Concert and festival previews and reviews.
Optimus Primavera Sound 2012 Printable Timetable
We’ve designed printable timetables for every festival we ever covered: San Miguel Primavera Sound, Milhões de Festa, Paredes de Coura… and of course we’re doing it again for Optimus Primavera Sound. This time we teamed up with the p3 team and the result is so good it makes me want to eat it. Treat yourself and your friends right: click the title of this post, download the pdf and print a handful of them before you go. See you there!
If you’ve ever been to an amusement park, certainly you’re familiar with that anxiety minutes before riding that humongous, scary and life-threatening roller coaster (even if at the last call you decide to quit, like my mother used to do a couple times). And although it’s not that sort of concert which you don’t have a clue of what’s about to be, this same feeling got into me, maybe just for the thrill of it.
I really admire young people doing good stuff and Young Man is a project that fits in my patterns of admiration and respect. Young Man is the alter ego of Colin Caulfield, a 20-something-year-old boy that presented himself in Paris this week, in a floating venue called Petit Bain.
If you had been following Young Man, I am sure that you noticed that he had been growing up. Colin gained some visibility thanks to a set of videos that he posted on youtube covering some artists like Beach House, Grizzly Bear or the huge Deerhunter. Boy, his first EP, saw the light of day in 2010 and afterwards he challenged himself to record an album trilogy in 18 months. The first album of this trilogy was Ideas of Distance, recorded in 2011 and this year he released the second album, which is ironically called Vol.1. In Vol.1 Colin shows to the world his passage from the adolescence to the adult life, a very important moment on his musical trajectory. Vol.1 is also the first album that he recorded on a studio and with a full band: Emmett Conway on the guitar, Joe Baley on the bass, Dylan Andrews on the drums and Jeff Graupner on the synthesizers.
All these folks came with Colin from Chicago to Paris, playing the concert at Petit Bain. I am a total mess when I try to identify the music genre of any band, but I never doubt when dream pop is the right answer. In fact, the entire concert was a beautiful experience of dream pop, in a way so much stronger than we can feel in the albums. Young Man played the right formula: the conversion of the melodic songs in the albums to intense themes in the concert was very wise.
The concert had only 8 songs, all of them long and perfectly connected. They started with “Fate”, a track off Vol.1, and after that they visited Boy and Ideas of Distance with “Just a Growin’” and “Felt”. In addition, they also played some new songs that are not recorded yet. Yeah, they played a bit of all of their work only with 8 songs.
I would like to have listened more songs of Vol.1 though. I really missed the beautiful tracks “Thoughts”, “By and By” and “21”. It would be great if they had stayed longer on board of Petit Bain and had played more songs.
Alone in the stage, Colin said au revoir to Paris with “Directions”, the joyful ending song of Vol.1. Colin, who lived and studied in Paris during a few months, started this song in French but eventually he switched to English, just after promised that he will sing the French version on his next visit to Paris. “I don’t know where I’m going. Am I already there? Is it already there?” repeated Colin at the end of the concert, as an exposition of some doubts of a young man that is taking his own directions on his musical route.
RBC
Setlist:
1. Fate (vol.1)
2. Just a Growin’
3. Felt
4. Unfair
5. Do
6. School
—-
7. Time
8. Directions
“We all make mistakes”, sang Sharon van Etten at the beginning of her concert in Paris, last week in La Maroquinerie. In fact, it will be a huge mistake if you don’t run to see her every time you can! Besides of being an excellent musician, Sharon is so lovely… It’s nice how a girl with her arms tattooed and with a bunch of powerful songs seemed to be the sweetest thing on earth when she appeared on the stage with a pencil skirt and an elegant pair of black high heels. She denied during the concert, but I have to confirm: Sharon van Etten is so cool!
After “All I Can”, the first song of the concert, she proceeded with tunes such as “Warsaw”, “Save Yourself” and “Kevin’s”, a song that she confessed had sung a lot of times before.
Actually, Sharon talked a lot during the concert and I loved it more and more because of that. It’s nice to know a bit more about the songs, even if you can guess some things by yourself. When she sings that “You’re the reason why I’ll move to the city, you’re why I’ll need to leave” (not you, obviously), you know that she talks about love, but it’s sweet to hear from her that “Give Out” is a song written for a man that she loved. This song was such a nice and strong one (no, I didn’t cry, but I was almost there when Sharon sang with her heart that she needed to leave. Oh.).
On other side, she made me smile when she talked about her mother and about her hypothetic future kids. Her mum loves “Magic Chords”, which is my favorite song of Tramp, her last album released on February. “Magic Chords” is a perfect song and it starts to play very easily in repeat mode on our mind: “You got to lose, you got to lose, you got to lose sometime…”. It was also on this song that Sharon shown us her magnificent omnichord, a very weird musical instrument with a bunch of buttons that helps to create the amazing instrumental atmosphere on this song.
Another sweet moment happened in the end of “Magic Chords”, when an American girl on the first row asked Sharon about her tattoos. In a very kindly way, she explained to the audience each one of the tattoos that she has in both arms. The tattoo of a guitar on her left arm is my favorite one, because it fits her perfectly.
After playing a couple more Tramp songs, Sharon dedicated the encore to the previous albums, Because I Was in Love and Epic. “She made me love, she made me love, she made me love… more”, said Sharon in “Love More”, the last song of the gig. Yeah, that’s true: after I saw her for the first time last February in a mythic concert – as she and her manager referred after the show – at Point Éphèmére, Sharon made me love her even more in La Maroquinerie. Some girls are bigger than others… And Sharon van Etten is obviously one of the biggest.
RBC
Setlist:
1. All I Can
2. Warsaw
3. Save Yourself
4. Kevin’s
5. Peace Sign
6. Give Out
7. Magic Chords
8. Ask
9. I Wish I Knew (Solo)
10. Leonard
11. Serpents
12. I’m Wrong
13. Joke or a Lie
—–
14. For You
15. Don’t do it
16. Love More
There’s something heartwarming about this first couple of years off this decade. To make up for the absence of new groundbreaking albums released on this period, grandiose bands who were kinda dead for more than 10 years decided this was the right time for a comeback. Bands like Swans, Superchunk, My Bloody Valentine, the Afghan Whigs, At the Drive-In or Refused started/are starting to take over all the summer festivals that matter. Spain, quietly reformed by frontman (and only permanent member of the band) Josh Haden back in 2007, might not be following their trail into the big stages, but they’ve just embarked on a full European tour after releasing The Soul of Spain, their first full length record since 2001’s I Believe. Last Saturday, at Porto’s recently renewed venue Hard Club where they last played 13 years ago, Haden and the new band proved that not only his songwriting remains as good as it was back then; Spain’s live show is still rock solid.
(Honestly, I have no clue about it as I was just 11 back then. The only Spain I knew back in the day was Tui (that lovely border town where I bought my first Final Fantasy game), Vigo and A Coruña.)
(due to the lack of a decent camera, here’s a picture of the soundcheck via the band’s twitter account)
Haden knows everyone loves The Blue Moods of Spain. Haden is a crowd pleaser. Haden decides it’s a wise choice to play their 1995 iconic debut album on its entirety in the first part of the concert. He’s totally right: four songs into the show and the band’s playing everyone’s favorite song, the not-so-wisely-titled “Untitled #1” (watch some footage below, recorded by someone else. Thank you, by the way). From the hardcore fans paying €25 to see them to the broke but awesome people who could only afford to be there thanks to a lovely website who was handing out tickets for the show, everyone felt that was money well spent. The sound quality was so pristine that it looked like you were listening to the album on your living room using a million dollar sound system, except that yesterday you had an opportunity to do it while looking miserable around everyone else, asking the bartender to pour some more of that ol’ whiskey bottle on your glass. That’s the wet dream of every 40 year old depressive/depressing man who never got over that heartbreak from over 15 years ago, right?
After a 20-minute break, which I bet they required in order to watch the Champions League final’s penalty shootout, the band returned to the stage for a regular set comprised of songs from the rest of their discography, including the latest LP: “I’m Still Free”, the first song released by this new incarnation of the band, was one of the highlights here, with Haden repeating the somewhat basic but powerful lines on the chorus over and over again: “I’m still free/I’m still free/And I tell the world about it/‘Cause I got no doubt about it” while keyboardist Randy Kirk had his moment of glory, elevating the song into the instant-classic-song-pantheon through his Hammond.
Of course such a crowd-pleaser band knew how to end a show on a high note: “Our Love Is Gonna Live Forever”, She Haunts My Dreams’ wallowing closing track was played just before the encore, which consisted of arguably the best song off it, “Nobody Has to Know”. Too late: now everyone who was there knows Haden and the band are still on top of their game. Like in every single year’s Eurovision song contest, here are the results of the Portuguese voting: twelve points to Spain.
Setlist:
1 – It’s So True
2 – Ten Nights
3 – Dreaming of Love
4 – Untitled #1
5 – Her Used-To-Been
6 – Ray of Light
7 – World of Blue
8 – I Lied
9 – Spiritual
-20 min break-
10 – Every Time I Try
11 – Only One
12 – Without a Sound
13 – I’m Still Free
14 – Before It All Went Wrong
15 – She Haunts My Dreams
16 – Oh That Feeling
17 – Make Your Body Move
18 – Sevenfold
19 – Our Love Is Gonna Live Forever
Encore
20 – Nobody Has to Know
DSS