Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2009 > October > 03 > Entry
Live review: Federico Aubele
If your ACL set gets rained on — and I mean pouring afternoon rain, not the drizzles that percolated much of the morning — you basically have two options: Push back against the weather by ramping up your intensity or completely ignore the flood.
The first option really isn’t an option for Federico Aubele. His gentle music — a melange of his native Argentina’s tango, Jamaican dub and washes of ambient techno — doesn’t really give him any tools for holding back the storm. You might as well build a levee out of Lego.
Instead, Aubele (on lead vocals and nylon string guitar) and his modest backing band — a drummer, a keyboard player and a woman who sang harmony vocals and a few solo parts — did what they would have done under any circumstances: played 45 minutes worth of gentle, lilting love songs, most from his new album, ‘Amatoria.’
Aubele’s hushed intimacy held up surprisingly well in a festival setting, even as the storm grew fiercer midway through his set. A bigger problem than the weather was the pummeling guitars bleeding over from … And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s set at the nearby XBOX360 stage. ‘It’s like a remix,’ Aubele joked about the unintentional mashup of punishing indie-rock and breezy Latin American balladry that resulted.
As if trying to block out the noise from afar, the crowd moved closer and closer to the stage as Aubele’s set went on. Or perhaps they were just huddling for warmth.
Ricardo B. Brazziell photo
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | | Categories: ACL 2009: Saturday, ACL Festival 2009
