Primavera Sound 2008, Barcelona 29th May – 1st June '08

Primavera has, over the last four years, become a sort of Catalan ATP to the Reading/Leeds of Sónar or Benicàssim – challenging, innovative and unfailingly brilliant. Many of its six stages nearly slip off the tarmac and into the sea, a sharp salt tang fizzing in the air, catamarans and gulls gliding languidly by.

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Young Marble Giants photographed by Amos Memon

This is a year dominated by the old guard. Despite a programme that reads like Pitchfork’s buzz list, Young Marble Giants, whose sole LP, Colossal Youth, came out nearly three decades ago, deliver the performance of the festival, if not the year. They’re less a live epiphany (they’re almost motionless on stage) than a stark reminder of what it means – what it should mean – to be an artist, to be human, to struggle to understand one’s place in the universe. They’re as seminal as Joy Division but without the relentless namechecking and photogenic biopics; as enraged and engaged, but delivering their barbed commentary with clenched-jaw, shiver-inducing minimalist restraint. There’s an extraordinary frisson to watching a quartet of 40-somethings, professionally obsessed with the fleeting moments of youth, excavate the fruit of their adolescence from the amber it was set in after an untimely 1980 dissolution. Playing with a live drummer instead of, famously, a slightly crap homemade drum machine, their sound is more rounded live than on record, but no less resonantly vacant. Alison Statton’s crystalline but deliberately unpolished vocals float above the high, melodic bass and rumbly rhythm guitar, the two almost impossible to untwine. They close with “Credit in the Straight World”, still the sharpest interrogation of underground culture of the last 50 years. As reunions go, this is as magical, as untainted by the passage of time, as anyone could hope for.

Watch:> Young Marble Giants: ‘Salad Days’ and ‘Credit in the Straight World’:

With a crowd of about 20,000, Primavera is small enough that you’re constantly running into friends, acquaintances and various members of Les Savy Fav (who whirled through their late-night set like a particularly colourful and ear-splitting hurricane). Look, here’s Andy Hung out of Fuck Buttons, watching Bradford Cox of Atlas Sound mooch about ahead of an eardrum-shattering set punctuated with deeply philosophical interludes about girls “getting fingered in a KFC parking lot in New Jersey”. The night before, Fuck Buttons had virtually reoriented the earth on its axis with their potent blasts of sonic might. So Andy, what were your favourite bands this year? “Shellac, Shellac, SHELLAC!”

Shellac photographed by Inma Varandela

Shellac are indeed amazing. It’s tribute to years of graft as well as genius that everything melts into place, the most awkward of time signatures washing over the enormous, raw midnight crowd like the sucking of an ebb tide. When they kick into “Prayer to God”, it’s like the tear ducts of thousands of men, dormant for years (well, since they first hit play on 1000 Hurts) swell, itch and flow. But, like a spoilsport, I have to disagree with Andy. Devo were (by a whisper) better.

Devo photographed by Inma Varandela

Devo were a revelation, issuing a wholehearted challenge to any band who’s dared to exist since 1973. Their sound may be inarguably of its time, but the sharpness of every note, the knowingness, the layers of meaning in their every power chord and mock-salute, were an unspoken reminder of the era from which they sprang: Kent State, Watergate, Wounded Knee. O to be in a band when being in a band meant taking on the Prez, however obliquely and with whatever abstract, absurdist joy. O to be in a band when being in a band meant everything.

Fanfarlo photographed by Emma Gowing

Watching Fanfarlo in England always seems a bit of a cheat. They’re so technically and melodically accomplished, so assured, so ridiculously good that it’s surreal to see them playing in, for example, a tiny upstairs room at the ICA. They should be two albums in and headlining the Astoria. Here, they’re as shiny-eyed and intense as ever playing to thousands, vocals, violins and horns ringing out pure and clear like a prayer.

Amos (drums), after confidently predicting “no smoke unless you ask for it”, is almost suffocated by the smoke machine. Poor Amos. So what were your favourite bands? “Well, I was backstage at Dinosaur Jr and embarrassed myself air-drumming to ‘Feel the Pain’ just as Malkmus walked past. Dufus!” So, Simon (vocals, guitar) what were your favourite bands? “Dirty Projectors, Port O’Brian, Deerhunter and El Guincho.”

Dirty Projectors photographed by Inma Varandela

I’m not one of the many instant converts to the clattering, hypnotic charms of El Guincho, but I’m with Simon on the Dirty Projectors. (So is Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, rocking out and oblivious to all around him for most of the set. Whaddaya say, Justin? “Fucking amazing!”) Despite being perhaps the only one around who was unimpressed by Rise Above‘s seemingly remote, swottish exercises in third-world cultural examination, I was floored by their live set. More than floored – awestruck, motionless, slack-jawed. Dave Longstreth’s locked-eyeball intensity, the velvet-gloved, iron-fisted control of Amber and Angel on the flanks, the sheer gloriousness of the melodies – I’ve never been so delighted to be proved wrong.

HEALTH photographed by Inma Varandela

HEALTH are extraordinary. They seem to be able to expand – their volume, their relentless thrashing, their mighty talents – to fill whatever space is available. On the Vice stage, out on a peninsula surrounded by the sea and seemingly all 20,000-some festivalgoers, they’re like the darkest elements of a Matisse dance painting come to violent life. Wild but elegantly thrown-about limbs and bodies give visual form to their relentless beats and hammering chords. Acid clouds of sound build up, with phrases and refrains echoing and repeating until they lose all meaning, at least in any traditional sense. Their pagan exuberance – wheeling mics around, shoving them into monitors, throwing their bodies into anything that will resist – recalls misfit teenagers set loose in a laboratory of dark secrets. Weird science indeed.

A few lines must be devoted to the festival’s disappointments. Malkmus, you’re first on the list, although I suppose no one can blame the clearly billed Steven Malkmus & the Jicks for not playing a Slanted & Enchanted Don’t Look Back session, which seems to be the secret hope of the entire audience. You’re next, David Berman – Silver Jews are dully, slickly uninspiring, in line with the recent nice-enough Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea. And personal disappointments – word has it that Pissed Jeans and Why? are epiphanical, and both missed.

I’m told off for missing Bon Iver, who rouses a tear and a holler from every listener, as he did four days later at St Giles church in London (and two weeks earlier at the Forum and Rough Trade East. How many landmark, heart-stopping shows can one man perform in a few short weeks?) But I don’t regret skipping his show, instead hopping across town to the unmapped, almost unadvertised satellite gigs in the Parc Joan Miró. Curious toddlers stare and bemused grannies drag their tiny dogs past a wonky stage where the magnificent David Thomas Broughton holds court. His mind-boggling mix of soaring baritone vocals and looped guitar, rattles, taps and feedback is punctuated with abrupt moments of slapstick. Unlikely as it sounds and impossible as it is to explain, every song is a lush, delicately layered, sometimes ear-shattering mystery, but I find myself humming a few uncannily catchy lines on the way back to the festival proper.

The Wave Pictures photographed by Inma Varandela

On Sunday night, the The Wave Pictures are as delightful, melancholic and quietly perfect a closing act as anyone could wish for. Against a backdrop of early flights and Monday-morning hangovers-in-waiting, they mesmerise nearly a thousand in Barcelona’s gorgeous fin-de-siècle Apolo club, complete with softly glowing globe chandeliers and mahogany wall detail. They’re reflective and wistful, but also totally gripping, with ballsy bass and drums. Crowd favourite “Now You Are Pregnant” gets as rapturous a singalong reception as always, but in retrospect it’s almost chilling. In a plea to the girlfriend who’s never really understood him, David Tattersall sings, with a catch in his throat I may be imagining, “Johnny Cash died today, and you’d say, ‘It’s not like Elvis’ … and you would be right.” We wake up to the news that Wave Pictures idol and all-round legend Bo Diddley has died.

So, David, I’d asked earlier, what were your favourite bands this year? “The Sonics were very good, very good indeed. And Jonny and Franic playing with Darren Hayman.” You can’t nominate them, they’re in your band. “It was still very exciting.” It was all very exciting. It was life-affirming, euphoric, momentous. It was the musical high tide of the year. Don’t mind us, we’ll just lie here next to the ATP stage, under the sun and the wheeling seagulls, until next year rolls around.

Photo by Amos Memon