The last thirtieth anniversary concerts of Super 8′the debut album by Los Planetas. Anyone who has not yet seen them at the dozen festivals where they have performed the album they published in 1994 from start to finish can do so this week in Madrid: on Wednesday and Friday at La Riviera and on Thursday at Ochoymedio. Just as happened weeks ago in the other round of three concerts in Barcelona, tickets were sold out a long time ago and the atmosphere will be triumphant. Super 8 It was not conceived to be played on stage in the same order in which it was pressed, but beyond some occasional dip like These last dayssupports a full pass splendidly. And the set of encores, a great success in every sense, makes it clear that the group from Granada is not going on stage to speculate. On this tour only one victory is enough. And it’s a win.
It wouldn’t make sense otherwise. The end of 2024 is also approaching, the strangest year in the career of the Granada group. Few Spanish bands have experienced a creative break with so much media revenue. On the one hand, starring in this successful retrospective tour. On the other hand, also starring Second prizethe film by Isaki Lacuesta chosen to represent Spain in the Oscar race. Tour and film point in the same direction, the past, but they do so with diametrically opposite intentions. While the concerts activate a collective and uncritical celebration, the film is an invitation to dive inside a group undermined by contradictions.
In a way, the celebration tour of Super 8 has arrived at the right time, as it works as an antidote against Second prize. “This is not a movie about The Planets,” the advertising for the feature film insists, but the same trailer echoes the murderous phrase that the character of May (the bassist who left the group) utters to J: “You are a vampire. “You are going to continue in music alone or accompanied.” It is not strange that the singer from Granada criticizes the film. Even so, the tour also confirms this thesis, given the notable absences of Eric Jiménez and Banin Fraile. This has been, then, a multipurpose tour: a nostalgic balm for the public, a massive celebration to silence Second prizea boost of self-esteem (and financial) for J and Florent and, also, the reminder that Super 8 It is the fundamental stone on which the independent Spanish music industry that we know was professionalized.
The album of ‘indie’ schism
In the reviews of Super 8 that the specialized music press published in 1994, one could already perceive that desire for change, a 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 debut of the Granadans could represent “a serious shock in the vital signs of that colorful cemetery that has always been our hit lists.” They had only published one single and had not even won the influential demo contest of the Barcelona magazine, but there was no doubt: they were the chosen ones. Even the newborn Sound World He ran with visible enthusiasm in favor of Super 8: “It should have been called Super 10 in reference to the ten great songs that make up his debut work.”
The climate of transition towards indie It was so unmistakable that paddling in the opposite direction required a certain daring. This is how José Boix expressed himself from the magazine Route 66: “It is an arduous task to comment on a band’s album. indie national, and even more so when it comes to a group that has already received all kinds of praise (from Grandma Julio Ruiz above all) and is also the first to sign for a multinational. It seems that if you don’t automatically praise bands like Los Planetas, something is ‘bad talk’ in your head.” So much dart and wordplay denotes a division in the press of the time. Not all groups, much less Spanish, are capable of generating this type of schism in the union. The Planets already were. And while Rockdelux He awarded them “an ambition much broader than the personal recreation of other people’s universes,” Route 66 He warned that “the distortion formula they apply is no longer new.”
In 1994, most debates about The Planets revolved around mimicry and authenticity. And if it helped them sing in Spanish from the beginning and later turn towards flamenco, it was precisely to forge an unmistakable identity. On the other hand, the paradox of being an emblem of indie homeland from a multinational sounds today like an anachronism from the 90s, since Los Planetas have done practically everything that, according to the dogmas of the indiean underground and alternative group should never have: tours with a symphony orchestra and stops at the poshest festivals, intimate concerts with two guitars and piano in alliance with Live Nation, photos with Caixabank executives to promote concerts in the Alhambra while they sing “ I am not going to be a collaborator of a regime that has to fall” and meetings with entities at the Pedro Sánchez level.
The Distortion Manager
You don’t have to be a lynx to locate the emotional impact of a thirtieth anniversary tour. The nostalgia factor explains practically everything. Even more so, since it is a well-known group and album. Anyone who has wanted to see Los Planetas in concert has been able to do so almost every year. Even live they have rescued titles from Super 8 during these three decades. These concerts do not reveal a hidden treasure or unearth a forgotten band. They only take advantage of a favorable calendar to travel to the past. In fact, the tour is announced with the subtitle “10 tablets to travel in time”, but that “you and I traveling through the sun in a new dimension” that J proposed in Travel and that sounds in the first bars of each concert takes on a different direction. That song takes us “on a trip through the sun”, but towards an old dimension. Rememorex 800 tablets from Pfargue Laboratories 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, there was at the second Barcelona concert. The quartet took the stage under a sea of distortion. Distortion was and is the hallmark of the people of Granada. However, unlike so many musicians indies of the 90s who manipulated strings, pedals and monitors in search of electrical couplings before attacking the first song, this time there was someone in charge of activating that magma of murky noise: their stage technician. A subtle detail, but also significant to illustrate the perception that Los Planetas have of themselves and their relationship with the music business and noise. J, Florent and company came out on stage like true professionals of the noise.
The most widespread comment about Los Planetas’ recent concerts is, precisely, that they have rarely sounded so professional. OK. But if this is the best that can be said about a group with three decades of experience, there will be little that can be said. Which is a solvent company, without a doubt. And better this way, of course. Nor can many more conclusions be drawn from a retrospective tour. These more than enjoyable concerts have been an ellipsis in Los Planetas’ career. But the important thing starts now. And since in 2005, after the dejected The Planets against the law of gravity, J took a stylistic turn that would lead to their stage of flamenco psychedelia, the people of Granada were not facing such a crucial moment.
The usual question
The tour of Super 8 It has arrived like May water for The Planets. J and company needed to see if they could still mobilize the public. In Granada, Madrid and Barcelona (the only cities in which they have played at their own risk, outside the framework of festivals or cycles) they have attracted many more people than those who approached them when the first album came out. More, even, than they have attracted on their own in the last two decades. That’s what it takes to transform concerts into events. But although the group has already experienced other stages of semi-sluggishness due to parallel projects (Grupo de Expertos Solynieve, Los Evangelistas, Los Pilotos, Fuerza Nueva…) and even a solo album by J, nothing has strained the seams of the group more. band to do without in these Eric and Banin concerts; an issue that they will have to face as soon as the tour ends.
It can be assumed that a thirtieth anniversary tour of Pop (1996) is not on the table; It would be too much Rememorex. The next Los Planetas album, if there is one, will determine if the Granada natives are capable of amassing ideas and structure to once again be clearly relevant in the present – something that has not happened for several albums – or if they perpetuate themselves as a self-homage band. . And it is that between 2014 (date of the first anniversary concerts of A week in the engine of a bus; the 15th) and 2024 (with the first anniversary concerts of Super 8), the group has almost generated more rivers of ink for its reissues and commemorative tours than for its new albums.
The Planets will start 2025 with the same life plan: traveling in 1994, this time between Logroño and Pamplona. Your latest news from the present is The songs of the water (2022), an album conceived during a pandemic and visibly disoriented by the paranoia of those days. They had never sounded so cornered as in antiplanetismthe song that closes the album. Navel-napping and anemic, the best that can be said about her is that from then on anything will sound like an improvement. But with the middle group dismantled and the nostalgic machinery gaining ground on the present year after year, the room for maneuver to refloat the Granada ship seems increasingly narrower. Thirty years after Super 8J once again faces the question from then: what can I do?
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