I'm back! Paredes de Coura report

Well, after that short summer break of doing nothing and procrastinating as far as blog posts go, I'm back. Like you hadn't noticed by the fact there's a new post. Thank you Mr. Obvious Blogger... carrying on.

As I referenced in my last post I was attending an annual summer festival called Paredes de Coura, located in the far north of Portugal. I had never gone to it so it was a great new experience. As we all know the world is in economic turmoil and this country is one of the most affected at the moment by it, so the line up was not full of stars and world class bands, yet those who attended did their best to put on a show.

Our first day consisted in getting there, finding a good place to build our tents and then enjoying the first concerts. We arrived late, finding a Syrian guy on stage, Omar Souleyman, chanting in arabic and clapping his hands to the music. I found this extremely entertaining and kept clapping my hands in such way for the entire festival 'cos it's just awesome. The crowd seemed to enjoy it, they were dancing in their own ways of fake belly dancing mixed with drunkenness for my delight.

Notable presences were Pulp, a British band which I learned only afterwards, has a history back to the '70s. They started with a laser show, which was fun for a while, but then the crowd was shouting for them to get started already. They ended with their single Common People... I didn't know it but the crowd seemed to
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Another, quite peculiar, band made it's presence with it's peculiar name and peculiar way of peculiarly rotate their band members through all the instruments... the drummer would stand up and play the guitar. The guitarist would drop the guitar and go do vocals and the vocalist would go to the drums... it was weird, but they rocked it out. And you will know us by the Trail of Dead:

Experimental band Battles, from New York, came all the way to put on a good show with their drums and keyboards. Their drummer was sweating buckets by the end of it. Good effort sir:

Last day brought perhaps the most people, with the portuguese band Linda Martini opening up to the delight of many, but not mine, cos I went to have a nap. I woke up in time to watch the only band on the whole festival I knew, and one I am quite a big fan of. Enter, Mogwai!

The stage exploded at this point. Epic.

They rocked my, and everyone else's, socks off. The vibrations off the subwoofer must have been enough to give more than one girl a crisis. At a certain moment while playing Mogwai fear Satan, the crowd thought the song had ended just to get their spleens removed by an explosion of sound. Right here.

The day ended up with Death from Above 1979. We had been warned by a random dude that there would be dead in the moshpit. Well... being a veteran of watching Cradle of Filth live, it didn't impress me much. There were no dead but the crowd loved the show nonetheless.

So now I'm back home and ready to do some other projects now that september has come. Time to roll up my sleeves and get to working. Next up, a game review, cos I know you all love them.