with joy as they crushed through their zippy punk tracks that sound way better when they’re not lo-fi. I then had a great 15 minute conversation with them afterwards about Midwest life and Pulp vs. Deftones before I went to go catch Les Savy Fav. They were super nice and a great hang, I told them to come see me at the festival if they spotted my flag. (They didn’t.) I saw Les Savy Fav at Riot Fest in 2021. Someone on here described them afterwards as “PG.G. Allin”, a phrase rattling around in my brain to this day, using tables and mic cords and garbage bags to create as much audience havoc as possible. This time, it was more like G Allinn. Tim Harrington ran a lot through the audience and unexpectedly jumped off a balcony, but I think he works better as a prop comic than as a short distance sprinter. Luckily, the new music sounded really good live so I don’t have much to complain about.
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On my second day, knowing this was the last day I was going to be able to do anything while still feeling reasonably human, I decided to skip Parc Guell (boring, costs 10 euros, for tourists), and make my way to Montjuic instead (beautiful, amazing views, was featured as a pit stop on The Amazing Race 10). I skipped the cable car after finding out it wasn’t covered under my Hola pass and made the hike up to the top, which was much prettier anyway. The Palau Nacional at the bottom is very pretty, I took my picture on the staircase where Phil Kehogan eliminated Dustin and Kandice nearly 20 years ago, and made my way to Los Caracoles with Theo and pablo. A patient of mine had recommended this restaurant to me, so I had to go. The meal was…fine, nothing spectacular, but I really enjoyed my paella and there was a funny moment where the wait asked me if I wanted to take a photo of the paella first before it was served and I couldn’t hear him at all so he had to say it about 10 times before I got it. Satisfied with our food, we headed through La Boqueria towards BierCab again, only to walk by CCCB and discover that the Primavera Pro showcase was happening here in the courtyard. The nice thing about this courtyard was that it had a bar and was in a rather pretty area, the downside was it was really hot and everyone cornered in the left side in the shade instead of actually in front of the stage. The band playing at that time was Flying Moon in Space, a German art school-kid krautrock band that was, no shit, one of the best sets I saw that weekend. Every member of the band had insane, frenetic energy (including knocking over the stage barrier!) in spite of the fact they were usually just playing one chord at a time a la the Britney Spears’ piano player videos. Their anchor was their drummer, remarkable at slowly building up the tempo in a song, and the highlight was the final song which featured the singer saying - say it with me, everyone! - “Hoo ha ha hoo! Nananana” for 12 minutes straight over an increasingly fast drum beat. It was so fucking great. They will never play in the US but I need to see them again tomorrow.
After some more time at BierCab, shooting the shit, prompting people to rate shoegaze as a genre of music on a scale of 1-10, it was time to head in to the Inaugural. Pablo and I did get in to catch Tropical Fuck Storm do the "Stayin’ Alive” cover, which was good enough for me! This is the time for Chicago! This is the time to see Motherfucking Ratboys! We caught up with FH and his wife near the rail. Ratboys were one of two Chicago bands making slow, slightly dreamy indie rock this weekend but of the two, Ratboys are the more rockin’, with a couple of extended guitar solos that bordered into jam territory near the end. Of course, though, the real highlight was holding up my Chicago flag and getting smiles and looks from every member of the band during the set, and then a Spanish guy asking me to take a picture with the flag at the end. Special shout out to FH for asking me if he could help hold the flag the entire weekend.
After that, we hung around for Stella Maris, which was, simply put, one of the most insane things I’ve ever seen at a festival. Stella Maris is a fictional Christian pop group from Spanish TV show La Mesías, which is unavailable to watch in the US and even if I could I don’t think I’d understand it much, both because I barely speak Spanish and because I later realized there was so much specific Spanish Catholic cultural context I simply wouldn’t get unless I was immersed in the culture (e.g. at one point during the set a group of people came together to form this quasi human pyramid with people standing on top of each other shoulders on the top, forming a tower. I found out the next day from a poster in a cultural center that these are called Els Castells. I had no idea!) BUT what I do understand and like is camp and entertainment, and holy shit this was one the campiest, most entertaining things I’ve ever seen. If I had to describe a general outline of the show: a group of six sisters (the actresses from the show) come on stage singing insane Christian hyperpop with early 2000s Web 1.0 graphics flashing behind them on the screen with the intention of converting everyone to their cult. Eventually the actor who plays their dad joins them on stage to further their mission, as more dancers come out to do intricate choreography. Eventually, the human tower people come back, hoisting their dead mother through the audience towards the stage. She comes back on stage for the final song and gets brought back to live to the rejoicing of everyone in the audience. The problem with this straightforward description is that it cannot capture how catchy the music was and how funny the visuals were, even if you didn’t speak Spanish or weren’t familiar with the culture. It was a totally unique, one of a kind of performance. The Spanish gays were going nuts for this shit. I compared it to if the Righteous Gemstones did a concert, but that’s not quite right either - “Misbehavin’” is certainly campy, but not to this extent. It would be like if 100 gecs produced the Righteous Gemstones and they stole all of Magdalena Bay’s visuals. And also someone came back to life at the end. It was pure insanity. And this was free! You didn’t have to a ticket to see this shit!! You could just walk through the door!!! This is the kind of performance I was referring to earlier when I was talking about the kind of unique performances only this festival can conceieve/offer. Here's a video of it:
We’ll get to Phoenix in a second, but this is when the venue was starting to fill up and the drink lines were starting to be a problem. I made this joke frequently throughout the weekend, and I felt bad after every time I’d say it because I’d been drinking and it was kind of mean. Looking back on it sober and after experiencing the beer lines the rest of the weekend I feel quite confident asking this question again: are Spanish the stupidest fucking people on Earth? Only three bars were open at the festival at this time (understandable honestly) but the lines would be about 20 people long. You’d get to the front and notice Spanish people chatting with the bartenders like they were friends, asking about various cocktail combos, taking their sweet time paying, like they had never waited in a fucking bar line before. It was infuriating. It was never a problem again after this one specific instance but holy shit I’m still mad thinking about it now. No wonder Primavera needs about 10 cash registers at every corner of the festival.
Anyway, Phoenix was really good! They did a very tight, hour long set, all the hits all the way through and that’s that. I’m assuming most of you have seen Phoenix in the last 10 years so you get the gist of it: big LED screens with hyper colorful graphics, high energy the whole time, having a secret weapon in drummer/huge showman Thomas Hedlund. But there were two surprises: one, fewer Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix songs than I thought there’d be, which I sort of liked especially for a 70 minute festival (Phoenix if you are reading this please play more Ti Amo songs again though! It’s a great album!), the second being that Ezra Koenig came out for the last couple of songs, including Tonight. We cut out early during Identical to make it to Apolo [2] in time for the rest of the night. But we’re going to have a very important story to tell in a minute, so please note that Thomas Mars was wearing a black shirt and black pants.
Theo, hoffm83n and I arrived at Apolo, a shockingly intimate club with a shockingly huge bar and less shockingly large smoking patio. (Shout out to Richard from Germany, who we had a lovely conversation with during breaks.) Fat Dog was up first, one of the few disappointments for me of the weekend imo. Given how loud and confrontational and funny their music is, I thought for sure their stage presence would match, but it was a whole lot of standing around until the very end. It was hard not to contrast it with performances in a similar style like Flying Moon in Space earlier or Mandy, Indiana later. But the music was fun and enough of an electronic kick after Phoenix to get the night starting strong. Fortunately, The Dare was able to amp up the night a bit more, with his loud black and white Helvetica graphics, scream-talking-singing, and indoor smoking working much better in a club than at a festival. He did his set which was mostly new music (including a few new songs I didn’t recognize from the last time). My only caveat is that I would’ve liked this more if the dang songs were out now! I want to sing along better to them! They’re very silly and fun even if he plays the straight club kid parody character completely straight!
But now we have to talk about Fake Thomas Mars.
Around this time, Theo points out a guy with shaggy hair wearing a black shirt and pants standing in front of us, swaying along to the music. It’s Thomas Mars! Theo wants to talk to him, I don’t, I don’t like talking to people more famous than I. (And I’m pretty famous, I’ve been featured on JID’s Instagram story!) Theo goes up and tells him “Hey man, great set today.” and he responds, “Yeah this is really good right now” about The Dare, which seems like a very famous-person-deflecting-attention thing to do. I don’t think anything of it later until this other American guy we met at Stella Maris gets really excited about this prospect too, and eventually after The Dare ends they get the courage to go up and talk to him directly. The problem is, while this guy looks like Thomas Mars from behind, he does not look like Thomas Mars from the front. Worse still, he’s American. Worse still, he knows Phoenix but does not know who Tomas Mars is. Ordinarily this would be incredibly embarrassing for all involved, but later we had a great talk about LA club culture in the Ed Banger era, we took a picture, and now I follow him on Instagram so it all worked out nicely.
Anyway, we also saw Desire! It’s not my favorite Johnny Jewel project tbh and I find Jewel’s ability to find singers of a very similar type…interesting, but I was shocked by how much by how much I liked this. For such a dark project, the energy was consistently sunny and fun the whole time, with singer Megan Louise having a blast the whole time and displaying vocal chops that exceeded Desire on record. Add into that the fact that they did both their “Bizarre Love Triangle” and “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” covers and you’ve got a recipe for a really fun closing set at 3 AM. JD Twitch of Optimo DJed afterwards, I was half paying attention, half dancing to him dropping Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo” of all songs, half talking to fake Thomas Mars. (Hold on, don’t tell me those fractions are wrong.) But after about 45 minutes of being there, it was really time to head out. After all, you don’t want to waste all of your energy before the festival even begins by staying out until 5 AM, right! Right…?
Ok this is about 3000 words so I think this is a good place to stop. We’ll continue on with the remainder of the festival soon.
