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SXSW Review: Loney Dear
(Habana Calle 6, Friday night)
“We love the Paramount,” frontman Emil Svanangen of Sweden’s Loney Dear said near the end of his band’s set at the Polyvinyl Records showcase on Friday night. “We were there a few weeks ago. It was freaking marvelous.”
And indeed, everything about Loney Dear’s opening gig for Andrew Bird at the Paramount last month was freaking marvelous — the venue, the sound, the band.
The band’s South by Southwest performance wasn’t bad, but it was certainly different. Svanangen had a few less members and thus a few less instruments backing him. Paired with the lack of the Paramount’s stunning acoustics, Loney Dear sounded less like a twinkly, floating folk with charming melodic sensibility than stripped-down, hard-driving rock backed by electronic samples.
And unfortunately for audience members near the back of the venue, the door to the bar had to remain open for the majority of the show because of fire hazard restrictions, so the sounds of the pounding blues band inside collided with Loney Dear’s melody-driven music to create an awful mess of sound.
But that was hardly the band’s fault, and near the front of the stage, the samples that backed songs like “Airport Surroundings” and “Everything Turns to You” from the band’s latest album, “Dear John,” raced forward and got the crowd moving, while the backing vocals from the new female keyboardist resonated with a haunting echo.
Other songs, like the ambient “I Was Only Going Out” just sounded out of place at a venue that gave the music such a rough edge.
It was a decent performance by Loney Dear, but it definitely highlighted the difference a venue can make.
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