Barreiro Rocks Festival (Portugal) -- Garage Rock Mania ! PART ONE

Last week was time for the annual Barreiro Rocks Festival, Portugal's garage rock celebration!

For the second year in a row I served as Festival DJ, but first a look at the shows...

1.October -- Club Mercado, Lisbon -- This promo party kicked off the week with Paco y Esposa Fruta from Spain, a primitive two man guitar & drums combo from Spain that had its charm but a lack of tunes.

Next up was Nicotine's Orchestra, a one-man band created by Nick Nicotine, head of Hey!Pachuco records and one of the organizers of the festival. This was my first time seeing the Orchestra, and it was very impressive-- snare, kick-drum, harmonica, guitar, vocals-- when the Orchestra tackled the Gun Club's Sex Beat the sound was so complete you couldn't remember the original had a bass player! Other highlights included a terrific Rollin' & Tumblin', and a great cover of Psychotic Reaction, in which the somewhat silly original solo sections have been replaced by some simple but effectively distorted chord-strangling. The overall tone of this Pachuco project is bluesy and the originals aren't bad either!

Finally we had Juanita y Los Feos, from Madrid. They played the festival last year and since then have replaced their drummer and have refined their sound considerably. Juanita is a punk screamer in the Siouxsie Sioux mold while the Feos (Uglies) play a garage/punk hybrid with off-kilter guitar and some memorable Farfisa melodies. Now I need to hear an ALBUM ! Vaminos!

4.October -- Carvoaria, Barreiro -- This party in the official festival after-party space kicked off with another performance by Nicotine's Orchestra, and the songs, especially the originals, grew on me considerably.

Next up was a band I had seen at a punk festival more than a year ago and completely forgotten-- Samesugas from Galicia, Spain. I didn't have great expectations of this band but they brought it on with an hour-long assault of '77 style punk meets rock'n'roll. This band is tighter than 99% of punk bands and the drummer in particular deserves a round of applause for his imaginative fills-- never heard anything like them before, so he must have quite a laboratory up there. What is in the water in Spain, anyway ?

5.October -- Carvoaria, Barreiro -- The festival began to pick up steam after Samesugas' amazing performance the night before with an afternoon of Portuguese bands, starting off with Barreiro's own A New Hope, rock in the recent pop-punk style. Next up was Stash, also of Barreiro, who have crafted a stoner/krautrock style in the vein of Sabbath, and especially Neu! -- While the songs and set could be a little tighter, there were some truly excellent moments for this instrumental combo.

Os Lacraus of Queluz (near Lisbon) provided the Portuguese language moment of the festival with their Jonathan Richman-with-stadium-pop-melodies rock, and win the prize for best song titles of the festival ("Maria is an intellectual because she lost her virginity at the book fair"). A few more gigs and it's time for a real record, boys!

Rounding out the afternoon was Debut, again from Barreiro. A duo with an ipod for a drummer, their sound touches on Ex-Models and Liars most outre territory-- many songs having no repeated riffs, no verse/chorus structure at all. But there's nothing really chaotic about this band, who actually sound very lean and focused-- the energy pored into this show made for quite a spectacle. The band sometimes goes back to older-style songs with a more straight-up postpunk sound which, honestly, dilutes the power of what they do. This band should consider doing 20-30 minute sets and then just walking away...

(next post: MAIN STAGE OF THE FESTIVAL !)