INTERNATIONAL MUSIC REVIEWS & NEWS
Spiraling through atmospheric drone riffs and surf rock, Univers’ guitar melodies sound as if outer space were crashing into the ocean. The guttural vocals hold a strange Joy Division ‘80s vibe, but definitely sound like the droning omnipotence of the Universe itself. So, if you ever had one of those weird moments where it seemed like the universe [...]
Maria Rodés’ voice comes through her music like a morning dove on a vintage 1920s radio. The acoustic guitar and Spanish lyrics conjure a concert in a dusty park’s gazebo somewhere in Spain, but the experimental decorations littered throughout the music has an irrevocably contemporary air. The nylon string guitar, piano riffs, and Rodés’ lullaby vocals are accompanied [...]
Especially for Barcelona where the music and art scenes can be elusive, it always helps to check out record labels in order to discover new bands and to find interesting places and venues to go to. Barcelona has numerous independent record labels that also manage international artists, as well as some collective labels managed by [...]
Spain can be an unusual location of curation for live music. The most prevalent trends are discotheques based around popular music (mostly American), hippie and rasta jam bands, or death metal. Anything else can be hard to come across unless you know where you’re looking. Even for a cosmopolitan contemporary cultural center like Barcelona, such [...]
Exploring live music in Barcelona led to overhearing every once in a while about a group of crazy dudes from a place called Vic. I first heard about a collective called Famèlic when speaking with the Barcelona band Mujeres. The name Els Famèlics is Catalan Spanish that actually means “the hungry” rather than the false friend, “the [...]
This article covers three Spanish bands discovered through various concerts and outlets like bandcamp and SoundCloud. All three of them have a different take on drone and shoegaze music, a style that’s hard to find in Spain. Univers Univers is a band that is just getting started, having played a lot of secret shows in [...]
Once upon a time there was a musician named Fanny Roz. Her story involved snail races, tree houses, smokey French jazz bars, magical beaches in Chile, and a tale of two cities. It was the best of times…yeah, okay, it all really sounded like it was pretty much the best of times… The whole story of [...]
Good local music can be hard to come across in Barcelona unless you know where to look. The city is a little bit fragmented as there’s a bigger draw to drunken discotheques, heavy metal bars or jazz and flamenco. “Indie rock” bands can be hard to find, because there aren’t too many of them and [...]
The Parc del Forúm is an excellent location for Primavera Sound, because the Spanish heat gets intense, particularly in the front row crowds, but there’s always a cool sea breeze that hits you just at the right moment. The three main festival days were full of a lot of excellent performances and I even had [...]
In THE BOMBER JACKET’s interview with Barcelona’s Mujeres, the group mentioned a little town outside of the city called Vic where they said a makeshift D.I.Y. music community had formed. Such types of spaces are great at producing creative (or extremely weird) acts. Furguson is an example and they are part of the Vic collective [...]
