Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2011 > September > 17
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Scene report: The panda in the front row at Stevie Wonder
Who are those people in the front row? When did they secure their spots? Have they moved at all during the day? What’s with the panda suit?
University of Texas student Vanda Taupradist, an international business studies major, got to Zilker Park at noon on Saturday to see Stevie Wonder. The panda head is nothing new for the music lover, who likes to sport the costume at concerts. But the full-body costume is a first. Vanda, who is known to friends as Vanda The Panda, said when she found out that the legend Wonder was headlining ACL Festival, she knew the musical genius deserved the sartorial upgrade. And she went to great lengths to make sure she could see the artist her mom had turned her onto as a child.
Taupradist camped out at HEB for 17 hours to buy student tickets to the festival. Her reward? Icon Stevie Wonder’s set list and towel, a bunch of new friends after having never left her spot and some serious laundry to do before returning to the festival Sunday.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Fest review: Fitz and the Tantrums
(Laura Skelding AMERICAN-STATESMAN)The going was a bit rough at the beginning of Fitz and the Tantrums’ 5 p.m. set at the Honda stage. The tinny mix wasn’t doing the band any favors, burying both the creative horn charts and the stirring organ. Fortunately, the sound improved, and singers Michael Fitzpatrick and Noelle Scaggs were basically not going to rest until they had the entire crowd dancing and letting loose. The group’s neo-soul style has an element of irony, and Fitzpatrick seems to have worked backward from Britain’s the Style Council to find R&B nirvana, but Scaggs is a natural, like a Tina Turner cousin signed to Motown. You know when she was seven years old, the middle-schoolers were copying her dance moves. Both expressed heartfeld appreciation for Austin audiences, and Fitzpatrick proclaimed that the band would not be where it was without its SXSW exposure.
The Tantrums covered the Raconteur’s “Steady As She Goes” with aplomb. but really grabbed the crowd with the title track of their full-length debut, “Pickin’ Up the Pieces,” featuring arranger James King on flute. The group had fans singing along lustily to a clever cover of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams,” and finally established dominance with the irresistible, singalong original “MoneyGrabber.” A certain amount of time-travel may be required to fully appreciate the band’s appeal, but when Scaggs and Fitzpatrick commanded the audience to get low down, and Fitzpatrick called out vioators — “I know you guys think you got a hall pass!” — the average height of their fans was suddenly about 3-feet-tall, and the exhortation to get crazy had a host of fans erupting skyward into a happy paroxysm of silly dance moves.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Fest review: Alison Krauss
Musical transcendence can be hard to find at a festival like ACL, where for many, listening is secondary to coming, going, deciding how long to stay and where to go next, discussing the previous band, determining group requirements for beer and food, and trying, via various forms of technology and occasional waving and screaming, to track down friends who disappeared hours ago. Those looking to be transported may struggle to focus on the musicians alone amid the hurly-burly. However, a large crowd at the Bud Light stage actually grew astonishingly still and surprisingly quiet for Alison Krauss and Union Station’s magnificent 4 p.m. set. A hush fell the minute Krauss began to sing the opening bar of the heart-wrenching new song “Paper Airplane,” from her first album with Union Station since the smashing success of her 2007 Raising Sand collaboration with Robert Plant.
Krauss has one of the loveliest soprano voices going, with a crystalline tone and irreproachable pitch, and her phrasing is marvelously liquid and understated. She has probably never sung an unnecessary note in her life. She brings the same economical expressiveness to her fiddle playing, and she’s backed by one of the best bands around, featuring Jerry Douglas (dobro, lap steel, vocals), Dan Tyminski (guitar, mandolin, lead vocal), Ron Block (banjo, guitar) and Barry Bales (bass, vocals). Basically, if any one of them comes to town, no matter who else he’s playing with, go see him.
A rollicking bluegrass tune had heads bopping, while a yearning older number, “Let Me Touch You for Awhile,” held the crowd transfixed. Wearing a long, flowing, fuschia-print gown with bell sleeves, Krauss was funny and engaging between songs. She joked about one of the standards out in the audience, an inflatable toy on a long pole.
“It’s not every day you see a unicorn on a stick,” Krauss said. “What is that, a paint roller? Is that so you can get into those hard-to-reach places?”
That quote may not be exact, because it was raining too hard at that point to take notes. In honor of the precipitation, the band pulled out a terrific oldie, bluegrass legend Del McCoury’s “Rain Please Go Away,” which Tyminski sang beautifully, and hopefully he wasn’t too puzzled by people shouting “Noooooo!” at the chorus.
One of the most moving numbers was the desolate “Ghost in This House,” but in the middle of Krauss’ depiction of the loneliness that haunts the survivor of a bad break-up, a roar of happy applause went up in one section of the audience. It turned out someone had proposed to his girlfriend. I’m no marriage counselor, but I’m thinking he should have waited for the next number, the sweet and hopeful “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You.” At least he didn’t do it during “I Am A Man of Constant Sorrow,” which Tyminski sang with stirring conviction, reprising his appearance on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Fest review: Wanda Jackson
((Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
You think you’ve got it going on? Wanda Jackson, 73 years young, just happened to mention during her ACL set on Saturday that she used to date Elvis. A story which has the added advantage of being true.
Then she happened to let drop that she’d just finished a ten-day tour with Adele. And, oh yeah, Jack White called her up one day to ask if he could produce her latest album. “I’m a lucky Okie,” she said with admirable understatement.
Jackson, rock and roll’s original “bad girl”—long before Ronnie Spector and eons before Amy Winehouse—is still going strong, taking to the Austin Ventures stage in a black pantsuit with a hot pink fringed jacket and an awe-inspiring head of lacquered black hair (“The bigger the hair, the closer to God,” as Ann Richards used to say).
Backed up by a crackerjack rockabilly ensemble from Nashville, Jackson moved through her set with a vigor her grandchildren might envy. She’s still a sassy thing, with more attitude in one cocked eyebrow or sly smile than most punk rockers. How many septugenarians can you name that would take the stage to the majestic chords of Link Wray’s “Rumble” and then belt out “Riot In Cell Block #9”?
Jackson devoted the mid part of her set to tracks from the Jack White-produced “The Party Ain’t Over,” including “Shakin’ All Over,” Elvis’ “Like A Baby” and, poignantly, her take on the late Winehouse’s “You Know That I’m No Good.”
“She fought her demons,” said Jackson in an aside. “I was so looking forward to meeting her one day.”
Jackson has hits of her own, of course. She had to write them, being that no one was writing rock and roll songs for women in the Fifties. There was the campy “Fujiyama Mama” (they don’t make titles like that any more!), and the so-simple-it’s-brilliant “Mean Mean Man,” and her enduring theme song, “Let’s Have A Party.”
Towards the end of her set, Jackson’s voice grew raspy with allergies; the price of singing in Austin. Her husband of nearly 50 years brought her out a glass of something to soothe her throat. She nodded towards him and said, “That’s the guy who kissed better than Elvis. So I married him.”
Even bad girls have sweet spots.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Fest review: Courtyard Hounds
I happened to catch the Court Yard Hounds’ first public performance a year and a half ago at South By Southwest. The venue was the beer garden of a small tavern on Rainey Street and I’d be lying if I didn’t say the whole thing had a slightly unfinished feel to it. Martie Maguire and sister Emily Robison were embarking on something neither had ever done before—front a band.
Their “day job” as founders of the Dixie Chicks did not demand that either step to center stage full time and, as a result, the inaugural shows of the Court Yard Hounds had a slight whiff of “work-in-progress.”
But time has gone by and, as the Dixie Chicks begin to recede further from the pop culture consciousness, the Court Yard Hounds have evolved from a curiosity into a living, breathing, stand-alone musical entity.
Moreover, their set on Saturday at the Austin Ventures Stage was a red-blooded, full-throated, arena-ready performance—fully committed and almost scarily assured.
The sisters have always been virtuoso instrumentalists, of course, but they seemed to have settled easily into their headliner roles; Emily handling most of the vocals and the stinging banjo and resonator guitar lines, and Martie leavening the mix with sweetness, icing the arrangements with fiddle and mandolin and joking onstage with easy brio.
Most of their set was drawn from their one and only album with a smattering of new songs woven in. The band hit the ground running with “Delight” and popped the clutch straight away into “It Didn’t Make A Sound,” one of Emily’s thank-God-and-Greyhound-you’re-gone songs, propelled by her banjo and Bukka Allen’s honky-tonk piano.
They debuted some new material, including “Phoebe,” which Emily described as Martie’s “happy suicide ballad” and another, “Rock All Night,” which likened love to a midway ride at the Texas State Fair.
But for all the musical fireworks, the most memorable moment had to be when Martie escorted her three young daughters out onstage to shake maracas with mom and Aunt Emily on the lilting “The Coast.” It was precisely, exactly as cute as the dickens.
Then it was back to business, with a bluegrass breakdown and a concluding rave-up of the caustic rocker “Ain’t No Son.”
There’s no way for this observer to know if Maguire and Robison want to revisit the amphetamine-like craziness that was the Dixie Chicks at their platinum-selling peak. But if they do, they have the music to take them there.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Scene report: Snoozing through Fitz &the Tantrums
As if Fitz & the Tantrums weren’t entertaining enough, the Honda stage provided additional amusement in the shape of a young guy crashed out on the ground, sleeping under a wet green quilt as soundly as though he were resting on the finest mattress in a luxury hotel room. His buddy, standing and occasionally dancing to the music, glanced down at him regularly during the first part of the set, and then made a couple attempts to rouse him as more and more people started making their way back out of the thickest part of the crowd, and naturally headed straight for what seemed to be a space between dancers and chairs, only to have to hopscotch over Sleeping Beauty.
Apparently his pal finally really needed to be somewhere, because he gave up on trying to get him to stir, and just shrugged and took a picture of him with his phone, then gently tucked a backpack under his head as a pillow before setting off through the crowd, leaving him curled up in a fetal position, one hand tucked under his chin. More and more people traipsed by and did double takes, their reactions ranging from smiles to raised eyebrows to rolled eyes. One guy laughed, gave the thumb’s up and proclaimed “OUTSTANDING!” A couple people took photos. And older gentleman looked at me, held his finger to his nose and stage-whispered “SHHHHHH!!” as the crowd sang along loudly with a song, and Sleeping Guy remained oblivious.
“Awwwwwww!” exclaimed one passer-by/stepper-overer.
“That’s rough,” another proclaimed with a scowl of disapproval.
He was still sleeping soundly when I left at the end of the set, and if you want to see the spectacle for yourself, he’s probably on the Facebook page of someone you know, or he may well still be there Sunday morning.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Festival Scene report: Water, water everywhere
And no, I’m not talking about rain.
For the most part the Austin City Limits Music Festival 2011 looks very much like the Austin City Limits Music Festival 2010 — there’s minimal additions to the overall setup, which makes sense, given how smoothly last year ran. What few extra touches are there aren’t likely to make too much of an impact on your festival experience.
But credit should be given where credit is due: probably the biggest of those changes is a huge relief and a very smart move by C3 Presents that deserves a shoutout. For the first time in my memory the festival has a water set-up that’s essentially flawless; I think this year is the the only year when I’ve been adequately hydrated the whole day through. Camelbak is offering up free filtered water at any one of three different stations in the park, and there’s never any appreciable wait to get filled up.
This is a huge improvement that’s made bringing in a refillable container easier than ever; throughout the years refilling your water bottle has always been varying levels of annoying, so this is a supremely welcome change. It’s had a bigger impact on my experience inside the park than pretty much any other factor.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Festival review: Alexander
When Alexander Ebert stepped out in front of the crowd Saturday afternoon, light droplets of rain falling from the sky, you could almost believe he had neither changed clothes nor moved from the spot since last year’s Austin City Limits Music Festival, when Ebert’s band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros played a cacophonous set of buoyant hippie folk rock on the same stage.
He was wearing a half-buttoned tattered shirt that looked much like the one he had on last year, a hat that seemed similar, and he was still barefoot. I didn’t recognize the rainbow-colored guitar strap, but it certainly seems like the sort of thing he wore last year.
But appearances can be deceiving; Ebert’s been up to a lot since last year. The Los Angeles bohemian toured the country with Mumford and Sons on a vintage train and released his solo debut, simply “Alexander” in March. According to his Facebook page, Austin City Limits is his first chance to play the new songs in a festival setting. Live, the new material hit the free spirit folk sweet spot, jammy, stoner-friendly and pleasantly ambling, faintly reminiscent of 70s king Donovan. But it lacked quite the transcendent power of the better Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros songs, perhaps due to the absence of excitable Zeros singer Jade Castrinos.
“Awake My Body” was an inauspicious first song to go with, with its low-key charm and bits of jagged trumpet. The set picked up some energy with a passionate clapalong on the lovelorn and pleading “In the Twilight” and a new song penned at the end of the aforementioned Railroad Revival Tour. But the show didn’t pick up any real steam until the cool, hushed “Truth,” which has a certain reverent and lived-in vibe all its own.
The band seemed a bit looser and more enthused from there on out, harnessing the collective goodwill emanated by the drizzle for a soaring “Let’s Win,” and Ebert growled nicely on the bluesy “Glimpses” and it’s “Mama, I’m so tired of the bull (expletive)” refrain.
Not that Alexander’s particular brand of nonconformist folk doesn’t have its problems; there can be a sort of hippie sameness that sets in. For somebody with such a musically short attention span — between his solo work, Edward Sharpe and his powerpop outfit Ima Robot, Ebert’s all over the place — Ebert’s solo material doesn’t have the sonic variety it probably should. But you can’t doubt the man’s sincerity; he sings loudly and passionately and communes genuinely with the audience when he perches himself on the partition separating crowd and stage. And that level of sincerity carries you a long way at a festival like this.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Festival Review: Iron and Wine
(Alberto Martinez AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
At some point in the past, say, three or four years, it became perfectly acceptable to have beer-ad horn solos (or whole beer-ad horn sections!) in your (ostensible) rock band. I am not entirely sure when this happened, nor am I entirely sure who to blame. But there is a big, smooth jazz horn presence on record music made by everyone from Destroyer and Bon Iver to Fleet Foxes and, God bless her, PJ Harvey, who at least has as little Beefheart in her past to keep her honest.
Dripping Springs resident Sam Beam, doing business as Iron and Wine, is similarly down with the horn section. Horns are all over his his album “Kiss Each Other Clean,” his Warner Bors debut which ambled into stores in January, and a three piece horn section was all over his meandering, jammy set Saturday afternoon at ACL fest during some of the day’s heaviest rain. As a colleague put it, “This is very ‘Bob Dylan at Budokan,’ huh?” Um, yes. Yes, it was.
To his credit, Beam has never been all that wedded to his songs’ original arrangements, but this was one of the most free-form sets I’ve ever seen him play, well into that vague area where dad-rock becomes jam band noodling and vice versa.
Songs such as “Walking Far From Home” were stripped to the frame and rebuilt using scattered percussion, guitar flickers and a general feeling that they could break into, say, “Dark Star” at any moment. The most powerful moments came when Beam himself put on an electric guitar and cut loose, single notes and swaths of distortion adding color and fire to the slow-burn music.
“Free Until They Cut Me Down” was almost abstract, horns starting to freak out over jazz-rock drums as the sort of ramble-tamble that was impossible to imagine from this guy at the beginning of the century, when he was a film instructor in Florida making whispered, sub-dermal folk records in his house. Beam’s music was wandering like the wild geese in the west; we were just following it around.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Festival review: Daniel Lanois & Black Dub
(Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
It’s long been evident that Daniel Lanois has more musical imagination than he knows what to do with. Witness his career-defining productions for the likes of U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Emmylou Harris and others. Not to mention his own eclectic solo projects and soundtrack work.
The lastest project from his fertile brain is Black Dub, a quartet that utilizes his longtime go-to drummer Brian Blade and a slender blonde firecracker of a vocalist named Trixie Whitley. Lanois has described the project as “a collective,” whose operating aesthetic borrows from the Jamaican reggae “dub” technique of chopping, splicing and re-mixing tracks for a unique sonic effect, in essence a new musical creation. Lanois says most of the tracks from the group’s debut album were recorded live in one take with no overdubs. Spontaneouos collaboration and fluidity triumph over premeditation.
You could see that same guiding principle at work, for better and worse, during Lanois Saturday set on the Austin Ventures stage. Lanois is a master of tonal landscapes, using his guitar and pedal steel to create evocative sonic landscapes full of ringing echoes and bell-like tones. On songs like “Nomad” and “Surely (You Were Meant To Be Mine),” he provided a complex palette of witchy, funky grooves against which Whitley flung her powerful voice, while Blades swung in punctuation and counterpoint. It was a fascinating exercise to watch.
However, to this listener, things went somewhat off the rails when Whitley and the bassist left the stage and Blade, and Lanois began to work off one another in a long, elliptical instrumental that seemed to take shape only slowly, The musical term, I think, is “taking the long way around the barn.” If you and I were doing likewise, it might be aptly charactgerized as noodling around. But you could see the structure of the track slowly evolve as Blade and Lanois reached a sort of telepathic collaboration. Interesting, but a trifle opaque for my tastes.
Whitley returned to the stage and the band concluded their set with a twangy rocker called (I think) “Wicked Child,” and a doom-fraught, headlong rush of percussion and guitar that resolved itself into “Ring the Alarm.” Only eight songs in all, but the band covered a lot of sonic territory.
And that is why Daniel Lanois will always be compellingly listenable no matter what he undertakes. It may not always be accessible to the layman, but it will never be boring or slapdash.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
Filmmaker Malick, Christian Bale spotted at ACL Fest
(Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
Austin fimmaker Terrence Malick has been busy this year. He won the Palme d’Or for his imaginative and moving film “The Tree of Life,” and word is he has already finished with principal photography on his next film starring Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams. There was news his next film after that would be a feature starring Christian Bale. And it seems the director and actor may already be working together, or at least hanging out. Photographer Daniel Bloomfield posted to Flickr last night a photo of Malick and Bale on the side of the stage during Bright Eyes performance. For those skeptics who believe there’s no way Malick would be spotted on stage, there is Spoon drummer Jim Eno in the foreground of the photo. It is also interesting to note that photographers were not allowed to shoot the Bright Eyes set where the legendarily press-shy director was snapped. Reps from C3 would not confirm Malick or Bale’s appearance at the festival Friday. Bright Eyes plays tonight at Stubb’s.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Festival Review: Aloe Blacc
Aloe Blacc has a pretty wicked sense of humor.
Like fellow ACL Festival performers Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros last year with “Home,” or Foster the People this year with “Pumped Up Kicks,” most of the wider attention that the Los Angeles singer has received is on the basis of one song. “I Need A Dollar” is a blues-soul gem for our impoverished times that shot up the charts across Europe, found a home on late-night television and as the intro to HBO’s “How To Make It In America,” and is slowly infiltrating domestic radio as well.
(Sidenote #1: The Onion AV Club could make a great installment in their ongoing “Inventory” feature of all the fantastic soul songs about poverty, from Sharon Jones’ “Money” and Black Joe Lewis’ “I’m Broke” in the recent past all the way back to gems like Baby Huey/Curtis Mayfield’s “Hard Times” and Billy-Paul’s “Let the Dollar Circulate.” Free idea, AV Club!)
So it’s safe to say that of those who showed up to Aloe Blacc’s early afternoon set with any inkling of who the soul singer was, they were probably stoked to see “I Need A Dollar” live. But Blacc, hilariously, teased their expectations twice, first having his band, the Grand Scheme, introduce him to the song’s distinctive melody before segueing into the jumpy “Hey Brother” instead. He pulled a similar fakeout before singing heartfelt soul-pop ballad “If I.”
That was both funny and smart — saving “I Need A Dollar” for the second-to-last song both kept the crowd there (many of them started to wander away after he played that one) and let Blacc plunge into his breakout album, last year’s “Good Things,” which fully marked Blacc’s transition from hip-hop (he’s also in hip-hop duo Emanon) to soul. Fly in a vest and sunglasses, Blacc displayed a remarkably smooth and unruffled confidence — leading the audience in clap-alongs and generally wrapping the crowd around his finger without ever being too showy (save an excellently ostentatious dance on “You Make Me Smile.”)
Blacc’s not from the Black Joe Lewis/James Brown/Otis Redding “howl like you mean it” school of soul singing — he’s more along the lines of Raphael Saadiq’s smooth-as-silk, pop-friendly take. And his songs, fortunately, take advantage of that; he nailed the slick “Good Things,” brought soul to the Velvet Underground’s oft-covered “Femme Fatale” and made the sweetest-sounding condemnation of Congress ever in “Politician.”
Blacc’s band the Grand Scheme kept pace at every step, with guitar and organ infusing a kind of Tarantino cool into “Femme Fatale” and shining during a lengthy jam just before “I Need A Dollar.”
(Sidenote #2: Just where do these suit-wearing, awesome-playing soul backup band guys like the Honeybears, the Menahan Street Band and the Grand Scheme come from, anyway? I like to imagine they’re grown a farm somewhere.)
And when Blacc did bust into “I Need A Dollar,” he brought his best effort, briefly mashing up the song with a line or two each from Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry” and Hall and Oates’ “Maneater.”
“It’s all soul music,” said Blacc. “It doesn’t matter what country or color it comes from.”
True enough. And when Blacc makes soul music that good, you’re practically beaming when he goes 15 minutes over.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Festival Review: Belle Brigade
Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN
You can’t say that Barbara Gruska and her brother Ethan—aka the Belle Brigade—don’t come by their chosen occupation honestly. Their father is singer/songwriter Jay Gruska and their maternal grandfather is Oscar-winning composer John Williams.
That backstory, however interesting, would be less than relevant if the younger siblings hadn’t crafted such a breezy and enjoyable debut album and, more to the point, delivered the goods with an ear-pleasing set Saturday afternoon at the Honda Stage.
Though they may be flying under the radar compared to some of the Fest’s bigger names, the pair’s sunny harmonies and guitar-driven hooks drew listeners from across the western half of Zilker Park.
One writer likened their music to a top-down cruise down the Pacific Coast Highway with the radio blasting, and that flavor pervades the Belle Brigade’s music, even when the songs’ subject matter might be less than upbeat (as in “Rusted Wheel” or “Sweet Louise”). The pair’s acknowleged fondness for the Fleetwood Mac hit machine, the Beatles and classic Motown shine through in their sibling harmonies (Ethan, unusually, sings in a higher register than his sister, for the most part), tenaciously catchy melodies and streamlined delivery.
Their set really went from a smolder to a flame when Barbara (a sought-after LA session drummer who boasts a tenure with Jenny Lewis among her credits) set down her guitar and went to work behind the traps on the rocking “When Not To Look For Freedom.” It was an effervescent, elevating moment that kick-started a slow and humid afternoon. On guitar or on drums, she was every bit the firecracker her red hair implied, jumping in the air to bring a song to a close or slamming the snare drum like it had kicked her dog.
“Rusted Wheel” and “Lucky Guy” showed deliberate pop craftsmanship in their careful construction and gear-shifting tempos. And then there was “Shirt,” which may be the only pop song I can think of written from the point of view of a garment (Hmmm, maybe My Morning Jacket should cover it…)
The Belle Brigade isn’t out to save the world, but as they demonstrated at ACL, they can make a little piece of Zilker Park a happy place to be.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Fest Review: Pretty Lights
One-man electronic dance sets like last year’s Deadmau5 show or this year’s epilepsy-a-thon from Pretty Lights pose certain challenges for reviewers. I’m happy that the festival has shifted its attentions increasingly to dance music over the years; seeing Pretty Lights and Skrillex on the bill is an acknowledgment of a variety of music that a certain set of fans are exceedingly passionate about. But they can be tricky to write about.
Absent many of the typical features of a live show — dynamics between individual band members, clear song breaks, stage banter — there’s not always a huge amount to seize upon. Instead, the most important questions tend to be A) “Is the production adequately inspiring?” and B) “Did the set keep its momentum the whole way through?”
And the answer to both of those is a pretty unqualified “Yes.” Colorado’s Pretty Lights, nee Derek Vincent Smith, set up shop behind a laptop atop a series of platforms and surrounded by towers that were bathed in a fantastically timed, genuinely mesmerizing kaleidoscopic light show. C3 cannily slotted Pretty Lights right in the sunset hour, giving the entire set the feel of an escorted journey into the nighttime. Even whoever was editing the video screen seemed to get into the spirit, frenetically cutting between audience members and giving the visuals the vague sense of a Four Loko commercial, with countless shots of boozed-up dancing youngsters.
Against the psychedelic backdrop of the lights, Smith did a solid job keeping things fresh, mixing his hip-hop and soul samples with a series of progressively stronger beats, and occasionally pulling in and transforming a snippet from left-field — Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place” was drawn into the fray and miraculously made a bit slower and more ominous than it already is. The crowd was healthy and appeared satisfied; I saw a lot of euphoric dancers.
But it’s hard not to feel like there was something indescribable missing that kept Pretty Lights’ set from being quite as thumping as it could have been. In the past Smith’s often played with a live drummer, and that would have added some necessary energy to the beats and added someone else for the crowd to latch onto; as it was Smith, with his minimal F-bomb-oriented banter, could have used some help engaging the crowd.
Or maybe the set’s energy level just flagged a bit at the end as audience members naturally drifted off to situate themselves for Kanye West. Smith acknowledged the looming headlining performance by going out with a prominent sample of West’s “All The Lights,” a sensible acknowledgment of the evening’s big event that nonetheless somewhat served to make Pretty Lights’ set feel less like an event itself and more like a prelude to what was to come.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Festival interview: Electric Touch
Mood: cheeky and friendly for Shane Lawlor, reserved and withdrawn for Christopher Leigh
This is ACL number what for you guys?
Shane: Number two. We did in 2008 when our first album came out and now we’re back as we’re getting ready for our new single and then the new album soon after.
So lots of new stuff we’re going to hear?
Shane: Oh yeah, lots of new stuff since we’ve been writing for the last two years pretty much.
How much have you changed as a band in the three years since you’ve played ACL?
Shane: We’ve seen and been through a lot. We went to New York for a while, went to Los Angeles for a while and made it back to Austin. We’ve played some major festivals and just had a lot of ups and down, and our songs are about those things we’ve gone through. Same as how everyone else writes, really. We do tales of ordinary life and the human condition, we do it rock n’ roll in Glorious Technicolor (note: that phrase is cap-cased in the band’s official fest bio - this tells us something).
Seems like Manic Street Preachers is a band that-
Shane: They were around a lot when I was younger but at that time I was really a fan of a lot of American music. I liked them but they weren’t a huge deal to me. Now I can certainly see that the influence was there. It’s funny because they’re English but they seem like such American music in the size and the way it’s put forward because they’re an arena band in England. They’re just huge in the songs that they do, so I can see the comparison.
For all the non-Austin people who will read this and are just learning about you for the first time, who are the bands that each of you grew up with, that influenced you?
Shane: When I started playing it was bands like Pavement and Sonic Youth and Nirvana, stuff like that but listening to artists like Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, those were my gateways into music very early on. Buddy Holly was just massive when I was growing up.
Have you ever made a pilgrimage to his grave site (in Lubbock)?
Shane: No, I haven’t made it out there to see it. One place, we went there to see where they were supposed to have a big statue of him and we went to see it but when we got there they had taken the statue away for cleaning or something, so we kind of made the trip for nothing.
What about you Chris? What got you started in music?
Chris: For me it was a lot of British punk rock. The Ramones kind of led me into it, into The Clash, The Buzzcocks, The Undertones and the Sex Pistols. All those bands turned me on to music, not by necessarily being great at their instruments but by having a real passion for it. Even if they were writing about things I didn’t necessarily understand, the connection was there and I got some sort of feeling out of what they were doing.
How old were you when you started playing and performing?
Chris: I started playing guitar when I was 11 years old. I think when I was in seventh grade i played some recreational dance hall, you know those gigs when you’re young. That eventually led to other stuff and before you know it I was playing in bars at 16. Before you know it we’re here at ACL.
What have you learned about playing and surviving at fests?
Shane: These ones like ACL are really nice, really five stars, with lots of stuff to eat and drink everywhere. We went on the Warped Tour and that was so different, with us living in a band for a few weeks and the heat and humidity was terrible. I don’t know how we made it through that one.
You guys had to be kind of out of place there.
Shane: We really were, yeah. In a way we were the punks at the punk rock festival because we were so different than pretty much every other band that was there. We were anti-conformist for what was going on there, if that makes any sense.
What’s the biggest mismatch you’ve had as far as opening for someone, that made you wonder “Why are we here?”
Chris: We opened for Bon Jovi. That was a big one. It’s hard to mismatch because we bring or show out there and we always make it work because people attach to the passion we have whether we’re with the Arc Angels, Airborne Toxic Event or The Fratellis… so many bands.
You’ve gotta tell me more about Bon Jovi.
Shane: The night we played for 10,000 screaming housewives in a casino, in Las Vegas for the opening night of the Hard Rock Casino or something.
Chris: I was out back and Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora walk by and I was taller than both of them and that was weird, because, you know, Bon Jovi has that stature and in a way you look up to them but literally I was looking down on them.
Shane: I was talking to one of their sound guys, asking him how they got the big guitar sound they had going on and he looks at me square in the eyes as says “Play with your heart.” So I was like “OK, heart.” And a $10,000 pedal and effects rig doesn’t hurt either. But really, anyone who’s up there that big, it serves as inspiration and keeps you going.
Do you see part of the road ahead when you play with someone like that?
Shane: Kind of. I admire anyone that’s in a huge band that’s been doing it for that many years and has that longevity. Even if I might not be the biggest fan of their music, I admire it for keeping it together at that level for that long.
What’s your favorite club to play in Austin?
Shane: I love Stubb’s because we’ve been lucky enough to play there a bunch of times, and even on the outside a few times. I love the Parish, we played there (Thursday) night and it has such great sound. I like the Mohawk because of the great vibe there and great scene. Continental (Club) is great because you can go there any night and see something that’s just fantastic.
The walls there just sort of drip with history, don’t they?
Shane: Oh my God, it’s an amazing place.
What’s the best act you’ve seen there?
Shane: One time I went in and Miles (Zuniga) from Fastball and Courtney (Taylor Taylor) from the Dandy Warhols were there, just playing songs and hanging out because it was Miles’ birthday. It’s cool to be there for something like that and just soak in that vibe.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Fest review: Kanye West
There was a surprisingly small crowd with about twenty minutes to go until the Kanye West set Friday night. When West finally came on, he did so in grand fashion, in a crate that had been carried out to the center of the crowd; after an opening sequence by his dancers, who are clearly modeled on “Black Swan,” he popped out of the box and boarded an elevated platform, which took him high above the audience for “Dark Fantasy” (Nakia shot some of video of West’s entrance here). Then, instead of having a helicopter airlift him out, he walked to the stage on a barred-off path through the crowd, distributing high-fives.
It was an over-the-top beginning to an over-the-top show, which included a backdrop of Gothic-style stone angels and was divided into three ‘acts,’ which really didn’t really break up the show in a particularly meaningful way. No one seemed to mind, though, probably because that’s just the kind of half-baked craziness that has earned West truckloads of attention.
There was no band, just a small team of DJs spitting out samples and synth effects. When Jay-Z played the Erwin Center a while back, he brought along a pretty incredible band and it seemed to give the music more life in a live setting. While it would be tough for Kanye to have a live band play an entire set of music given his reliance on electronic sounds, etc., he removed any doubt that rappers need a band to boost a show.
After starting with an epic “Higher” and an equally hard-hitting “Power,” West broke into “Jesus Walks.” The reaction to that early hit highlighted the fact that his older material is better than the new stuff, regardless of how many end of the year lists it lands on. People loved “All of the Lights,” “Run This Town” (though we got a piped-in Rhianna part and no Jay-Z) etc., but they went absolutely nuts for “the Good Life,” “Stronger” (a highlight, with a laser light show that did the Daft Punk sample justice) and “Gold Digger.” With huge hooks that filled the park, those songs had more power than the more minimal recent material.
That doesn’t mean that newer songs didn’t play well live. “Heartless” and “Love Lockdown” were both singalongs, as was “Runaway,” during which West thanked his crew for their hard work as everyone threw their hands up in a disturbing “toast to the douche-bags” (really?). He closed with the Bon Iver-sampling “Lost in the World,” and then thanked the fans, because as much as people hate his egomania, they also enable it.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (14) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Festival Review: Charles Bradley
Of all the artists to emerge from or have their careers resurrected by the great soul resurgence of the last 10 years, it’s quite possible that Charles Bradley has the potential to be the most galvanizing. That’s a tall order — Bradley’s got fierce competition in the modern soul game, ranging from Daptone labelmates Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings to Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears to Raphael Saadiq to Mayer Hawthorne to Fitz and the Tantrums to … point being, it’s a long list, with as many different movements and varieties cooking as simmered in the genre’s heyday in the 60s and 70s.
But Bradley brought something singular to the table at the Vista Equity stage on Friday: heart. Great, huge, heaping helpings of sentimentality and love and … well, soul. Sure, he’s got a powerful, raw, full-throated voice, backed by a strong cadre of musicians in the Menahan Street Band. But more importantly, he’s also got a naked vulnerability, a life story - he’s a 62-year-old former James Brown impersonator and worker of odd jobs across the United States who’s still reeling from the shooting death of his younger brother - that’s the most arresting tale of personal redemption this side of Girls’ Christopher Owens. Other singers may have the howl and excitement (Black Joe Lewis, in spades) or may have nailed the pastiche thing (Sharon Jones) but it’s Bradley whose need to share his music seems the most spiritual, as if coming from an ocean of deep feeling.
Audiences can sense that kind of thing, which is one of the reasons why Bradley enjoyed such a rapturous reception at the ACL Festival. Bradley strutted onto the stage right as a mercurial introductory instrumental groove from the Menahan Street Band morphed into the distinct beats of Baby Huey’s “Mighty Mighty.” He let out the first line of “Heartaches and Pain” and immediately enjoyed wild shouts of approval from the assembled crowd. “Heartaches and Pain” is an autobiographical number, dealing with the aforementioned younger brother’s murder, and one of the more melancholy songs off an album, “No Time For Dreaming,” that’s fairly saturated with tragedy. Whether the audience knew the backstory or not, they clearly connected with Bradley’s delivery. They were in his pocket from line one.
And he didn’t let them down. Bradley nailed the delivery of the bouncy title track, underscoring exultant backing vocals from the Menahan Street Band with an array of dance moves lifted straight from the James Brown playbook, dropping in bits of the robot for variety’s sake. He was sweaty and shirtless by the time he segued into single “The World Is Going Up In Flames.” His standard “Heart of Gold” cover seized on that song’s powerful strain of melancholia, while “This Love Ain’t Big Enough For the Two of Us” exploded out the gate with insistent horns from the band and Bradley’s searing yell. He paused every couple of songs to throw an enthused “I love you!” to the audience, beaming with the pride of a man whose life has just launched into an unexpected third act.
Bradley, as mentioned, has gigged as a James Brown impersonator, and the Godfather of Soul’s influence on him is clear - the shout, the dancing, even a clear physical resemblance. But songs like “Why Is It So Hard,” with its heady mixture of autobiographical lament, commentary on the contemporary woes of America and “A Change Is Gonna Come” reference, evidences Bradley’s closest soul forefathers - Otis Redding and Sam Cooke, whose primal voices could be at once thrilling and yet deeply sad and sentimental. When he closed out his set with “Golden Rule,” with bows and gratitude to the audience for sharing the experience with him, he was achingly sincere. And the crowd when wild, as they’re apt to do when confronted with a soul master who, improbably, released his debut album at 62 to a receptive world. “No Time For Dreaming?” On the contrary, Bradley at the ACL Festival, occasionally goofy dance moves and all, seemed to be living proof that it’s never too late to dream, and that’s a message most of us are happy to hear right now.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Fest review: Santigold
There are a few different ways to do the beat-heavy electro-pop/hip-hop that Santigold (born Santi White) traffics in. There’s the school that’s heavy on artifice and separating the artist from the audience (think Janelle Monae’s outer space android schtick), and there’s the performer-as-cultural-lightning rod approach, which worked pretty well for M.I.A. before she popped out a Seagram heir and pretty much forgot what a Tamil Tiger ever was.
Problem with those schools is once a crack shows in the persona - ie, a real person with real flaws becomes visible - the art’s origin and motivation gets all turned inside out. White avoids any such problems by ditching artifice entirely (well, except for a pair of largely expressionless but cartoon-ish dancers best described as Robert Palmer’s video backing band girls crossed with Jerome from Morris Day and The Time) and just rocking the party. She gets you to clap, asks if you’re having a good time and smiles big and wide at you as fluffy hooks buffeted by deep bass rumbles come tumbling out of the speakers.
Saturday’s show came at an interesting time for White, who is three years removed from a solid, realized debut album. About to release a new LP, the set was split nearly in half between sturdy, bouncy hits like “L.E.S. Artistes” and “Lights Out” and new material that suggests a move toward both U.K. grime (double-time raps and vocals with dirty, busy production) and, curiously, Miami bass (no explanation needed or given). It’s music that sounds made for dark, cramped clubs, where the bass can roll around a packed room and cause a crowd to half lose their minds, instead of soundtracking beachy beer commercials. It’ll be interesting to hear how those songs present on record, but it was fairly obvious the hooks on White’s next record will reveal themselves through repeated listens rather than pleasantly smacking you in the face right away.
The distinctly contrasting material blended fine in a live setting (a good sign), thanks certainly to White’s obvious enthusiasm and a stage show that at various points featured White being dragged around on stage, a backing band with matching plastic Elvis wigs, prop sledge hammers, pom-pons, parasols, three costume changes and one of those two-person horse costumes that sidled up on stage for no real reason at all. Holding it all together was White, grateful and joyous at the chance to have a crowd of more than 10,000 (Coldplay followed her on an adjacent stage) join her on the next steps in what looks to be a constantly evolving, surprising career.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Fest review: Coldplay
A few years ago in an article about sign language interpreters at music festivals, Austin resident and touring interpreter Barbie Parker talked about the relative difficulty of preparing to interpret for different kinds of artists. A legacy artist like Bob Dylan was a nightmare because of the deep canon and unpredictable setlist, while rappers presented a two-pronged problem because of speed of delivery and the multitude of plays on words and other lyrical devices that don’t translate gracefully to sign language.
You could learn something by watching the interpreters from Austin’s Lotusign do their work Saturday night while British rock band Coldplay banged out a grandiose, hit-after-hit-filled and consummately professional 90 minutes at Austin City Limits Festival. Mainly that the band is a gang of literal and lyrical generalists to the extreme, pretty much absent of metaphor, verbal trickery or allusion, with enough symbolism and personification (keys are held, clocks are watched, people are lost, etc.) to keep every set of lyrics from being “I used to be in love, and now I’m not” ad infinitum.
This insight about the band is hardly a revelation and as our great recent “defense” of the curiously maligned band points out, a big key to Coldplay’s success is the incredible accessibility of their lyrics, almost to the point of being musical comfort food for the loved, loveless and pretty much everyone who’s somewhere in between. But watching singer Chris Martin’s lyrics presented in a physical form with sweeping, easy motions - versus the near gymnastics demanded by a combo like Nas and Damian Marley earlier in the evening, or the arcane literary references of a band like The Decemberists - drove the point home in a new way; these are wide-open ideas populated by stock characters (God, devils, angels, children and “you” make up the bulk) in service of incredibly basic motivations. Inanimate object + verb + direct object + a U2- or Cure-sized melody = pretty much every Coldplay song ever written.
So it’s no wonder to find Coldplay on a headliner stage on a big festival like ACL and others all over the world. You pretty much can’t fit a song like “Viva La Vida” into a place with less than a five-figure capacity (though they tried pretty successfully Thursday night at an Austin City Limits television taping), “Yellow” soars high enough to scrape the heavens… everything the band does is big. Like book them for halftime of Super Bowl LX big. And clearly they’re comfortable projecting these songs in massive fashion. From the opening pulses of the new “Hurts Like Heaven” through to the end Martin bounded around the stage when he wasn’t behind a piano or guitar, reaching out the crowd (no one makes yearning as palatable as these guys) and delivered what is really a startling collection of hits for a band that’s been banging around for just over a decade.
Saturday found the foursome in a comfort zone, doing what they’ve done scores of times at this point and checking all the boxes you’d need them to fill as the night’s co-headliner. There were tastes of the upcoming album “Mylo Xyloto,” familiar songs given new colors (the closing of “God Put A Smile Upon Your Face was massive) and humorous asides like in “Everything’s Not Lost” about all the women in the audience wanting to see Coldplay while all the boys they were with really wanted to see Kanye West across the park. In all, enough new flourishes and surprises to keep it from feeling like a paying-the-bills hit parade.
It wasn’t a set that caused audience members to re-examine how they think about music as a whole as they filtered out of the park, but that’s never this band’s intent to begin with. Faces smiling, hands red from clapping and throats strained thanks to choruses so ingrained that singing to them is almost autonomic behavior, they left happy from seeing exactly what they had expected would be put before them, served up big and gulped down whole.
Set list:
- Hurts Like Heaven
- Yellow
- In My Place
- Major Minus
- Lost
- The Scientist (corrected)
- Violet Hill
- God Put A Smile Upon Your Face
- Everything’s Not Lost
- Us Against The World
- Politik
- Viva La Vida
- Charlie Brown
- Paradise
(encore)
- Clocks
- Fix You (preceded by verse and chorus of Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”)
- Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Fest: Burn ban vs. youth
Parry Gettelman FOR AMERICAN-STATESMAN | September 16, 2011
The burn ban at ACL apparently applies only to those over 30. Friday, I saw a number of 20-somethings smoking, including a group of five women sitting right by the Barton Springs entrance and attendant security; a guy with a chiseled chest, sagging trousers and clashing underwear at the Bud Light stage; and a quartet of women parked on the ground at the Honda stage, who were at least using a mostly empty beverage container as an ashtray. The smoke from several directions got so thick at one point during James Blake’s set that my throat started to hurt.
One attempt to discourage someone from smoking actually worked, at least temporarily, while another failed miserably. It was probably a mistake to try and explain the hazards of smoking, even during a historic drought, to a dude in a Camel t-shirt.
Best t-shirts Friday: one demanding “Stop plate tectonics” and another advising “I am not Johnny Ramone.”
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
ACL Fest: Gary Clark Jr. review
Parry Gettelman FOR AMERICAN-STATESMAN | September 16, 2011
Since he got his major-label deal with Warner Brothers, Gary Clark Jr. has been tagged as the Next Big Thing, his praises sung by everyone from Rolling Stone to The Wall Street Journal. During Friday morning’s ACL preview on KUT, a DJ proclaimed definitively that the Austin blues guitar hero would be moving up from the BMI stage to one of the main stages by next year. And while Clark’s Friday evening set wouldn’t make anybody forget Jimmie Vaughan or Eric Clapton, both among his mentors, his sizeable crowd was one of the most engaged I saw all day, with the vast majority of smart-phone users taking pictures or making videos rather than compulsively checking e-mail and texts. Mercifully, there was very little of the chatter that plagued other shows.
Clark, wearing slim-fitting pale trousers and a white t-shirt with a deep V neck, wasn’t big on crowd interaction, but he exuded easy charisma even when playing off to the right of his three bandmates like a sideman at the start of the opening number. Searing guitar licks are his hallmark, but he also has a terrific voice, a burnished baritone with a penetrating quality that was particularly effective on the snarling “Don’t Owe You a Thing.” One of the songs from his new Bright Lights EP, its choogling, swampy rhythm got a shot of punk-rock adrenaline, and Clark’s stinging guitar and vocal communicated sharp insolence, before he segued into an earthy, hypnotic, circular solo that sounded more like a bid to get signed by Fat Possum than a step toward crossover stardom.
On the pretty ballad, “Please Come Home,” Clark turned old-school R&B supplicant, crooning in a strong, if not classically smooth, falsetto. His guitar sent barbs flying every which way on a rocking cover of Albert Collins’ “If You Love Me Like You Say,” which ended in a dramatic flurry of chicken-scratching. The last number was naturally the show-stopping “Bright Lights,” which Clark introduced with a lyrical passage before galvanizing his band to deliver a sound thrashing. His guitar’s thick, menacing tone underlined the swagger of his vocal as he declared “You gonna know my name by the end of the night,” while the tangled, anguished notes reflected the lyrics’ undercurrent of ambivalence and self-doubt. His performance didn’t necessarily portend future superstardom, but it certainly primed an exceptionally appreciative crowd to impatiently anticipate the full-length Warner debut due early next year.
Follow Austin Music Source on Facebook and Twitter.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment Categories: ACL 2011
