1:30pm, Josh: Before
I begin my journey into day three, I feel the need to pause and acknowledge how
much fun—and how bizarre—this whole experience is. Yesterday I saw
some amazing young indie bands in a small club, one of my youth's most
important musical touchstones on a little soundstage, several great bands in a
church, and then capped the night off with a Playboy-sponsored warehouse party
featuring Moby and Justice. The amazing thing: I could've had five experiences
like that, just with different puzzle pieces.
Anyway: I missed Los Campesinos in favor of R.E.M. yesterday, so I made up for it
today at the Filter magazine day party. I think I love Los
Campesinos, and not just because they're Welsh and sort of adorable, but
because they have so much fun being smart and young. "International Tweexcore
Underground" is so funny and so right, it's almost shocking. "I never cared
about Henry Rollins!" New album out in late April, so beware the tweexcore
invasion.
1:40pm, Kyle: The glory that is Whataburger. It took me a good
half-hour and two different 'dillo buses (the free shuttles offered by the city
of Austin), but my favorite fast-food place is worth it. Too bad the closest
one to Chicago is in Mississippi.
1:55pm,
Marc: I keep seeing
Neely Jenkins (I think that's her name) from Tilly And The Wall walking around,
which keeps reminding me that if she weren't dating that guy from Maria
Taylor's band, I certainly wouldn't mind being her boyfriend.
2:10pm,
Marc: At the Paste/Stereogum party at Volume Night
Club, I'm reminded that if I were a lesbian, I certainly wouldn't mind being Kaki
King's girlfriend.
The pint-sized guitar goddess is doing her tapping thing with a backing band,
which is allowing her to concentrate on songs from her excellent new album, Dreaming
Of Revenge. John
McEntire helped hip her up on her last record, and she's kept up the good work.
2:16pm, Kyle: A kinda fat, bald singer of
a punk band stands on a second-story ledge overlooking Sixth Street. A crowd
gathers below as he bellows what's admittedly a pretty good song. A guy
standing next to me yells, "Turn up the vocals!" The song ends, and the singer
says, "Keepin' it weird, Austin." He drops his pants for good measure.
2:21pm, Kyle: Beginning a day of
celebrity doppelgangers, I spot Alia Shawkat—Maeby from Arrested
Development—or someone who looks just like
her eating a slice of pizza in front of Red 7 Seventh Street. Later,
I see someone who is the genetic twin of Alyson Hannigan.
2:23pm, Kyle: No one looks like Keith Morris
of Circle Jerks and Black Flag fame. The dude sitting on the patio of Beauty
Bar is none other than the man himself.
2:31pm, Kyle: Dallas band The
Future Cast plays to a small but enthusiastic crowd behind Beauty
Bar. The group's sound is a sort of piano-laced post-hardcore, not the typical
style you find on the streets of Austin during SXSW. They play with an
intensity I haven't seen on this trip, and it's nice to see a band play like
their lives hang in the balance during an otherwise uneventful day party.
2:55pm, Sean: Bradford Cox is a pretty
funny guy—you'd never know that from his dour day job in Deerhunter. But Atlas Sound is all sighing, dreamy pop instead of slightly
sinister narco-rock, so I guess it's okay to cut loose with a joke now and
then. "Is everybody enjoying the Renaissance Faire?" he asks. "Did you get your
turkey leg and candle-making kit?" Later he takes a phone call from his
roommate: "I'm on stage right now and there's about 500 people waiting, so
hurry up." He then announces that his roommate paid the rent on time and got a
promotion; Cox holds up the phone so the crowd can give him a round of applause
from over 1000 miles away. "That guy's a nut!" he exclaims after finally hanging
up. Even with the Bob Newhart routine, Cox manages to get through a sizeable
amount of cuts from his lovely (but unfortunately named) Let The Blind
Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, including "Winter Vacation"
and "Recent Bedroom," the songs bubbling about the room like we're soaking in a
glass of Fizzy Lifting Drink. It's an excellent tonic to my still-lingering
hangover from the Playboy party.
3:13pm, Kyle: The line to get into the
Shirts For A Cure Show at Red 7—which culminates in a performance by the
semi-reunited Hot Water Music—stretches down Seventh
Street to Red River. At the front door, a perfectly succinct sign:
3:15pm, Kyle: Cattycorner from Red 7 is a
parking lot-cum-music venue with a tented stage where Billy
Bragg currently plays to a throng of onlookers, many of whom peer
over the gate to see him. He prefaces a song by describing "Johnny Clash," his
name for his new low, guttural singing style.
3:20pm, Sean: The Pitchfork party is
always one of the most crowded of the week, and indeed the audience is packed
to the neon gills on the Emo's outside stage watching Fleet
Foxes. The band's pleasant psych-folk is a perfect soundtrack to this
sunny afternoon, abetted even further by the free popsicles being handed out.
I've only been able to spend a week or so with Ragged Wood,
but "White Winter Hymnal" has one of those melodies you remember forever the
first time you hear it, so I'm all smiles when it finally wafts in. They manage
to pull out their four-part harmonies and crystalline finger-pickings and make
them sound good even out here—no mean feat on one of the worst sound
systems in town.
3:20pm, Kyle: The Spin
party is always a hot ticket, the laminates a sort of status symbol among the
festivalgoers, but the line-up this year—Switches, Ben Jelen, The Whigs,
The Raveonettes, Vampire Weekend, and X—doesn't do much for me. I walk in
to The Raveonettes on stage doing their best Jesus &
Mary Chain impression. I generally like them as a band, but live they're about
as exciting as paint drying. Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo stand virtually
motionless and speak in a disaffected, too-cool-for-this monotone. Behind them
is new drummer Leah Shapiro, who plays standing up and uses a floor tom as a
bass drum. If I hadn't seen her playing, I would have sworn The Raveonettes
programmed the beats using My First Drum Machine.
3:55pm, Josh: Spin
always has a great day party, and almost always with the buzziest bands. I
catch the end of The Raveonettes' set, and the beginning of Vampire Weekend. I know this goes against the prevailing critical
winds, but I can't bring myself to muster an opinion on them. I think they're
absolutely okay. Pretty fine. Not bad at all, but nothing to write home about.
MySpace music editor and occasional A.V. Club contributor Trevor
Kelley tells me that that's okay, and when he notices that I'm clapping like a
half-enthused robot, I decide to move on.
3:55pm, Sean: Allow me to be the
one-millionth person to shout out that the emperor has no clothes on Times New Viking. Instead, he's running his thin, naked ass
down the street and hiding behind feedback and shrill attitude. The
drummer/singer has an obvious need for attention, but what he really needs is
to have his microphone taken away from him: He's way too into his own stage
banter, introducing nearly every song with some longwinded generic quip. Except
you can't understand him for all of the delay on his voice, so the banality
just echoes around the room—kind of like the shared delusion that this
band is awesome.
3:59pm, Kyle: Sixth Street and the
surrounding area are littered with street buskers whose best efforts are mostly
drowned out by the din of 10,000 bands playing at once. Most of them are
dudes/ladies with guitars, but I see one guy who raps. His style's a little
more aggressive: walking with passersby until they throw a buck at him to go
away. Here, a couple walks as the dude spits lines like "Get your fuckin' mind
right!" uncomfortably close to them. They're pained, but polite—and
probably furiously digging through their pockets to make this guy leave them
alone.
4:15pm,
Marc: Perhaps the
simultaneously hottest and most backlashed band at SXSW this year, Vampire
Weekend is playing
a great set at Stubb's as part of this party put on by Spin, which conveniently just put the
band on its cover. The band is way more indie rock than the world-beat thing
that people like to talk about, but the one thing that separates it from the
herd is that it uses sparseness perfectly, in a way that makes one think that
Vampire Weekend could very well become as good as Talking Heads. Okay, so maybe
I'm getting ahead of myself, but as for right now, I wouldn't want to be seeing
any other band right now.
4:25pm, Josh: I give
up Vampire Weekend in favor of Dizzee
Rascal, who's playing at one of the big TV
sets in the convention center. It's the rare live hip-hop show that doesn't
sound kinda muddy—probably because it's going to be on TV?—and I
realize that grime kinda sounds like plain' ol' old-school hip-hop. Or maybe I
just don't know anything, because I head upstairs to see The
Lemonheads after a few songs. Turns out
they've cancelled, with no reason given. Alas.
4:30pm, Kyle: Today's hot and sunny, so
spending an hour inside the cool, dark confines of the Alamo Ritz theater
sounds awesome. The occasion: the premiere of the first two episodes of NOFX Backstage Passport, a Fuse series documenting the
long-running punk band's world tour of off-the-radar locales like Ecuador,
Peru, Colombia, Chile, Russia, and a whole bunch of others. The smart-alecky
man-children in NOFX and their crew are perfect for a TV show like this, though
I'm still surprised by how thoroughly entertaining the shows are. Frontman Fat
Mike has the perfect personality for the show—funny, candid,
sharp—and the footage of sketchy shows in Third World countries is pretty
engrossing.
4:30pm, Sean: Kyle and Josh were a little
hard on Yeasayer Wednesday, and now I can see why: Between
the long and lustrous manes on both the guitar and bass player, and the
former's patchouli/crystals vibe and the latter's wife-beater/mustache steez,
there's a definite Kansas vibe going on. But I'm still a big fan of the
music—which I personally liken to a hippie version of TV On The
Radio—so I'm happy to hear favorites like "Wintertime," "2080," and
"Sunrise" replicated with such precision. I have to admit, though, it goes down
a lot smoother if you don't have to look at them.
4:55pm,
Marc: It's
horrendously hot here in Austin, which makes my beeline over to the convention
center to see The Lemonheads—who, Josh tells me, are gearing up to play It's A
Shame About Ray in
its entirety—more than a little uncomfortable. Then comes the text from
Josh that Evan Dando & Co. have canceled, so it's back to Stubb's.
[pagebreak]
5:05pm,
Marc: X has already started its set, which
sounds fine and all, but man alive, John Doe and Exene Cervenka look
unbelievably old—I later bump into an ex-coworker who describes her as looking
like a "crazy homeless witch." Exactly. Rumor has it that Lou Reed is supposed to make an appearance,
which he doesn't, but Stubb's has another guest celebrity in the house: Beatle
Bob, the old mop-top guy from St. Louis with the ridiculous dance moves, who
just the night before I wondered aloud if he was still alive.
5:29pm, Kyle: Back at the Spin party, X nears the end of their set
with "Nausea." John Doe is completely covered in sweat and bounces around the
stage with an exuberance that belies his age. Exene Cervenka, not so much.
5:46pm, Kyle: Walking back from the Spin party, I pass the outdoor stage where Billy Bragg
played earlier. This time it's Carbon/Silicon, the new
project featuring Mick Jones of The Clash and Tony James of Generation X and
Sigue Sigue Sputnik. The crowd isn't nearly as big, but a number of passersby
do double takes then stop to watch. One couple was walking down Red River
eating popsicles, when the woman noticed who was on stage. "Wait a minute," she
said, popsicle in mouth. "That's fucking Mick Jones!" That's everybody's
reaction. Even better, Carbon/Silicon is really good, and Jones—who looks
like your kindly British uncle—is obviously enjoying himself.
6:05pm,
Marc: Headed back
down Red River toward Sixth, I enjoy a quintessential SXSW moment as I pass by
the Free Yr Radio Broadcast Corner—there's great music coming from every
corner of this city right now, and I can tell that I should immediately change
my plans and check out whoever this is. Turns out its Carbon/Silicon, the newish band from The Clash's
Mick Jones and Tony James of Generation X and Sigue Sigue Sputnik fame. Jones
looks just as rough as X did—with Amy Winehouse in mind, I'm wondering if
England has finally made dentistry illegal—but the band sounds good,
offering up lots of pleasantly poppy rock.
8:01pm, Josh: I
talked everybody into seeing Wing,
a Chinese woman who basically does weird karaoke versions of AC/DC and ABBA
songs. Even former A.V. Club editor-in-chief Stephen Thompson was
pulled along for the ride. I began to feel a little bad watching Wing, because
she takes it so seriously. I summed up my feelings to my colleagues this way:
"I'm sorry, and you're welcome."
8:06pm, Kyle: At Maggie Mae's upstairs,
Chinese-Kiwi singer Wing opens with her rendition of ABBA's
"Dancing Queen," which sounds like the worst karaoke song ever. She sings at
the highest, most unnatural ends of her register, frequently falls behind in
the songs, and generally mangles the material. Wing's fun in small doses, but
40 minutes of her can be pretty excruciating—and it makes me feel a
little guilty. Wing stands poised on stage, her hands clasped, and a deadly
serious look on her face that shows she's not in on the joke. You can sugarcoat
it in an appreciation for outsider art all you want, but the irony in the room
is thick.
8:16pm,
Marc: It's hard to
not feel like an asshole every time you laugh at Wing, but sometimes it's impossible to
keep your mouth shut—the South Park-approved Asian singer from New Zealand is kind of
like the new Wesley Willis, with schizophrenia replaced by broken English. And
a falsetto that's about as on-key as I am when singing "Cherub Rock" as part of
a drunken 5 a.m. Rock Band session. And a string of covers that includes songs
by ABBA, AC/DC, The Beatles, and The Carpenters. I really am attempting to
eliminate all irony from my life, but little miss Wing proves to be just a bit
too tempting.
9:09pm,
Marc: Lines in
front of venues are already starting to get long, so I figure a set by The
Little Ones off the
beaten path is a good choice for right now. Wrong. The indie-pop band from L.A.
has already started and my friend and I decide that we really don't want to
stand in a line right now, so I consult my program and make the executive
decision to spend the entire night at the Merge show.
9:30pm, Josh: After
some ill-spent time at the Sub Pop showcase—Sera Cahoone was beset by
feedback problems (and a cheesy-ish backing band)—I plunked myself down
at the Super Deluxe Comedy Death-Ray show, intending to stay for an hour or
two. I ended up there all night. Morgan Murphy, whom I'd never heard of, made me laugh lots. ("I
was talking to my girlfriend—just a friend that's a girl, I love cock.")
The Human Giant dudes did their
T-shirt cannon routine. Eugene Mirman shared his enjoyment of the Internet. Brian Posehn told the same jokes I've heard him tell lots of
times before, but they were still fucking funny. (He describes his physical
appearance as a "bunch of farts that got dressed up in a man costume.")
Occasional A.V. Club
contributor Andrew Earles and his partner in comedy Jeff
Jensen have a new prank-call CD coming out
on Matador soon, and their two-man act was about as meta as the disc. It ended
with Jensen in a dress, pretending to be Elaine Boosler.
Reggie Watts mixes
beatboxing with jokeless comedy, which sounds like a recipe for disaster but
is, in fact, pretty hilarious. His entire act also served as a setup for Mr.
Show alum Paul F. Tompkins,
who spent about five minutes talking about how he was going to
come up and do beat-box comedy, but now he couldn't, because he had to follow
Watts.
The weirdest part of the show belonged to Janeane
Garafolo. I thought she was joking when
she came out all jazzed up and freaking out about her various
neuroses—and maybe she was. But it was less a comedy set than an onstage
therapy session, with some punchlines thrown in on occasion. It wasn't bad, but
it wasn't really good, either. And at times it was a little bit scary. As Scott Aukerman and BJ Porter said,
after wrestling onstage in their underwear, "alternative comedy!" Still far
better than regular comedy, I say.
9:32pm, Kyle: Friday night turns out to
be a series of anticlimactic sets by hyped bands. Kicking it off at the Bourbon
Rocks back patio is Pissed Jeans, who play slow, sludgy
post-rock with frontman Matt Korvette doing his best David Yow impression. The
shtick gets boring quickly and sets precedent for what will follow the rest of
the night.
9:40pm, Sean: Pissed
Jeans singer Matt Korvette clearly loves David Yow—and I love
people who love David Yow—but you can tell he's slightly too shy to, say,
pull out his balls here. Still, his drunken paces and yowls are convincing, and
his band careens behind him in the grand tradition of swampy rock like The
Birthday Party, Gallon Drunk, and yes, The Jesus Lizard. It's the kind of music
that would have inspired a lot of sweaty thrashing back in the day, but this
audience doesn't do much more than stare.
10:19pm, Kyle: Carissa's Wierd has
spawned at least three projects: Band Of Horses, Sera
Cahoone (who played at 9) and Grand Archives. The
last one features Mat Brooke, who was in BOH until going off on his own. The
group takes an eternity to set up, and its light, folksy pop doesn't bring the
energy level up much. Time to see what's going on outside on the patio.
10:25pm,
Marc: That
executive decision turns out to be a great one, as it was pretty easy to get
into The Parish, and the last few songs by Baltimore duo Wye Oak are perfectly dreamy and rocking. I
can't figure out where that low end is coming from until I notice the drummer
has two jobs: keeping the beat with his right arm while he plays keys with his
left. Right now, however, the spotlight is on me, as Radar Bros. singer Jim Putnam has noticed my
Zankou T-shirt, the one that gets me the most comments at SXSW, since it's a
restaurant in L.A. and half the people here this week are from Southern
California. I tell him that I'm not from L.A. and I only bought it because it
was four bucks, and suddenly he seems unimpressed, and instead of dedicating
the next song to me, he dedicates it to Zankou.
10:30pm, Kyle: It's electro-pop duo Handsome Furs, the side project of Wolf Parade's Dan
Boeckner. The music has a nice spark, but the songs quickly blend together. But
Boeckner gets points for his quip about gaining weight: "Ever since Wolf Parade
signed to Sub Pop, I've been eating so much foie gras that I've gotten so fat."
10:35pm, Sean: One of the cuter couples
in indie rock, Dan Beckner and Alexei Perry channel their adorable love into
some surprisingly dark synth-pop as Handsome Furs. The songs
from Plague Park remind me of the really minimal new wave
that I love—they're like slightly more rockist takes on early OMD and The
Human League, which isn't as easy to pull off as it sounds. (Ask one of the
thousands of other synth-pop bands playing this week.)
11:10pm, Sean: Kelley
Stoltz's band looks like it was hastily assembled via Craigslist, and
my friend from Sub Pop confirms that it changes nearly every show. The band
also ups my official glockenspiel tally to four; it is indeed this year's
banjo.
11:21pm, Kyle: Now I'm just drinking
because I'm bored.
11:29pm, Kyle: Recorded, The
Helio Sequence sound bigger than their drums-and-guitar setup, but
outside on Bourbon Rocks' patio, it just sounds thin. That said, the airiness
well suits "Lately," the opening song from the new Keep Your Eyes
Ahead and their first of the night.
11:40pm, Sean: I haven't really given The Helio Sequence a chance in recent years, so I'm fairly
surprised at how much I enjoy the new songs. The music seems much more
dance-oriented than I remember, and some have a definite whiff of Madchester
that I really like. It might be time to catch up with them.
11:41pm,
Marc: The Shout
Out Louds are just
as jangly and good here as they were at the A.V. Club party yesterday, and right now this
cover of Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now" is taking the whole thing up a notch.
Every time I see this band I kick myself for dismissing them for years, having
assumed a band called Shout Out Louds would play shitty pop-punk.
12:10am, Sean: This is my second Fleet Foxes set of the day and it doesn't disappoint. What
does disappoint is that while I've been outside watching The Helio Sequence on
the Bourbon Rocks patio, the inside bar has suddenly filled to capacity, so I'm
stuck standing on the deck watching the band play with their backs turned to
me. It's still great stuff, even with the shitty view; it's looking more and
more like Fleet Foxes may be my only SXSW "discovery" this year.
12:20am,
Marc: I'm pretty
much in front of the stage, which means I can't tell how crazy it's gotten
inside of The Parish, but it's safe to assume that actress Zooey Deschanel is
the main draw here. She's the She half of She And Him (M. Ward is Him), and though her
voice isn't anything special, it sounds good over these old-fashioned pop
songs. The backing band—which includes Omaha hired gun Stefanie Drootin
(The Good Life, Bright Eyes, Art In Manila, etc.) and some guy who looks like
he's probably someone's grandpa—is solid, to the point where it's almost possible to stop staring at
Deschanel.
12:20am, Kyle: I'd debated going to the
Emo's for the Biz 3 showcase with Flosstradamus, The Cool Kids, A-Trak, Kid
Sister, and Clipse, and I officially regret it when I get a surly text message
during Kid Sister's set from Genevieve, who's here on
vacation and thus not blogging: "Fuck your sad emo bullshit! Mortherfucking
DANCE PARTY up in here!!!"
12:40am, Sean: Considering how many
people—young and way too old—I've seen wearing those gaudy neon No Age shirts this week, I'm really surprised at how
sparsely attended their showcase is. The band is loose, and not in a good way:
By now they've probably played more than a half-dozen gigs around
town—and they have another one after this at the Lamar Pedestrian
Bridge—so it's understandable that they'd be a little tired. The pieces
are all there, but something's missing; they never add up to the barely
contained chaos that I've seen them pull off before. I imagine anyone who
followed the hype trail over here to see them for the first time will be
confused as to what all the fuss is about.
12:50am, Kyle: Twenty minutes have passed
since No Age was supposed to begin. When they finally start,
the crowd outside has thinned considerably. Five minutes later, I have what
should be trademarked as an official SXSW Moment: watching a buzzing, heavily
hyped band and thinking, "Really? Is this it?" Maybe there's time to catch
Clipse at Emo's…
1:10am, Sean: The inside room is packed
again for Blitzen Trapper, and while I've slowly come around
on the band's hiccupy Southern stomp, the wind is fast draining from my sails.
I stick around for a little while waiting to see if maybe they'll pull out the
jaw-harp, but my wife's face says, "Let's go."
1:25am, Kyle: Thanks to Sean "I've Got
The Hook-up" O'Neal, I get into a packed Emo's, where Clipse
is running half an hour late. When they finally show up and open with "Momma
I'm So Sorry," it's easy to see why Sean was so blown away the other day. The
crowd is psyched, Clipse is tight, and I can't get enough of those minimalist
beats. Fuck my sad emo bullshit, indeed.
1:30am,
Marc: The crowd has
definitely thinned out for Destroyer, and the technical difficulties certainly aren't helping
the momentum, but Dan Bejar and the gang are still making a gloriously epic
racket. I still haven't heard the forthcoming Trouble In Dreams, but I'm hoping most of what I'm
hearing is on there.
1:35pm, Sean: Sixth Street is swarming
with amateur musicians seeking attention any way they can get it. Leaving the
club I'm nearly run down by a mobile hip-hop crew consisting of a DJ spinning
from the back of a converted pedi-cab while some dude shouts into a miniature
megaphone random boasts like, "We run this city!" On the way to our car, we
pass the usual clusters of dudes strumming acoustic guitars and banging on
overturned buckets, but we also spy: a band of Indian musicians sitting cross-legged
and making droning ragas with accordions and other odd-looking instruments; an
obnoxious drum circle crowded with drunken frat boys exorcising their fear of
rejection; a swaying ren-faire girl playing the recorder like she's perched on
a toadstool in the Shire; and another rapper wearing a fake Afro who's
muttering into an amplifier draped with a Texas flag and banging on a
tambourine that says "Jesus." At SXSW, everybody's a star!
2:25am,
Marc: The only
late-night party I've been invited to can't be found on my SXSW map, which
means it's too far away for me to bother with. Besides, my dogs are barking.
Time for sleep.