Hey Guys!

Guess what?! It turns out I totally have a blog! Crazy, right? I know! It's like when someone tries to bum a cigarette and you're all like "I don't smoke", and then you get home and empty your pockets and suddenly remember that you've had a carton-a-week habit for decades as you pull out a pack of Camels, open it, lovingly caress your last one and light it. "Thank God I didn't give this one to that mooch," you think as you inhale deeply, adjusting the wig that hides the toll that months of radiation therapy have taken on your fragile frame. Just like that!
I mean, instead of ranting futilely into the void, I could have been ranting productively on the interwebs. Colour me embarrassed.
So much has happened:
I went back to Istanbul. Second time there. I love that city. Have you been? I don't know - you don't have a blog. It's a crazy exciting metropolis with millennia of history and culture and amazing food. Go.
Japan is up next. Woo hoo!
Closer to home, last week a corrupt Spanish politician was gunned down in the street by the mother of some girl she'd fucked over. Right now, the Spanish police could be kicking in my door to arrest me for suggesting that maybe some awful lady who scams over a hundred and fifty grand a year from the public coffers while faking eligibility for free trips to NYC and bullying the opposition and the press deserves to eat a lead sandwich with the works. (They're making it illegal, you know) If only I'd been paying attention to my bookmarks.
Eurovision! The fun I could have had with Eurovision. Buxom slavs and bearded ladies. Oh well. Next year.
In the meantime, I have a band too. That one is easier to remember. We recorded and played a couple of shows and I keep paying for rehearsal time, so it's harder to ignore. We've been accepted as semi-finalists in a radio contest. I'm not sure what we can win (apparently not too hard to ignore) but it's probably something cool like hats or beer, so I would really appreciate it if you would click on the link and vote for us. Just tick the box at the bottom of the page and click Enviar. Thanks.
My annual rock orgy takes place next week as I spend three days in the ugliest part of the city taking in the sweet noise of Primavera Sound. (With JB. Woo hoo!) I'll tell you all about it if it doesn't slip my mind.

VOTE FOR LES FAT JONES HERE!

Spring?!!

This year Primavera Sound was a misnomer, as a cold front gave the concrete expanse of the Forum, where the three day festival was being held, a decidedly wintry feel.
It ran from Thursday to Saturday and was an exciting weekend of great music with highs and lows.

Worst Pre Party
I got off to an inauspicious start on Thursday when my washing machine died at the same time that a pipe in the building sprung a leak that shot water like a geyser into the utility room by the entrance hall. After ascertaining that the washer had indeed given up the ghost and calling a technician to come and perform last rites, concerned by the lack of water running from my taps, I left my apartment to investigate. I came upon neighbours, an elderly couple, staring distraughtly at the jet of water slowly flooding the ground floor of the building. Nobody else was around and their frantic gestures were doing nothing to quell the rising tide by the elevator. There was a number posted for the building superintendent which went unanswered when I called. I then tried the emergency number for the water company. I was greeted by a resolutely unhelpful woman who seemed determined to eat up my cell phone's minutes without actually taking any action. She informed me that the water, once inside the building, was no longer the water company's problem while the woman of the couple yelled disconcertingly in my ear. Finally, the alleged water company operator (for the help she was, she might as well have been an Avis agent on her break) asked to speak to her. Worried that I might be missing some crucial information getting lost in translation, I gladly obliged. The old woman snatched the phone. After a minute or so, she also came to understand the absolute lack of usefulness of the operator, told her to go fuck herself and handed me back the phone, which I hung up without bothering to continue the conversation. I called the super back, who this time answered. The sound of gushing water was clearly audible over the phone and the super sent a plumber over immediately, who quickly fixed the leak and returned water to the building.

Clearest Illustration of Results of Laziness
Over 100 000 people came from around the city and the world. I'd had my ticket since Christmas and could easily have gone to get my bracelet pass earlier in the week. I didn't, and as a result had to stand in a line that snaked around the entrance of the park to get in. Shockingly, most people respected the line (I attribute this to the high number of foreigners who may be more used to doing what they're told) and I was inside in under half an hour.

Best Daytime Performance
Rock and roll is better in the dark. It's infinitely more powerful when the atmosphere is concentrated in the light generated solely for the performance. In a festival, the earlier bands lose out to the sun and often struggle not to diffuse into the air. Despite her preternaturally powerful voice, Neko Case couldn't overcome the time slot she had been given and was underwhelming. Django Django were affable Scottish lads who reminded me of Franz Ferdinand 2.0. Tame Impala lived up to their Aussie psych vibe and serenaded the sunset like a bunch of stoners would.

Biggest Conflict
There always comes the moment when several bands that you want to see play at the same time, and choices must be made. For me, the biggest one was Bob Mould vs. the Postal Service. I love the album Copper Blue more than Give Up and Silver Age is mostly great, but I was the only one in my group who felt that way. With a heavy heart, I passed on Bob Mould and went to watch the Postal Service. Cool surprise: Jenny Lewis was in the band. Weird surprise: she was dressed like a college freshman trying to get into a stylish bar and had a cruise-ship holiday romance vibe going on with Ben Gibbard who added dancing to his singing and songwriting as proven qualifications to be named Whitest Guy on Earth. Nevertheless, they have some festival-ready hits that were fun to bounce along to, and a good time was had by all. (Except one friend who was too disturbed by the aforementioned vibe and left to see Deerhunter.)

Best Climbing into the Audience
The giant Heineken stage hosted big bands playing for huge crowds, and the singers felt compelled to bridge the gap between them and the audience, climbing the security barrier and wading into the front row. Nick Cave did it in leather pants. Damon Albarn stayed to sing a couple of anthems from Blur's hit-o-riffic set. But the clear winner was Thomas Mars of Phoenix, who came down for the hit, stayed to serenade tearful girls with an acoustic version of "Sick for the Big Sun" before surfing halfway across the crowd to sing to the rear half of the audience.

Best Throwback Band
Every year, Primavera trots out some reunited or still raging star to draw the old folks (i.e. me) to the place with the Animal Collective and the Grizzle Bear and the dubstep. This year was heavy on the past with Dinosaur Jr, Jesus and Mary Chain, Dead Can Dance, Meat Puppets, My Bloody Valentine, Blur and more. For me, it was a tie between the Breeders playing Last Splash and Wu Tang who, despite the absence of Raekwon and Method Man, rocked the Forum for over an hour without a lag in energy.

Best Time to Go Home
Eventually, the guitars are replaced with MacBooks and it turns into a rave. The Knife brought costumed dancers and Crystal Castles rocked when they weren't conducting noise experiments, but at some point, the lady and I realised that we were the only ones not on MDMA and bed was calling.

Total Time Spent: 23.5 hours

That Was a Lot of Rock & Roll

Thirty hours of concerts in three days. That's a lot of rock & roll! (and chillwave and Afro-pop.)
I spent the weekend at Primavera Sound, a sprawling music festival that turns a hideous expanse of cement at the edge of Barcelona into a hipster paradise for a brief moment every year. It was fantastic. I had a blast wandering from stage to stage, catching bands I loved, bands I'd heard of, and being surprised by new music.
Now any hipster gathering is going to have some truly ridiculous (and ridiculously awesome) people there, but I'm not going to spend a post laughing at hipsters. Mocking their mustaches and bow ties is as obnoxious as those mustaches and bow ties. Besides, as someone who spent the first half of his twenties sporting dreadlocks, I have forfeited the right to criticize youth fashion. (Within reason. Poopy pants are still a crime, no matter what you have in your past.) We are all the products of our circumstances, and if asymmetrical haircuts and fuzz on one's upper lip are the current circumstances, then so be it.
In a weekend full of massive cheering crowds and stage theatrics, one highlight for me was an intimate acoustic set in a little theater on the premises. Jeff Mangum, sitting on a chair and strumming a guitar, entertained a couple thousand people with renditions of old Neutral Milk Hotel songs. I was late to the NMH party, receiving On Avery Island as a birthday gift in 2003, and discovering and falling in love with In the Airplane Over the Sea shortly thereafter, by which time the group had already disbanded with Magnum receding into seemingly permanent exile. He recently started performing again, so I was psyched to catch him in concert. He was affable and personable onstage. His voice was more powerful than on the albums, and he delivered his songs with a passion that gave me the chills that hearing Two Headed Boy sung live should. Good times.
A$AP Rocky confirmed that I just don't like modern hip hop. Various synth bands proved that, despite the nineties revival underway, the eighties will never die. I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiastic reception given to Afrocubism, a merging of musicians from Mali and Cuba. I figured hipsters generally liked their world music delivered by preppy white guys.
Two other bands got me thinking about what greatness in music means. On Thursday I watched back to back sets by Death Cab for Cutie and Wilco. It is a given among most of my friends that Wilco is a great band, a proposition I support wholeheartedly. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of my all-time favorite albums, one I return to regularly over a decade after its release. The thing is, since then, I hadn't really been into an album of theirs until last year's The Whole Love. Songs, yes - Hummingbird and You are my Face, for example, are standout tracks on albums that I will generously call mediocre. It took ten years for Wilco to make a musical statement that approaches the genius of YHF.  Holding a band up to the standards of a classic, even if it is their own, may be harsh, but it cuts two ways. I have been willing to indulge their guitar noodling, wan sentimentality or whatever turn they have taken since 2001 because I know what they are capable of.
Death Cab, on the other hand, have been turning out reliably pleasing pop albums for years. I have never loved one, but each release gets heavy rotation on the Noah Green playlist for months after I get it. Their concert was a best of that most bands would be proud to have in their catalog. But I would never consider them great.
I guess this means that the average rating of a band's oeuvre is ultimately not how I measure them. If someone reaches the peaks that Wilco has, I will patiently follow them through the valleys. I'm thankful for consistency of a band like Death Cab, and would frankly be overjoyed as a musician to equal such an even output, but my true admiration goes to the mercurial geniuses. 

Spring is Coming

There are certain markers in the city that show the progress of time throughout the year. The change in temperature and the length of days are obvious ones. A more subtle one is the nationality and type of tourist. The low season extends from the second week of January to the third week of January. After that, the influx of visitors begins anew, gradually picking up steam. First come the perpetually vacationing French, then the Italians. Soon they are followed by British who arrive to turn a glowing pink in the unfamiliar sun and get drunk by 5. Summer brings crowds of Americans.
This year, with work, Les Fat Jones and 2 Skinnee J's, I was too busy to really pay attention, and was caught by surprise when the streets were suddenly hot and crowded. As I cycle to work, I now need to bring a change of shirt. By the time I reach my destination, the one I wear on my bike looks like I fell into a swimming pool. (Too sexy? Too sexy!)
And this weekend brings a particular brand of tourist: the hipster festival-goer.

Yellow wristbands abound as people from around the continent flock to Barcelona to see Primavera Sound, a Pitchfork and Vice approved musical extravaganza.
Meanwhile, the country continues to fall apart. Sales are down, unemployment is up and the banks are in serious trouble, as is the currency they stock. Said visitors were greeted at the airport today by a literal mess.

The cleaning staff is on strike, not only refusing to clean, but actively dumping trash throughout the terminals.

Black Lips

At least there is some awesome fiddling going on as the place burns.