Primavera Club 2009 in Barcelona, Spain.

 

With a line up including Devendra Banhart, Beach House, Soundtrack of Our Lives, Deer Tick, HEALTH and A Place to Bury Strangers, you could already envision the ambience of the live band based festival. As everything else in Barcelona, Primavera club was subtle, live and a real fiesta of people, music and atmosphere. The locations where intimate settings, such as vaulted basements, an old theatre and classic concert venues, that within its smoke filled rooms, invited you to listen to the concerts, but not demanding you to engage.

Barcelona has always been a Rock ’n’ Roll darling, and the minimal representation of electronic or hip hop based music in the line-up, backed that notion up. It felt good to be standing with cold beers, smoking while the bands tuned their guitars. You could in one venue go from the intense wall of sound from Furguson, to dreamly almost mythical pop tunes from Beach House and end up with Kurt Vile and the Violators sophisticated world of composition delivered with humor, while dancing around next to the two previous band members. Later on that night the venue got bigger and the lights more impressive, but the feeling remained to be almost as when you in high school went to local venues to hear your friends play. The most impressive stage show occurred when HEALTH blew out the room with their electronically based noise rock and the almost athletic performance of John Famiglietti. While the sound was almost deafening the precision of the music and the graphics of the lightshow hypnotized you.

Apolo, an old theater with its balconies and dimmed red lights set the stage for Little Joy’s sweet universe transitioning in to an almost flirty atmosphere when Devandra Banhart performed. The Pastels, Kid Congo & the Pink Monkey Birds, David Holmes, Cass McCombs, Neon Indian, The Ladybug Transistor and so on, guided you through the people and places with their distinct performances. The nights passed like that, in and out of venues, atmospheres and variated performances – just like you expect from a live based festival in the charming settings of mild Barcelona winter.

Nathalie Schwer