Five Things We Learned At The Primavera Sound Festival

We were lucky enough to spend last weekend in gorgeous Barcelona, Spain for this year's Primavera Sound festival. Primavera is one of the loveliest music festivals in the world, bringing together important bands in indie / pop history as well as showcasing new emerging talent. We saw a ton of great new live acts including Spain's best kept secret, Za! (hello African grindcore), but here's five things we learned about some of the festival's headliners.

1) Pulp is one of the greatest bands of ALL TIME.
It's days later and we're still listening to their albums and trying to relive the magic of the Pulp show on Saturday. We feel like an indie rock Miss Havisham whom you'll find 10 years from now, with a rotting Primavera wristband still talking about how great Pulp played. Perhaps it was the warm Catalan air, or the thousands of adorable Europeans around us screaming "Harveees Co-ckerrr" in between songs, but we fell in love with Pulp all over again. Harvees (aka Jarvis) can still make a crowd of 50,000 swoon and cheer with a simple hip shake and breathy "ah ah." They played all the hits, beginning with "Do You Remember The First Time?" as PULP flashed in their classic neon font overhead, ending with "Common People" after a short but earnest dialogue about the protests and police brutality that happened earlier that day in Plaza Catalunya. We will remember this show forever.

2) "PJ Harvey is an old boring bitch who should get a job at Lord of the Rings"
At the time of print, we're stil trying to figure out if there's a store called Lord of the Rings in Barcelona, but we think this charming text from our Catalonian friend during PJ's set sums up her lackluster performance adequately. Yes, she dressed like Princess Lea gone wrong with random feathers in her hair, and yes she played a mini harp for half the songs. Her set was delivered quietly and with a strangely unfeeling smile, leaving the audience and especially us, completely unmoved.

3) Nick Cave was, is, and always will be pure sex.
We know this is pretty weird to say, but we wanted to be Nick Cave's Korg keyboard during Grinderman's performance. His slow yet forceful crotch thrusts into the keyboard during hot songs like "When My Baby Comes" left us flush and giggling like southern belles. How can a man with such a receding hairline make us still want to rip off his perfectly tailored suits? Maybe it's in his complete command over the audience or in his terminally cool demeanor whether he's doing rock kicks, being carried by the audience, or screaming 'I JUST WANT TO RELAX" at the end of the set...he never falters.

4) Belle and Sebastian should call it quits.
We preface this barrage with the admission that we are MASSIVE Belle and Sebastian fans. We've adored them since day one with their two-toned album art and heartfelt songs about shy kids on buses. Perhaps it's because we love this band so much that their set at Primavera was such a bitch slap to the face. To say they phoned it in would be requiring too much energy on their part. Stuart Murdoch, impeccably dressed as usual and with adorable dance moves, couldn't save the half-assed delivery of mostly newer material during their set. It's bad enough to taunt their fans with very little of their classic songs, but even the newer tracks were sort of squeaked out. We know you're supposed to be twee B&S, but that set was just limp.

5) The old weirdos still have it.
Two of the most engaging sets were perhaps two of the most difficult. Suicide and Einsturzende Neubauten made us simultaneously uncomfortable and completely inspired. New experimental bands like Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors owe much to these older, darker godfathers of weird noise.

-- MONA DEHGHAN

Previously > Hummer: Beth Ditto's "Vogue"