2023-04-21 17:36:03
“Indie culture is that I don’t understand it,” she said.
The indie culture, to understand us, was a more or less silent step accompanying Nacho Vegas in the trance of ‘Ramón In’. A death and a funeral. Big words. To her, however, her body asked for revelry. “This looks like the silent car,” she said as she shifted in her seat. “I have books at home, too,” she bellowed in a somewhat incomprehensible way. Until someone, usually, asked him in a very impolite way to shut up. But there was no way.
The joke at the wake. The laughing fit at the funeral. Live things, yes, but the first stretch of the concert there was no one to save it. At least for those who were around. Impossible to tune in with the delicate arabesques of ‘It’s going to start raining’, not to mention the melancholic rapture of ‘Ser árbol’. Passion on stage and ordeal in the last row.
The day before, on the same stage, Bill Callahan He showed that with very little, rough guitars and a voice like an unspeakable mining basin, one can masterfully hypnotize a thousand people. last night with Nacho Vegas finally presenting ‘Immovable worlds collapsing’ in Barcelona within the Guitar BCN festival, it became clear that very little is also what it takes to kick one out of the atmosphere of a concert. A misplaced spectator, a couple of shouts at the wrong time and good-bye.
For the rest, which should be relevant, Nacho Vegas was like almost always on this tour: sublime at times, washed out and hesitant at others. Passionate with his ballads with fracture but in full process of remodeling and restoration. Trying to fit the new domestic protest song to the old rugged and inflamed epic; looking for ways to tenderly focus on songs that ask for more punch. More bad grapes.
The measuring stick remains the volcanic interpretation of ‘The penalty or nothing’, intensity peak difficult to overcome. Last night, with all the tickets sold out and the Paral·lel 62 hall dressed up, ‘The final big joke’ and ‘How to crack’ came up, electric whirlwinds that continue to recharge batteries and correct imbalances. Because, more than a year later, there is something that still does not add up in the new incarnation of the Asturian. One of the most obvious examples is ‘Big Crunch’, powerful hook to the glory of Nina Simone that sounds somewhat anemic and deflated live. Song, pamphlet, bomb, yes, but with wet gunpowder.
Unlike previous concerts, in which he took the opportunity to rescue little-visited pieces from his repertoire, yesterday the Spaniard recovered old hymns such as ‘Nuevos plans, identicas estrategias’, ‘Dry Martini SA’ and ‘Reloj sin manecillas’; he took advantage of ‘Vampire City’ to cede the stage to the neighborhood struggle of Can Batlló; and premiered a ‘Abnegation’ which perfectly sums up the crossroads at which he finds himself: half an electric jacket, half a popular song, and a chorus that seems to be made from the remains of ‘What witches eat’.
In his new role as a clueless ‘chansonaire’, the Spaniard allows himself to do without the guitar (he only picks it up in ‘Ser árbol’) and seeks greater complicity with his musicians, but at times he continues to look uncomfortable, as if it weren’t over. to fit into that skin that has been in the making since he published ‘Still worlds collapsing’ at the beginning of 2022. Okay, we will always have ‘The man who almost met Michi Panero’, with that megaphone that went on strike at the most inopportune moment and its bomb-proof chorus, but the intensity is still missed and rapport, the majestic wall of sound, from the tour to present ‘Violética’.
Perhaps that was what the girl with the fuss was crying out for. You should have asked him.
#passions #ordeals #modern #song