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SXSW Review: Still Flyin’
(1 a.m. Saturday, Independent)
At least a couple of the 50 or so people who hung around until nearly 1:30 in the morning for the San Francisco collective Still Flyin’ are going to look back on cell-phone photos of themselves dancing like total goofballs and feel a wee bit embarrassed. Such is the guilty pleasure of this reggae-inspired jam band that’s calculatedly off-the-wall to the point of hip.
To not boogie along to the baker’s dozen — composed of back-up singers, a horn section, countless percussionists, a dedicated dancer in the style of a pogo stick, and a “guru” who switched off from manning the smoke machine inside the tie-dyed “mystery tent” to doling out beers from his fanny pack — is to not, um, live.
Word has spread about Still Flyin’ ever since Okkervil River’s Will Sheff told Pitchfork it was essentially his new favorite band. Now, “hammjamming,” the term frontman Sean Rawls and his merry pranksters use to explain their half-serious, half-joking approach to settling into a groove, is becoming as in-the-know as the secret handshake of the Skull and Bones society.
If all of this sounds over the top, it is, but that doesn’t mean musicianship isn’t there. Take a song like “Good Thing It’s a Ghost Town around Here,” with its gleeful, breakneck pace, and you sort of start feeling like you’re watching descendants of Afropop legend Fela Kuti.
Photo by Kathy Hoinski
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