Five finds at Primavera

Five finds at Primavera

31 May, 2011
by: Domzig

Searching high and low...

It was Primavera the weekend just gone, and as it’s the first proper festival of the season, we bravely battled through the numerous queues, beer fights, Ryan Air direct marketing and pointless taxi rides to try and get a feel for who you should be checking out over the summer.

Here’s what we’ve found

Yuck

No strangers to most people who live in London, Yuck already look like they’re going to be one of the biggest indie bands of this year’s festival circuit.  Built from the spare parts of Cajan Dance Party, they travel around genres a bit, so that they sound like Thurston Moore one second and some shoegazy version of REM the next. Basically if you ever wanted to tour your older brother’s record collection without changing CDs, then this is the band for you.

At Primavera, they played the ATP stage which was an unintentionally forest-themed area right in the centre of the Forum. Judging by the amount of people stacked in to see them and the thunderous reception their breezy indie rock received, these guys are going to be huge.

Ty Segall

Yeah, OK, so everyone is getting kind of sick of all these garage-punk bands, but you need to get into Ty Segall because he’s really good. Burying ’60s sing-alongs and dance crazes beneath waves of reverb and giddy thud, he’s the leading light of the new wave of psych-garage-pop that seems to be surfacing from under San Francisco’s indie scene at the moment.

Playing the Vice stage at Primavera to criminally few people, his gnarly, gut-punching blend of proto-punk and indie is sort of like the Jager Bomb of music. It kind of grabs you, shakes you around and says ‘we’re partying, bro, and there’s nothing you can do about it’.

Big Boi

So, you remember when hip hop was less about speed boats, swimming pools filled with money and David Guetta and more about partying with your bitches BBQ and drinking cool-aid? Well Big Boi is bringing it back to that.

Known to most people as the more forgettable part of Outkast, I seriously don’t know why this guy has been under the radar for so long.  He played the Rayban stage on Thursday, and even though we didn’t know it at the time, he probably put on the show of the festival. Not only was there rewinds, call-backs and a scratch session from the DJ, he also invited loads of Spanish girls on stage to dance really awkwardly through most of the set. Needless to say, it was wicked.

Avi Buffalo

This is a band who seem to have the cuteness factor ramped up all the way to ten. Bizarrely playing the main-stage just before Pulp, they looked more like a bunch of kids who had just been let out of year 9 art class than an actual band, and, even better, their bassist looks a bit like Chavez from Young Guns.

Appearances aside, you’d have to be pretty dead inside not to love their music. An ensemble built from light-hearted indie guitar-lines and a love of the more experimental end of seventies rock, they sound like Fleetwood Mac meeting a sing along from Sesame Street.

Das Racist

This may be pretty controversial, but I really don’t get why people are going nuts for Oddfuture. They’re like a stupid in-joke for New York douche-bag hipsters and NME readers who dance to NAS because it’s, you know, ironic and shit and laugh condescendingly at anyone slightly different from them

From here on in, I’m sticking to Das Racist instead. We saw them play to 200 mental Spaniards, and while fundamentally they’re doing the same thing as Oddfuture, they’re actually funny.

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Domzig