Primavera Sound 10 is left in tatters on the final day at the Parc Del Forum
Day three of the festival guarantees that anyone staying in the city will have doubtless found enough all hours drinking holes to ensure a suitable final day's head. Perhaps it's fitting then that Animal Collective’s psychedelic head trip that is ODDSAC – their collaborative film with the visionary Danny Perez – opens the day in the spaceship-like Rockdelux Auditorium. What the collective – who are slowly coming to define a generation in much the same way as Pink Floyd – have achieved with the product of four years' work is a film with an inimitable quality of making you wish it was over whilst watching, but then wanting to do it all over again once finished. Some of the most gorgeous shots of light and general head-bending imagery are juxtaposed with scenarios that will leave you never able to look at a toasted marshmallow in the same light and continually haunted by the sight of bared teeth. People leave with their head in their hands, someone even appears to have a panic attack, but anyone that sticks it to the end is not disappointed.
Talk of the film is still running rife long into the night but anyone present at the ATP stage for New Yorkers The Psychic Paramount’s psychedelic space-drone could take temporary respite in a relentless set of noise just this side of listenable dirge. Not many people seemed to have made it back from The Bloody Beetroots or perhaps survived ODDSAC at first. But as the band play, the crowd fills increasingly to see what the racket is about. I imagine both new fans and record sales will be made on the back of this fine performance in the searing midday heat. Another packed day of music means it’s a sprint up the hill to the Pitchfork stage to catch the end of an on-form Real Estate who are just jamming out an extended version of their new instant hit ‘Basement’.
A day of alternating between west and east coast American music begins to look set as we wait for Atlas Sound to appear. Appearing on stage like a new age Neil Young, bearing only an acoustic guitar and mouth organ, it quickly becomes obvious the only thing he shares with the folk legend is the sonic space his music sits in. Perhaps owing to his cover of ‘Cortez the Killer’ with Randy Randall and Jim Jarmusch, written earlier this year specifically for ATP New York, the sound Bradford Cox creates is blistering: amazing for just one man with a loop pedal.
During seemingly a collection of all new material, the crowd reaction for ‘Walkabout’, recorded with Noah Lennox (Animal Collective coming to haunt us again) is the biggest of the set. Cox then perhaps sums up the entire festival when he stops momentarily, pointing into the distance and stating “That, is a beautiful sea thing right there”.
Keeping it on the east coast, Grizzly Bear headline the Ray Ban stage for a final moonshine Mediterranean performance. Edward from the band has been spotted at various times enjoying the festival since the first day and perhaps doesn’t sum up the crowd's adoration of the band nor festival with his intentionally kind words, “This is, definitely, one of our favourite festivals in the world”. They flit mainly between their work on ‘Veckatimest’ (with ‘Two Weeks’ bringing a reign of oh-oh’s from the crowd) and ‘Yellow House’ (with ‘Knife’ cementing itself as the sing-a-long classic of the weekend).
A double-bill back to the west coast closes the festival. Never relenting until the fat lady sings, or perhaps the long haired dude from HEALTH stops singing, it’s a marathon across the festival between No Age on the Pitchfork Stage and HEALTH on the Vice. Both offer alternate spectrums of art rock, and the only let down of the bizarrely three-piece No Age set is the omission of ‘Everybody’s Down’.
These are the words the bruised crowd chant back at Randy Randall as he stands aloft a speaker holding his guitar over the crowd, feedback ringing out. They need not comply. By this stage the race across the site is endurance rather than anything else, but one last time seems a no-brainer with HEALTH’s ‘Die Slow’ ringing from the Vice Stage. After an expectedly energetic live show of electronic scrapes and groans, ‘We Are Water’ looks set to end a perfect weekend of music. But not before new track from ‘Disc02’ ‘USA Boys’ rewrites all that, along with the rules of what noise rock can sound like. It's like Jay-Z crawling inside their drummer's mind, perusing the festival, and destroying everything that’s left of it.
Click here to read an interview with HEALTH
Click here to read our review of day one of Primavera Sound 10
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