concerts
barcelona
2019-12-12 20:00
!!! Wallop Tour
In 1997, nobody was even remotely worried about the ranking of his or her person or business on Google, but it already seemed like a rather kamikaze idea. “Why don’t we call ourselves !!!?”. “You wouldn’t dare!”. They dared. And given what we have seen, finally it wasn’t such a bad idea to name your band with three exclamation marks. The weird thing is that nobody had thought of it before.Almost twenty years after the arrival of the Californian band’s first album, everyone now verbalises their cryptic naming as they see fit, but everyone knows who we are talking about. They, that gif on legs that is Nic Offer and his followers, advised us, at that time, to pronounce it like a quick clicking of the tongue (“chk chk chk”), but after any one of their concerts they have been called all sorts: “The mother of all parties”, “absolute madness”, “unbelievably funky””.In reality, !!! transcend their name to be danced to only. Non-stop: their groove is infinite. They could have used up all their rowdy reserves at that almost mythical show at Primavera Sound 2004 when Nic Offer ended up puking from so much grooving, but later came several more albums, their corresponding tours and more festivals to help to blur the frontier between club music and punk guitars. It is no small achievement although nowadays it seems to be: their explosion onto the scene at the turn of the century was really quite revolutionary. They have been fun, yes, but they have also been important. And still to be conjugated in the present. They are fun and they are important.
barcelona
2020-02-07 20:00
RIDE
And then, comes one of those days when you wake up pop, thirsting for the fresh guitars of the day and hungry for fantasy choruses. So you decide that if those bands that started their career 30 years ago are still making music it means that they are still an integral part of today’s music and you put on Future Love, Ride’s 2019 single. Oh surprise: that track for which Real Estate and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever would kill for does not only completely satisfy your indie pop urges, but also takes you from flashback to flashback all day long through the discography of the Oxford band. It is impossible that such a perfect song like Future Love could come from a band without experience. And how!If in musical dictionaries there is a photo of Mark Gardener and Andy Bell next to the entry shoegaze (there isn’t but you know what we mean) it is because the first EPs by the band, their 1990 debut Nowhere and its follow-up Going Blank Again in 1992 are quintessential of the genre. It contained everything that everybody else copied: the waves of distortion, the stifled voices representing stifled feelings, the otherworldly harmonies… That is why Ride is more a model than a band. Even when they themselves have broken the mould (which they did early on: in 1994 with Carnival of Light when they went against party discipline embraced sixties psychedelia) they are still a language in their own right. The stylish, dreamy and noisy indie pop sounds like Ride even when they welcomed interference from the likes of DJ Erol Alkan producing their comeback album Weather Diaries.Ride, the band of the 2015 giant banner, the band of the Heineken Hidden Stage in 2018, will be back to articulate their language in the present tense through Primavera Sound channels during the presentation tour of their recently announced new album, This Is Not a Safe Place, that will come out on August 16th and will once again be produced by Erol Alkan and mixed by Alan Moulder. Essential pieces of this pop dream from which we don’t want to wake up.
madrid
2020-02-08 20:00
RIDE
And then, comes one of those days when you wake up pop, thirsting for the fresh guitars of the day and hungry for fantasy choruses. So you decide that if those bands that started their career 30 years ago are still making music it means that they are still an integral part of today’s music and you put on Future Love, Ride’s 2019 single. Oh surprise: that track for which Real Estate and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever would kill for does not only completely satisfy your indie pop urges, but also takes you from flashback to flashback all day long through the discography of the Oxford band. It is impossible that such a perfect song like Future Love could come from a band without experience. And how!If in musical dictionaries there is a photo of Mark Gardener and Andy Bell next to the entry shoegaze (there isn’t but you know what we mean) it is because the first EPs by the band, their 1990 debut Nowhere and its follow-up Going Blank Again in 1992 are quintessential of the genre. It contained everything that everybody else copied: the waves of distortion, the stifled voices representing stifled feelings, the otherworldly harmonies… That is why Ride is more a model than a band. Even when they themselves have broken the mould (which they did early on: in 1994 with Carnival of Light when they went against party discipline embraced sixties psychedelia) they are still a language in their own right. The stylish, dreamy and noisy indie pop sounds like Ride even when they welcomed interference from the likes of DJ Erol Alkan producing their comeback album Weather Diaries.Ride, the band of the 2015 giant banner, the band of the Heineken Hidden Stage in 2018, will be back to articulate their language in the present tense through Primavera Sound channels during the presentation tour of their recently announced new album, This Is Not a Safe Place, that will come out on August 16th and will once again be produced by Erol Alkan and mixed by Alan Moulder. Essential pieces of this pop dream from which we don’t want to wake up.
madrid
2020-02-19 20:00
BIG THIEF
For a normal band, debuting with a masterpiece could mean setting the bar far too high from the word go. But Big Thief is anything but a normal band. Their first album came out in 2016. It was actually called Masterpiece. This tongue in cheek title worked like a sort of liberation for them. It was as if Adrianne Lenker and her bandmates had said ”alright, we have got our masterpiece, now we can get on with things that really matter”. And they started to make records that describe people’s lives. Yours, mine, everybody’s.After Masterpiece, came Capacity and U.F.O.F. Between these two, Lenker also released her first solo album, abysskiss. In total, four timeless records that you turn to when you are at a loss. You stand before them as in front of a mirror, facing their songs, which can either comfort or break you in two depending on your mood because they are full of truths, sung for strangers called Paul, Mary, Randy, Jenni, Haley and Betsy, but also for you. And, suddenly, you everything becomes clear.With the next album which will be out October 11th, only five months after the release of U.F.O.F. and with the memory of its presentation at Primavera Sound 2019 still fresh in our minds, the straight flush of Adrianne Lenker and her Big Thief will be completed by Two Hands, the fourth album from the band that has taught us that the North American folk-rock tradition can be turned around. Big Thief have partnered with PLUS1.org so that €1 from every ticket sold will go to support HANGARMUSIK and their orchestral music program for children in emergency and community accommodation for refugees. http://www.hangarmusik.de
barcelona
2020-02-20 20:00
BIG THIEF
For a normal band, debuting with a masterpiece could mean setting the bar far too high from the word go. But Big Thief is anything but a normal band. Their first album came out in 2016. It was actually called Masterpiece. This tongue in cheek title worked like a sort of liberation for them. It was as if Adrianne Lenker and her bandmates had said ”alright, we have got our masterpiece, now we can get on with things that really matter”. And they started to make records that describe people’s lives. Yours, mine, everybody’s.After Masterpiece, came Capacity and U.F.O.F. Between these two, Lenker also released her first solo album, abysskiss. In total, four timeless records that you turn to when you are at a loss. You stand before them as in front of a mirror, facing their songs, which can either comfort or break you in two depending on your mood because they are full of truths, sung for strangers called Paul, Mary, Randy, Jenni, Haley and Betsy, but also for you. And, suddenly, you everything becomes clear.With the next album which will be out October 11th, only five months after the release of U.F.O.F. and with the memory of its presentation at Primavera Sound 2019 still fresh in our minds, the straight flush of Adrianne Lenker and her Big Thief will be completed by Two Hands, the fourth album from the band that has taught us that the North American folk-rock tradition can be turned around. Big Thief have partnered with PLUS1.org so that €1 from every ticket sold will go to support HANGARMUSIK and their orchestral music program for children in emergency and community accommodation for refugees. http://www.hangarmusik.de
barcelona
2020-02-27 20:00
(SANDY) ALEX G
When nobody was even talking about bedroom pop yet, Alexander Giannascoli’s room had already served as a recording studio for several albums. He would record them and, without any great ceremony, upload them on that Bandcamp profile that ended up being his own personal Boyhood. There we watched him grow from album to album, without him even knowing if anybody out there was listening. First as Alex G; then as (Sandy) Alex G the alias that this premature veteran still uses today. He has already released eight! albums during his career that started in this decade that is nearing its end: the first, Race, was released on January 1st 2010. Afterwards, there came the almost accidental turning point in his career, starting with DSU (2014), with his signing to Domino records and not forgetting a surprising invitation from Frank Ocean to participate on the incredible Blonde. These are all valid reasons to believe that this indie-is-dead-and-buried stuff is great as long as it resuscitates every now and again to be reincarnated in characters like (Sandy) Alex G, the penultimate link in the invisible chain that could connect Elliott Smith, Jason Molina, Mark Linkous, Stephen Malkmus, Conor Oberst and Bradford Cox and, whilst we are at it, jangle guitars, country beats, psychedelic whirlpools, the gentleness of folk and a hint or two of grunge. On September 13th he will extend his own chain with the release of House of Sugar, his new album.
madrid
2020-02-28 21:00
(SANDY) ALEX G
When nobody was even talking about bedroom pop yet, Alexander Giannascoli’s room had already served as a recording studio for several albums. He would record them and, without any great ceremony, upload them on that Bandcamp profile that ended up being his own personal Boyhood. There we watched him grow from album to album, without him even knowing if anybody out there was listening. First as Alex G; then as (Sandy) Alex G the alias that this premature veteran still uses today. He has already released eight! albums during his career that started in this decade that is nearing its end: the first, Race, was released on January 1st 2010. Afterwards, there came the almost accidental turning point in his career, starting with DSU (2014), with his signing to Domino records and not forgetting a surprising invitation from Frank Ocean to participate on the incredible Blonde. These are all valid reasons to believe that this indie-is-dead-and-buried stuff is great as long as it resuscitates every now and again to be reincarnated in characters like (Sandy) Alex G, the penultimate link in the invisible chain that could connect Elliott Smith, Jason Molina, Mark Linkous, Stephen Malkmus, Conor Oberst and Bradford Cox and, whilst we are at it, jangle guitars, country beats, psychedelic whirlpools, the gentleness of folk and a hint or two of grunge. On September 13th he will extend his own chain with the release of House of Sugar, his new album.
barcelona
2020-02-29 20:00
ALGIERS
The quotation from Bertolt Brecht used by Algiers in 2017, when they released their second album The Underside of Power, is still valid today in 2019: if with two albums the Atlanta band has still not managed to change the world, let’s go for third time lucky. If in 2019 the planet is even more fucked up than it was in 2017, we have to keep fighting.Franklin James Fisher, Ryan Mahan, Lee Tesche and the former Bloc Party member Matt Tong are absolutely clear about that and it is in this context that they are releasing Can the Sub_Bass Speak?, audio-visual track in collaboration with the duo of producers Randall Dunn and Ben Greenberg (Jóhann Jóhannsson, Sunn O))), Uniform) that expands on their collage of free jazz, post-punk and dystopian soul with anti-racist and anti-fascist messages. It is part of the artistic web and installation thereisnoyear.com and anticipates the reactivation of Algiers’ battle and will be followed very soon by new music that will take them on a European tour with dates in Razzmatazz 3 in Barcelona (on such a unique date as February 29th) and in Café Berlín in Madrid (March 1st). In dark times, songs to light the way.
barcelona
2020-03-01 19:00
TYCHO
+ Poolside Scott Hansen aka Tycho says in the text that accompanies the single Easy, which he released in April, that ”music can transport us to other realities”. What he doesn’t mention, because our friend Scott is a cool guy, is that not all music has that virtue and that it cannot be measured according to the charts, even if it is worth millions. Another thing he doesn’t explain, because cool guys don’t do that, is that his music does have it. With the emotional electronic music by the Californian artist that aims at both the head and the feet, made to move people both emotionally and physically, it is easy to travel from one place to another without even leaving your home. Sometimes, it takes us to places that we have already been to; and at others to destinations that we have never set foot in. Sometimes, it can even mix everything up: who says that you cannot feel nostalgia for a place that you don’t know yet, for an era that you haven’t lived? In 2006 it was made very clear to us that you can when he released Past Is Prologue, his first album, full of songs that seemed to imagine Instagram filters ages before they were even invented. Since then, over the next three albums, reality has passed through Tycho’s hands making it right on target.
madrid
2020-03-19 19:00
METRONOMY
Joe Mount and hisMetronomyhave spoiled us. It would be good if once in a while they made a bad album, even if it was on purpose, so that we could assess everything they have done for us fairly: they have been polishing up the vintage side of synth-pop, that already came with a shine, for over a decade now. They are the outstanding pupils from the school of The Human League, Visage and late Roxy Music, but Mount and company have swotted up on the book of technified, sophisticated pop style so well that they have ended up patenting their very own. Elegant and refined; they could almost pass for French rather than British. They make hits quite literally without turning a hair. Six records later, Metronomy now only focus on themselves: it is the advantage of being a contemporary classic.
barcelona
2020-03-20 19:00
METRONOMY
Joe Mount and hisMetronomyhave spoiled us. It would be good if once in a while they made a bad album, even if it was on purpose, so that we could assess everything they have done for us fairly: they have been polishing up the vintage side of synth-pop, that already came with a shine, for over a decade now. They are the outstanding pupils from the school of The Human League, Visage and late Roxy Music, but Mount and company have swotted up on the book of technified, sophisticated pop style so well that they have ended up patenting their very own. Elegant and refined; they could almost pass for French rather than British. They make hits quite literally without turning a hair. Six records later, Metronomy now only focus on themselves: it is the advantage of being a contemporary classic.