The last concerts of the thirtieth anniversary of Super 8′the first album of Los Planetas. Those who have not yet seen them in the dozen festivals where they performed from start to finish the album they released in 1994 can do so this week in Madrid: Wednesday and Friday in La Riviera and Thursday in Ochoymedio . As happened a few weeks ago during the other series of three concerts in Barcelona, the tickets were long sold out and the atmosphere will be triumphant. Super 8 It was not intended to be played on stage in the same order in which it was pressed, but beyond some occasional dips like These last dayssupports a full pass wonderfully. And the series of encores, a great success in every sense, makes it clear that the Granada group does not take the stage to speculate. In this round, one victory is enough. And that’s a victory.
It wouldn’t make sense otherwise. The end of 2024 is also approaching, the strangest year of the career of the Granada group. Few Spanish bands have had a creative break with so much media revenue. On the one hand, starring in this blockbuster retrospective tour. On the other hand, also featuring Second prizethe Isaki Lacuesta film chosen to represent Spain in the Oscar race. Tour and film point in the same direction, the past, but they do so with diametrically opposed intentions. While the concerts activate a collective and uncritical celebration, the film is an invitation to delve into a group undermined by contradictions.
In a way, the celebration tour of Super 8 came at just the right time, as it acts as an antidote against Second prize. “This is not a film about The Planets,” insists the advertising for the feature film, but the same trailer echoes the murderous sentence that the character of May (the bassist who left the group) pronounces to J : “You are a vampire. “You will continue in music alone or accompanied.” It is not surprising that the Grenadian singer criticizes the film. However, the tour also confirms this thesis, given the notable absences of Eric Jiménez and Banin Fraile. It is therefore a versatile tour: a nostalgic balm for the public, a great celebration of silence. Second prizea boost in self-esteem (and financial) for J and Florent and, also, the reminder that Super 8 It is the fundamental stone on which the Spanish independent music industry that we know was professionalized.
The “independent” schism album
In the reviews of Super 8 that the specialized music press published in 1994, we could already sense this desire for change, the feeling that something had to happen and that it had to happen through Los Planetas. Víctor Lenore (then Víctor Malsonando) prophesied in Rockdelux that the Grenadens’ debut could represent “a serious shock in the vital signs of this colorful cemetery that has always been our blacklist. They’d only released one single and hadn’t even won Barcelona magazine’s influential demo competition, but there was no doubt: they were the chosen ones. Even the newborn Sound world He presented himself with visible enthusiasm in favor of Super 8: “We should have called him Super 10 in reference to the ten great songs that make up his first work.
The climate of transition towards independent It was so obvious that paddling in the opposite direction required some daring. This is how José Boix expressed himself in the magazine Route 66: “It’s a difficult task to comment on a band’s album. independent national, and even more so when it comes to a group that has already received all kinds of praise (especially from grandmother Julio Ruiz) and is also the first to sign for a multinational. It seems like if you don’t automatically praise bands like Los Planetas, there’s something wrong with your head. » So many darts and puns denote a division in the press of the time. Not all groups, and even less the Spanish, are capable of generating this type of schism within the union. The planets already were. And while Rockdelux He entrusted them with “an ambition much broader than the personal recreation of someone else’s universe”. Route 66 He warned that “the distortion formula they are applying is no longer new.”
In 1994, most of the debate about Les Planètes revolved around mimicry and authenticity. And if this helped them to sing in Spanish from the start and then turn to flamenco, it was precisely to forge an unequivocal identity. On the other hand, the paradox of being an emblem of independent home of a multinational sounds today like an anachronism of the 90s, since Los Planetas have done practically everything that, according to the dogmas of independentan underground and alternative band should never have: tours with a symphony orchestra and stops at the fanciest festivals, intimate concerts with two guitars and piano in alliance with Live Nation, photos with the executives of Caixabank to promote the concerts at the Alhambra while they sing “I am not going to collaborate with a regime that must fall” and meetings with entities at the level of Pedro Sánchez.
The warp manager
You don’t have to be a lynx to feel the emotional impact of a thirtieth anniversary tour. The nostalgia factor pretty much explains everything. Especially since it is a very well-known group and album. Anyone who wanted to see Los Planetas in concert was able to do so almost every year. Even live, they saved songs from Super 8 during these three decades. These concerts don’t reveal a hidden treasure or unearth a forgotten band. They only take advantage of a favorable calendar to travel into the past. Indeed, the tour is announced with the subtitle “10 tablets for traveling in time”, but it is “you and me traveling through the sun in a new dimension” that J proposed in Journey and what resonates in the first bars of each concert takes a different direction. This song takes us “on a journey through the sun”, but towards an ancient dimension. Rememorex 800 tablets from Laboratoires Pfargue do not promise new sensations, but sensations already experienced. No problem with that. But that’s how it is.
There is a striking detail in these concerts celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Super 8. Or at least that was the case during the second Barcelona concert. The quartet took the stage under a sea of distortion. Distortion was and still is the hallmark of the people of Granada. However, unlike so many musicians India of the 90s who manipulated strings, pedals and returns in search of electrical couplings before tackling the first piece, this time there was someone responsible for activating this magma of murky noise: his stage technician. A subtle detail, but also significant in illustrating Los Planetas’ perception of themselves and their relationship with the music and noise business. J, Florent and company took the stage as true professionals of the noise.
The most common comment about recent Los Planetas concerts is that they have rarely sounded so professional. ALL RIGHT. But if that’s the best that can be said of a band with three decades of experience, there will be little left to say. It’s a solvent company, no doubt. And it’s better that way, of course. Nor can many other conclusions be drawn from a retrospective tour. These more than pleasant concerts constituted an ellipse in the career of Los Planetas. But the important part starts now. And since 2005, after the discouragement The Planets against the law of gravity, I took a stylistic turn that would lead to their psychedelic flamenco scene, the people of Granada were not facing such a crucial moment.
The usual question
The tour of Super 8 She arrived like May water for The Planets. J and company had to see if they could still mobilize the public. In Granada, Madrid and Barcelona (the only cities in which they played at their own risk, outside of festivals or cycles), they attracted many more people than those who had approached them when the album was released. first album. Even more than they have attracted alone over the past two decades. This is what it takes to turn concerts into events. But even if the group has already experienced other stages of semi-apathy due to parallel projects (Grupo de Expertos Solynieve, Los Evangelistas, Los Pilotos, Fuerza Nueva…) and even a solo album by J, nothing strained the group’s seams. extra group, a group that must be done without in these Eric and Banin concerts; a problem they will have to face as soon as the tour ends.
It can be assumed that a thirtieth anniversary tour of Popular (1996) is not on the table; That would be too much Rememorex. The next Los Planetas album, if it exists, will determine whether the Granada natives are able to accumulate ideas and structures to be clearly relevant in the present again – something that hasn’t happened for several albums – or if they continue as a self-tribute band. And it is that between 2014 (date of the first anniversary concerts of A week in the engine of a bus; on the 15th) and 2024 (with the first anniversary concerts of Super 8), the group has almost generated more ink for its reissues and commemorative tours than for its new albums.
Les Planètes will begin 2025 with the same life project: traveling to 1994, this time between Logroño and Pamplona. Your latest news from the present is The songs of water (2022), an album conceived during a pandemic and visibly disoriented by the paranoia of the time. They had never looked so stuck as in antiplanetismthe song that closes the album. Navel-gazing and anemic, the best that can be said about her is that from this point on everything will sound like an improvement. But with the dismantling of the intermediate group and the nostalgic machinery gaining ground year after year, the room for maneuver to refloat the Granada ship seems increasingly narrow. Thirty years later Super 8J then finds himself once again confronted with the question: what can I do?
