Up next, Britt Daniel’s Spoon swagger onto the San Miguel, swigging the stuff almost like some sort of twisted, dehydrated and gangly Texan take on Oasis. In the politest possible way... The Underdog Ronseals it, trailblazing the burgeoning acoustica stomp and making a fair few thousand truly tremble with the ramshackle power of these dark horses. Drawing heftily and almost exclusively from latest LP Transference, their rather lengthy set does have a tendency to drift into minor key drudgery at times (Trouble Comes Running, The Mystery Zone) although heads and forearms are lifted heavenwards as the synthetic horns of You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb pipe up, exploding into the first truly euphorically tinged spot of anthemia thus far. Slightly less conventional are electronically-orientated gypsy-infused siblings CocoRosie, once again writhing in melancholic minor keys as beatboxers spit, flutes and recorders excrete wispy sounds that tumble into one another like hirsute beasts bundling down the Grand Canyon. Their catastrophically lavish stage setup encompasses harps and tatty rag skirts, slapdash face paints and pristine white jumpsuits, yet their melodramatic extroversion doesn’t twang as many heartstrings as it may, were it toned down a touch. Devastatingly beautiful, dangling precariously from a balloon of emotive lusciousness are Baltimore dream pop duo Beach House, whose breathy drones courtesy of Victoria Legrand, delivered as she throws her majestic brain about like a velociraptor, layer their uniquely surging sounds quite consummately. Surrounded by neon parasols and backed by subtle drum thuds, their warmly serene woozy balladry, taken predominantly from sultry third outing proper Teen Dream, gently borrows your heart, enlightening your every emotion on a glittered griddle pan, before restoring it in your rib cage. Take Care’s utterly spectacular, whilst the soaring guitar chimes of Walk In The Park illuminate the dark and dank banks that surround the ATP Stage. Heaven only knows where of what their ephemeral beauty’s born; best way to find out would probably be to get them curating a Butlins-based festival asap...
Tonight’s reformed headliners and cult figureheads Pixies are only in it for the money these days. Everybody knew it, they went and admitted it, and you’d be fairly hard pushed to find a single Spaniard in attendance tonight to dumb down such irrational motivation. Frank Black and Kim Deal’s differences, both artistic and personal, are so well documented they barely merit a footnote in the lengthy construction of one of the quintessential star spangled banner outputs still in existence. Hell, they’re more relevant to off-kilter underground culture than a graffiti-splattered subway carriage. And so to their Spanish return... Joey Castillo of Spanish descent, Frank Black of Puerto Rican Spanish difficulties, it’s all rather apt to have them back on Barcelonan shores. Surfer Rosa’s Vamos, tonight’s closer, is unquestionably the most aptly inserted performance of the weekend, invoking a near-hysterical dementia gracias a screeching Les Pauls, bounced inanimately on unsuspecting drum sticks and duelling yowls from Black and Deal. Bone Machine rattles cagily like a pram losing wheels, Gigantic sounds, well, absolutely fucking enormous and Deal beams brighter than beachside disco balls throughout. Grinding out a greatest hits set before disappearing on a Wave Of Mutilation, there’s almost an element of the tedious travails of the covers band tonight but then as Carlsberg proclaim, were the Pixies a covers band... With Black & co. over the hill and rolling happily down t’other side all the way to the Bank of America, slowly surging to their summit are Brooklyn eclectic eccentrics Yeasayer. Profiteering forever more from Anand Wilder’s gerontogeous heritage, the quartet are now bolstered by neon light cubes, keyboard stands that spurt through the stage, trailing a pillar of blinding luminescence and an extra pair of rather capable hands. Mondegreen revolutionises the robotic vomit that contemporary dance music’s come to stand for, regurgitating cagey horns and hooking them up directly into the pulsating veins of the band’s free jazz-esque basslines, I Remember pairs off dying dance floor solitude with hallucinatory synth bubbles that rise to Gaga’s Disco Heaven and All Hour Cymbals’ brightest beacon, 2080 gets a futuristic rework, reinvigorating it twelve-fold. Flourishing to the ripest of fruitions, Ambling Alp, sounding as electrifying as a TV chucked in a bath, embodies the idyllic anthem to a disconsolate adolescence. Oh and Chris Keating finally commands the stage just like he never threatened he ever would. In a pair of beige chinos.
