Spanish bands to watch from Primavera Sound 2014

Every year Primavera Sound in Barcelona has an onslaught of indie darlings from English speaking countries, but did you also know that Spanish bands play the festival? And no, not just John Talabot. Spanish groups usually play during the 5PM time slot when everyone is either just waking up from their 7AM bedtime or going back to sleep for that sweet, sweet siesta so you’re sure to see Arcade Fire or Kendrick Lamar. So, it’s easy to miss them. Here’s a list of some of the Spanish acts that played the festival that are worth keeping an eye on.

Univers, from Barcelona univvers.bandcamp.com

The epitome of Spanish shoegaze, Univers have been our friends since we interviewed Mujeres a while back, as both groups share a member. We also wrote about their last EP La Pedregada, and this year they came out with their first full length L’Estat Natural. It’s lovely dimension bending guitar riffs and voices drenched in reverb.

Pional, from Madrid soundcloud.com/pional

A good buddy of John Talabot and featured on 2012's Fin, Pional makes house and electro music. Constantly releasing remixes on his soundcloud page, his DJ set is one of the best at Primavera Sound. And his original electronic compositions aren't too shabby either.

Oso Leone, from Mallorca
osoleone.bandcamp.com

Oso Leone make some minimalist electronic music that is as entrancing as it is poppy at times. With reverb drenched vocals as the songs wind deep into their meditations, you might not even realize what language the band is singing in, but it doesn’t even matter.

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PRIMAVERA SOUND 2013 REVIEW

Originally published on thebomberjacketcom

A lot had changed for the 13th edition of Primavera Sound, most notably that the festival was no longer “San Miguel Primavera Sound,” but “Heineken Primavera Sound.” The difference is relevant, because a lot of the local Spanish elements of the festival haven’t been as emphasized in more recent years (and the Primavera organization has been called out on it once or twice). Don’t get me wrong, Primavera Sound is an amazing music festival, but as this was my third year in attendance, it was hard not to notice (or realize) some things. Spanish groups rarely got set times later than 6 p.m., and the attendance of those sets reflected the low amount of exposure they were actually getting. Although it’s cool that additional concerts were organized for the entire month beforehand and most intensively during the festival week, it’s debatable whether or not that meant that groups were pushed out of the festival to play at a bar the week before. Primavera has become a veritable booking force in Spain–particularly in Barcelona. It organizes concerts for nationally touring bands and also for local groups, but during the time in Barcelona I had more than one band mention to me how hard it was to book a show without the Primavera stamp of approval.

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UNIVERS: THERE’S NO FIRE IN SPACE, BUT THERE’S HAIL

Spiraling through atmospheric drone riffs and surf rock, Univers’ guitar melodies sound as if outer space were crashing into the ocean. The guttural vocals hold a strange Joy Division ‘80s vibe, but definitely sound like the droning omnipotence of the Universe itself. So, if you ever had one of those weird moments where it seemed like the universe was trying to communicate with you but you didn’t understand, maybe it’s because the universe speaks Catalan, like Univers. The band comes from Barcelona and their latest EP, called La Pedregada, is a nostalgic blend that perfectly conjures up the city’s dusty back rooms, beach side bars, botellones (the Spanish word for “street drinking”), and late, late nights.

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Shook Down's top 80 Songs from Spain in 2012

Below is an even better list of the best stuff from Spain in 2012. I posted a list a few days ago from Yours in Music about the albums, and these are the songs. It comes from the Barcelona music blog, Shook Down.   The list is more focused on national independent music rather than international (hence the lack of John Talabot). The first tune is from Sexy Bicycle, a band that I covered for the Bomber Jacket in an article called Spaingaze, which you can read here. I like it because it also includes friends Mujeres, Aries, Maria Rodés, and Fanny Roz, as well as other favorites like Aliment, Pegasvs, Lorena Álvarez and Epirit! They're all great bands to check out if you're looking too explore the Spanish music scene.

A list of fifteen is below. After the jump, there's a list of eighty and a bunch of videos.

1. Sexy Bicycle, Boris Lancaster
2. La Bien Querida, A Veces Ni Eso
3. Lorena Álvarez, La Boda
4. Esponja, Fucking Pony
5. Wilhelm & The Dancing Animals, Elephant
6. Aries, Dilo Mañana
7. Aliment, Holy Slap
8. Mujeres, Soft Gems pt. 1
9. Tremenda Trementina, Mi Novia Es Un Raro
10. Linda Guilala, Un Millón De Zombis Más
11. Fred i Son, Abric i Bufanda
12. Maria Rodés, Cae Lo Que El Fuego Cae
13. Klaus & Kinski, La Duda Ofende
14. Joan Colomo, El Xiprer
15. Pegasvs, Brillar

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Univers :: La Pedregada EP

Another excellent 12/12/12 present was the release of Univers' first EP La Pedregada. It's heartwarming to see the holiday crosses international boundaries. Too bad it only happens once a century.

I covered Univers for The Bomber Jacket in a piece called Spaingaze along with two other drone findings from Spain. You can read that piece here. Univers contains a member from another Barcelona favorite, Mujeres, specifically singer Yago Alcover. The gutteral Joy Division-like vocals are split between him and Eduard Bualance and capture the mumbling monotony of the all knowing universe quite well. If you ever had one of those moments where it felt like the universe was trying to speak to you, but you weren't quite sure what it was saying, maybe it was because the universe speaks in Spanish.

The EP was released on Fàmelic Records too, which is another friend. Read my piece about them on The Bomber Jacket. It's cool to see these two come together.

univvers.bandcamp.com
facebook.com/univvers

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Barcelona Record Label Showcase

Especially for Barcelona where the music and art scenes can be elusive, it always helps to check out record labels in order to discover new bands and to find interesting places and venues to go to. Barcelona has numerous independent record labels that also manage international artists, as well as some collective labels managed by musicians, or just smaller-run operations. Spain doesn’t really have a massive national indie label, because there isn’t much of an audience for it in the country, but what you will find are groups of cool, like-minded people who are trying to make something happen. THE BOMBER JACKET has been lucky enough to meet and talk to many of these folks this year.

Read More on thebomberjacket.com

Bcore Disc

Bcore has been around since 1990 and they claim the title of one of the most influential labels in Spain. They have a variety of different types of bands such as the sludgy ’90s rock of Betunitzer, the melodic folk of Maria Rodés, the yelping and astral guitar of Margarita, the piano storytelling of Fanny Roz, or the astrological acoustic and tape project of Aries. The label grew out of hardcore punk at the end of the ‘80s, passing around handmade records, t-shirts and posters, and the D.I.Y. mentality is still with them. It’s also one of the few in Spain that still have a physical location. In Gràcia, carrer Montamy 25 houses the record shop, full of new and old records and CDs for purchase. The collection is also available online.

bcoredisc.com

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A Night on the Town in Barcelona: The Best Places to See Live Music

Read more at thebomberjacket.com

Spain can be an unusual location of curation for live music. The most prevalent trends are discotheques based around popular music (mostly American), hippie and rasta jam bands, or death metal. Anything else can be hard to come across unless you know where you’re looking. Even for a cosmopolitan contemporary cultural center like Barcelona, such places are pretty small, but there are indeed lesser-known pockets where similar musicians and friends gather.

Part of the reason why independent music isn’t flourishing in the city like one would think and why there aren’t a lot of live indie rock venues has to do with laws and police. Getting licenses is very difficult and expensive for small business owners already contending with the crisis. Because Barcelona is so thickly settled, noise complaints and violations become an issue, which can also end up being expensive. The difficulties associated with the live music scene have resulted in the closing of venues, and bands being forced to actually pay to play, which means that a lot of bands don’t ever end up playing live. There also aren’t ever any apartment shows for the same thickly settled reasons that cause venues problems.

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Barcelona’s Famèlic Family

Read the whole post on thebomberjacket.com

Exploring live music in Barcelona led to overhearing every once in a while about a group of crazy dudes from a place called Vic. I first heard about a collective called Famèlic when speaking with the Barcelona band Mujeres. The name Els Famèlics is Catalan Spanish that actually means “the hungry” rather than the false friend, “the family.” It seemed like an elusive group of kids playing music and doing things their own way, similar to a lot of D.I.Y. collectives in the U.S., which is something rare to find in Spain. The members live in Barcelona, but have shows in a suburb called Vic, because it’s much harder to book venues in the city. They also operate an independent record label and have releases from the bands L’Hereu Escampa, Mates Mates,Ohios, Regalim, and they work with Vic Goddard & the Subway Set. In addition to these groups, they’re also working with some of the best bands in the country. Eduard Vila and Aleix Vila are two members of Furguson, a band that THE BOMBER JACKET recently interviewed, and are also co-founders of the collective. TBJ spoke with Sergi Egea, the third co-founder who manages a lot of Famèlic’s ventures, about the group and music in the Barcelona area in general.

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The Real Fairy Tales of Fanny Roz

Photo by Konstantina Tomoska

Published on thebomberjacket.com

Once upon a time there was a musician named Fanny Roz. Her story involved snail races, tree houses, smokey French jazz bars, magical beaches in Chile, and a tale of two cities. It was the best of times…yeah, okay, it all really sounded like it was pretty much the best of times…

The whole story of how a French musician that studied in Toulouse ended up on a label in Barcelona (Bcore) is one that Roz has nicely divided into four chapters and posted to her websites. She has just released Prend Son Souffle et Saute!! (“take a breath and jump”) and just as her tale has many parts, each track tells a different story. She sings them while plunking a piano or plucking a guitar with a myriad of tempos, shifts, and vocal oddities tht make it hard not to think of Regina Spektor. The influences of the two places are evident all over her record, as it’s sung in French with a few dashes of Spanish.

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Sones, the Strange Ones

Published on thebomberjacket.com

Good local music can be hard to come across in Barcelona unless you know where to look. The city is a little bit fragmented as there’s a bigger draw to drunken discotheques, heavy metal bars or jazz and flamenco. “Indie rock” bands can be hard to find, because there aren’t too many of them and there are even fewer places to go see them play. There are only a handful of places where bands can get gigs or afford to get gigs, as most venues are reserved for acts passing through on an international tour. Luckily, there are a few independent labels that are helping to cultivate a music community, like Sones.

The record label and management company released records from a bunch of bands THE BOMBER JACKET has covered in previous issues, including Mujeres, Manos de Topo and Za!. As for international artists, they even released Dirty Beaches’ Badlands, an excellent dank and dusty, lo-fi, cinematic album from last year. They’ve also helped book and promote acts likeWavves, Bill Callahan, Dan Deacon and more. Sones even has a partnership with Minimúsica, which is an organization backed by the government that is dedicated to making the live music experience available for kids. A lot of Sones artists play these kinds of shows, tailoring their sets to a younger audience.

Listen to a Sones sampler below:

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Furguson’s Swindlers and Cross Country Runners

Published on thebomberjacket.com

In THE BOMBER JACKET’s interview with Barcelona’s Mujeres, the group mentioned a little town outside of the city called Vic where they said a makeshift D.I.Y. music community had formed. Such types of spaces are great at producing creative (or extremely weird) acts. Furguson is an example and they are part of the Vic collective Famèlic, although they’re from the village’s neighbor, Gurb.

What’s immediately noticeable about the music is the fusion of punk rock and electronic elements. The singer’s voice barks with a grit similar to Minor Threat or At The Drive-In and is guided by overdriven power riffs, but it’s backed by 8-bit synthesizers and effects. Even though the songs are in English, the vocals are as distorted as the guitars, making the grumbling shouts sound like it could be in any or all languages. It’s a fresh sound and the music is full of pop experiments listeners wouldn’t expect. And true to the suburban area that it comes from, listening to the music makes you think of friends in a small town with nothing to do, piling into a car on a Saturday night and speeding off down a dusty road.

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Primavera Sound 2012 Wrap Up

San Miguel stage, photo by Dani Cantó

Published on thebomberjacket.com

The Parc del Forúm is an excellent location for Primavera Sound, because the Spanish heat gets intense, particularly in the front row crowds, but there’s always a cool sea breeze that hits you just at the right moment. The three main festival days were full of a lot of excellent performances and I even had the chance to catch some of the shows at other sites. For example, Yann Tiersen played on Sunday at the Arc de Triomf with the crowd in the rain and lightning behind them.

I also had the opportunity to hang out with a lot of the Spanish bands and labels that I’ve been interviewing as there were some booths set up for labels from all over Europe. I spent some time with Beach Beach and a really nice guy from their label La Castanya. The band’s live set was excellent as well, and I was bummed that I didn’t get to see another buddy of THE BOMBER JACKET, Picore. Overall, the festival went down well, filled with a lot of really nice people and memorable moments. A bunch of them are listed below.

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Beach Niche

Photo by Adrià Cañameras

Published on thebomberjacket.com

The sunny island of Mallorca is in the middle of the Mediterranean and is a part of Spain. It has some breathtaking beaches that you would think only existed on postcards or computer desktop wallpaper, some awesome caves (complete with dragons) and a tourist hotspot called Palma. Yet, the guys from Beach Beach said that actually living on Mallorca can be kind of boring, especially in the winter. Their solution was to start a band.


If you didn’t guess, its beach music poised to stave off the winter. Yet, their songs delve into a bit more depth than just surfing, maybe because surfing in the Mediterranean sucks. It’s great music with a subtle, charming Spanish accent, perfect to listen to from the trunk of your car while you sit around a beach fire and drink Beach Beach’s favorite, a Pomada (read on to find the complicated recipe!).


The Spanish island of Mallorca is pretty well connected to Catalonia, the region where Barcelona is. The band is also similarly connected, as their record Tasteless Peace (listen here) was released this year on Barcelona’s La Castanya. The label is also a joint booking venture and is responsible for supporting several cool bands and organizing interesting events around the city.


THE BOMBER JACKET talked with Beach boys Pau Riutort and Tomeu Mulet about their music, La Castanya, and the perfect beach drink.

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Mujeres, Mujeres, Mujeres: Putting Their Fists Down

Photo by Ivan Montero

Published on thebomberjacket.com.

Luchador Records is down the street from the MACBA, Barcelona’s contemporary art museum where you constantly have to dodge skaters who are making videos, doing tricks off of the entrance’s ramps, staircases and the ample open space of the white stone plaza. More often than not, they’re also smoking weed and drinking a few San Miguels. At the beginning of the record shop’s sparse street that only houses one other record store, a clothing outlet and a fruit stand, I stopped for just a minute to read a Spanish poem scrawled on the wall called, “Ways to Kill.”

I was going to interview Mujeres at the store the bassist co-owns and that is their secret lair of sorts. Upon entering the place I saw a bunch of records on the walls that I surprisingly recognized, which was a nice change for being in Spain, and it immediately reminded me of DIY music spaces I had come across in the US. There were zines, random art projects like boxes of rolling papers with poems written on each paper, cassette tapes of local bands, patches for the “Pizza Army” and even one floppy disk of what undoubtedly couldn’t have been more than one song. What was more, as the band led me to the back space, past the huge Japanese arcade game, where we would do the interview, they told me that they had shows there every once in a while.

Besides being a great bopping rock and roll band with wavey surf riffs and fuzzified garage intensity, they have the potential to be an influential force for the future of Barcelona’s DIY and “indie” music. They explained that there weren’t many bands like them in the city and it’s true that on any given night there aren’t a ton of places to go see music or even music to go see. If more groups pop up with a mentality like Mujeres, places like Luchador would be perfect nesting grounds for music collectives. Either way, the spot is a cool one to visit and Mujeres is a band not to miss live.

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Lost in the Woods...or in Translation with Naturalesa Salvatge

Photo by Sibila Estruch.

Published on thebomberjacket.com.

In Spanish, the word “tranquilo” is pretty versatile, being used for “relaxed,” “peaceful” and even the command “calm down!” Although slightly awkward and not a word that would normally be used to describe a band, its false friend (sort of) in English, “tranquil,” would serve as a good adjective for Naturalesa Salvatge. The Barcelona band’s name is in the regional dialect Catalán and literally means “wild nature.” However just like the tranquil example, sometimes the straight translation loses some of the flavor in the process, and maybe a better one would be “untamed wilderness.”

The name goes well with their sound, as their songs seem to take place deep in the woods. The meandering lead guitar melodies cut paths through the underbrush. The droning vocal harmonies sunken into the mix sound like they are being crooned a mile away from behind a thicket of tree trunks and bushes. The poppy moments add that bit brightness to the songs like twinkling and waning light that filters through the thick branches blocking out the sky. The rhythm is tapped out around a campfire where the five dudes are hanging out having beers and making s’mores.

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Manos de Topo and the Verge of Tears

Photo by Las Collecionistas

published on thebomberjacket.com

The bipolar warbling vocals of Manos de Topo are somewhere between sounding like they are full of tears and like they fell out of the mouth of singer Son Miguel Ángel Blanca after he stubbed his toe. Yet the group manages to make it joyous with a well honed pop sensibility, bright colors, games and a bunch of jokes.

The group is from Barcelona, Spain and has just released their third album Escapar con el Anticyclone!  or "Escape with the Anticyclone!" Calling it a “collection of pocket operas,” the band said it was their most concentrated effort so far. The album is summed up nicely by the simple colors and shapes on the cover, as the group said that they were trying to “minimize the components to find only the essential feeling.” Before the album’s release, they group worked with illustrator Ana Sender on a board game for a musical exhibition at the Funcació Joan Miró. They said the themes from the game inspired a lot of their lyrics and it’s just one example of the playful nature in the music.

Another notable thing about the musicians is that a few of them also studied filmmaking.  Although they only made their first video on their own, their cinematic sensibilities continue to give them clever ideas and keep them involved during production. They have quite a few well made and hilarious videos like "Tus Siete Diferencias" ("Your Seven Differences") and "Es Feo" ("It's Ugly").

Watch the video for "Tus Siete Diferencias" below:

The Bomber Jacket: Manos de Topo means “Mole Hands” right? But what does Mole Hands mean?

A mole is a tender, wild and lonely animal, just like us. A mole’s hands is the metaphor of our hearts.

Watch the video for "Es Feo" below:

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Za! and the Post-World

published on thebomberjacket.com

Za! is an insane hodgepodge of experimental music which includes base elements of heavy droning guitar, weird vocal loops, and styles lifted from every corner of the world. They try to emulate and make fun of everything they like, from jazz to Japanese manga soundtracks to traditional Portuguese guitar to video game sound bytes to strange throat music from shepherds in Tuva, Russia.

The guys told me about all of the influences that inspired the infinitely interesting yet danceable mess that was their last release, Megaflow. We met for a drink on the sidewalk terrace of the first bar we wandered upon in Gracia. It was surprisingly fair in Barcelona for January weather. Sweat was beading on the glasses of our cañas and the guys were eating some fried tapas, croquetas and a salsa drenched bomba.

Spazzfrica Ehd [Edu]and Papa duPau [Pau] were joined by afriend, Marcos Junquera. Although he doesn’t play in Za!, he has another project with both of the guys called La Orquesta del Caballo Ganador [Orchestra of the Winning Horse] in addition to his own band, Betunizer from Valencia. They told me he only joined us because they knew the interview was for thebomberjacket.com and he was wearing an authentic colonel’s jacket from the Spanish army.

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