Torres With Just A Guitar

This was surprising. On the same stage as Tobias Jesso, Jr. the night before, Torres also took the stage solo, without a band and accompanied just by her guitar. She was playing later, and on Saturday night, so she also had a little more to contend with noise-wise than Jesso, but she held her own. It's another one of those Primavera sets that I'd deem sort of out of place for a festival, but hearing Mackenzie Scott do new songs from Sprinter is transfixing either way.

Mac DeMarco Covering Coldplay

I was vaguely aware that Mac DeMarco had a tendency to play a lot of covers, and that they were often of the more jocular variety. I was hanging backstage when I heard those familiar opening chords to “Yellow.” I really thought it was just a tease, but they committed, albeit in that jocular way. The crowd was a funny mix of genuinely psyched about this, and bemused. Anyway, the rest of DeMarco's set was good, too. I also wound up having a conversation backstage with the guy for like ten minutes without realizing it was him. Nice dude.

Caribou

Unfortunately, I missed a big chunk of Caribou's set because I stayed for the entirety of Underworld (more on which, in a moment) and I wound up taking the long, circuitous route backstage with Strand Of Oaks (more on which, in a moment). Doesn't matter, though -- twenty-five minutes of a Caribou set is still one of the easy highlights of the entire Primavera experience. Any Caribou set is a highlight of wherever it's happening. I became aware of Caribou by seeing Dan Snaith's project open for Radiohead; ever since, I'll take any chance I can to see these guys. I managed to catch “Can't Do Without You” and “Sun,” both of which are titans live -- especially “Sun,” which has grown into this ten-plus minute epic at the end of the show.

Underworld

One of the most exciting and intriguing things going into Primavera was Underworld. Like Sleater-Kinney on Friday night, this is another one of those artists I've always meant to spend more time with and never have. Turns out their 1:30AM set on one of the festivals main stage was one of the more overwhelming live experiences I've had in recent memory. It was crowded, but not too much that you couldn't make your way pretty far up if you wanted to. At this point, I was hanging out with some of the dudes from Strand Of Oaks, and we wound up close enough where you sort of forgot you were in a festival crowd at all; every beat and synth wash and broody melody seemed to totally fill every bit of the air around you. It felt like a small, internalized, intense club show rather than standing in a massive crowd of people. They played 1994's dubnobasswwithmyheadman in its entirety, stopping now and then to thank the crowd and make sardonic comments, and as the set wound to a close singer Karl Hyde said something about needing to play a particular song if they really wanted to thank us. It was, of course, “Born Slippy .NUXX,” which I actually didn't really expect to hear. But that's when the set peeled back open, and you realized there were thousands of people dancing to a legendary '90s classic at 3 in the morning. I've witnessed my share of amazing, communal festival experiences in the past, but seeing “Born Slippy .NUXX” in this context has to be one of the best.

Strand Of Oaks

At some point during Strand Of Oaks' ascendent 2014, I found out Tim Showalter had lived in Wilkes-Barre, PA, which is my hometown, for almost a decade before moving to Philly. Earlier Oaks records were written there; he played bars and DIY spaces five or ten minutes away from where I went to high school. Tim and I kept in touch a bit after meeting at one of his shows last year, and it's been striking to see how drastically and quickly things are changing for this guy after it took him until the fourth record to really break through. The iteration of the band I saw yesterday is a new-ish one -- they used to tour with a synth player, and when she left, Carter Tanton came on board as a second guitarist. It's made a huge difference in the sound and ethos of Strand Of Oaks live. Gone are any vestiges of introspective folk; gone are the synth layers from HEAL. The band's transformed into a looser, gnarlier, heavier straight-up rock outfit, and it just felt unbelievably powerful to see them do their thing on a big stage, to hear “Heal” reconfigured as a fire-breathing opener, to hear “Plymouth” riding on U2-esque guitar atmospherics. (Carter told me this is what everyone compares the current live rendition of this song to, and it's spot on.) You have to understand: there are places and names in “Sterling” and “JM” and “Plymouth” that only make sense if you've lived in Wilkes-Barre. Those are about Tim's days playing those bars in my hometown, and now he's singing songs about my hometown on one of the main stages at Primavera. This is not, to say the least, what you'd expect is going to happen for most artists who are hanging out playing in Wilkes-Barre. It's unreal, hard to believe, and totally inspiring. I can't wait to see what happens next.

Sunrise At Primavera

Before I got to Primavera, I had no idea this happened. The festival goes all night; you can stay and watch DJs as the sun comes up behind you, or you can leave in those final minutes of night and walk home at dawn, which are always some of the strangest and most gorgeous walks, but I guess particularly so after a festival. I'd called it a relatively early night on Friday and got to sleep around 4, but I knew Saturday would be a lost cause despite me having an early departure today -- I had to see Caribou and Underworld, it was my last night in Spain, and at this point I was kinda just going with the flow of whatever Tim Showalter came up with. A DJ was playing in the amphitheatre-ish Ray Bans stage; fireworks shot off pre-dawn while Blur's “Girls & Boys” and David Bowie's “Let's Dance” played. I took a little walk around and tried to get a decent photo of the sunrise, mostly to no avail. And as I came back up the hill and started to angle out of the festival, dawn had arrived and the DJ was blasting “Born To Run.” Technically, I also heard strains of “Don't Stop Believing” before I left, but I'm just gonna remember “Born To Run” here because hearing “Born To Run” blaring over a festival crowd at dawn, in the festival's final moments, might be the best ending to a festival that I could ask for.