Primavera Sound 2010: In A Nutshell

Best Areas of Barcelona
1. Parc Del Forum - There's lots of great areas of Barcelona, but during Primavera the best place to be is the Parc Del Forum, the huge outdoor concrete complex by the sea that hosts all the music.
2. The Beach - Before or after the music, Barcelona's long stretch of seaside sand is an obvious attraction for peely wally Scots. Instead of heading to bed at 5:30am, walk five minutes to the beach, feel the sand between your toes and wait for the sun. It'll be along in an hour.
3. Barri Gotic - The gothic quarter has a reputation for pickpockets, so don't carry valuables there and don't let any locals distract you with odd behaviour. Without that worry, there's dozens of wee characterful bars and cafes, carved into medieval tenements, hiding in the labyrinthine lanes and squares.

Best San Miguel Stage Headlining Act From Back in the Day Beginning With the Letter P
1. Pixies (Friday) - Forget the youthfulness of their music and the lack of youthfulness on-stage; Black Francis has moobs, but he yelps Broken Face, roars Tame and squeels Vamos like he always did.
2. Pet Shop Boys (Saturday) - Pixies and Pavement were professional in performance; Pet Shop Boys provided the pizazz. They put on a (quite bizarre) show with dancing skyscrapers, boxheaded fighting ladies and pineapple hats, which at least acted as distraction during all the songs which weren't Go West. Or Can You Forgive Her? Or What Have I Done To Deserve This? Or Always On My Mind. Or, you get the picture.
3. Pavement (Thursday) - Apparently, Pavement aren't a spectacular live band, though seeing them live at all is certainly special to those who'd given up hope. If Malkmus doesn't seem to be too fussed, Spiral Stairs and Bob Nastanovich are more excited; the latter especially is as excitable as any fan here, clearly loving his big kid vocal roles.

Best Pavement-like Act From Back in the Day
1. Pavement - the most Pavement-like band in a crowded field of Pavement-likes. Just.
2. Built To Spill - very like Pavement, and just as good: a thunderous You Were Right, a raucous Distopian Dream Girl and an incredible Carry The Zero to end; but the marginal highlight was actually Goin' Against Your Mind, a ten-minute long epic of guitar dynamics and rhythm.
3. Superchunk - quite like Pavement, except without any excited fans: a camera panning across the front row showed their most dedicated fans on the big screens: checking texts, crossing arms, looking around. Meh.

Best Old Guy
1. Van Dyke Parks - a pivotal figure in connecting traditional Americana and Disney pop with the avant garde; also a little old guy sitting at a piano like a grandfather, playing for the photographers clambering over the steps in front. Parks on piano, his cellist, bassist and violinist all seem to start playing different songs before converging together. His modest patter is hugely endearing, his return for an encore seems genuine, and the standing ovation that follows certainly is.

Best Nutter
1. Tim Harrington, Les Savy Fav - emerges in a giant furry bear suit, wearing flashing red lights round his eyes, strips down to his pants, runs a good 30m through the crowd to balance, on his belly, on the top of a pole. He then races past me -- I'm not near the stage at all -- nearly taking my neck off with the mic cable, to embrace a fan on someone's shoulders. There's a burst of noise -- no singing -- and he returns to the stage to attempt to climb it. That's just the first few minutes.

Best Dance Act
1. The Field - Playing with a drummer, guitarist and bassist enables Axel Willner to exercise a lot more fluidity in his performance than Ableton Live alone would allow; or at least, it looks more like a performance than a man at a laptop ever could. The drummer is especially good, adding frills, rolls and extra rhythms to create new patterns; he needs a break after 45 minutes, before a final 15-minute Over The Ice that seems to hold for an eternity before shattering.
2. Fuck Buttons - dazzlingly loud, large and abrasive, like an hour-long earthquake involving giant metallic plates, controlled by the Bristol duo facing each other as if in confrontation. With bright white lights and a giant glitter ball too, it's a disorientating sensory assault, and a thrilling spectacle.
3. Fuck knows? - 2010's lineup was full of great bands, but that's virtually all it was: bands. No hip-hop and only a slither of electronic dance artists. Whose bright idea was it to schedule The Field and Orbital at exactly the same time?

Best Finale
1. The XX - they started in light, and finished in far more appropriate darkness, but the specific highlight of the set was the very end, when all the stiff, restrained tension of the preceding 40 minutes was unleashed by bassist Oliver Sim, slamming at a cymbal while bass beats blasted out at machine gun speed.
2. Beach House - Beach House's permanent tiredness lends an end-of-tether honesty to their balladry; it's like the arguments and stress have been and gone, and now there's just debris left to soberly clean away. So when they finish with the unusually peppy 10 Mile Stereo, it sounds like regeneration: the set was a cleansing, and now the world awaits anew.
3. Built To Spill - Distopian Dream Girl and Twin Falls set up Built To Spill's glorious finale, an anthemic rendition of Keep It Like A Secret's Carry The Zero. Probably their finest five minutes, with a gorgeous vocal melody, plaintive soloing and a rapturous outro after the final denouement, it sends Built To Spill's surprisingly large crowd delerious.

Best Primavera Food
Do the free-poured spirits with mixer count as food? The non-alcoholic food in Primavera is pretty poor: its signature dish, the pizza cone, is only to be enjoyed ironically ("It's like an ice cream, but pizza!" and so on). The flavour of the pad thai remarkably managed to be overwhelmed by the taste of the cardboard box it was served in, but the felafel kebab gains a few points by actually being a chicken kebab. A nice surprise for me, probably not if I happened to be a veggie.

Disappointing Animal Parts
1. The Antlers - Playing just as you'd expect a Brooklyn indie-rock band on the Pitchfork stage should; with professionalism, energy and a little frolicking flair. Problem is: Hospice was a concept album about a loved one dying of terminal cancer, and it was utterly moving because of the intimacy of the recording. Those songs don't suit this big stage setting.
2. Beak> - Geoff Barrow's Jaki Liebezeit-indulgence project Beak> is apparently inspirational in a dark, intimate setting, but as with The XX, here a large stage, bright sunlight and Mediterranean backdrop made it difficult to admire.

Best On-stage Quotes
1. Spiral Stairs, Pavement - "We're for Spain at Cuppa Mundial. C'mon Spain." Not even "Viva Espana?"
2. Ira Wolf Tuton, Yeasayer - "Please have us back, you're way better than the UK!" Half of us are the UK.
3. Tim Harrington, Les Savy Fav - "No wonder Europe is failing as an economy, you don't look after your wires!" You don't want to argue with that guy.