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SXSW 2009 reviews: Day 3
March 22, 2009
SXSW Review: XYX at Spiro's Friday, then Beerland Saturday
XYX are a duo from Mexico, another act from the apparently absurdly fertile Monterrey scene (unless every single band from there is here this week). Drummer Mou Ortiz and bassist Anel Escalante played a whole mess of shows, but two stand out for the way they shifted the context of the band, opened up the ways to think about their music.
Friday, they played at Spiro’s on what has become a traditionally avant-garde rock bill brought to us by the fine people at WFMU, the legendary free form New Jersey radio station. They played with up and coming noisy oddballs such as Mayyors and Gary War and veterans such as the wonderful New Zealand band Renderers.
This made XYX’s music seem edgy and arty; this wasn’t unreasonable. Escalante’s bass drove the melodies, and there were melodies, complicated, buoyant bass lines that resolved into smart, catchy tunelets. Ortiz’s drumming was by turns devastating and lithe. Add an overplaying guitarist and you would have had a progressive rock trio the likes of which would have excited anyone who owned more than one King Crimson album.
Saturday, they opened local punk promoter Timmy Hefner’s non-SXSW showcase at Beerland. Here the band’s music also made perfect sense. Add a barre chording guitarist with a beaten up, sitcker-covered Gibson SG knockoff and a Marshall amp and you’d have a rock solid punk band with unusually smart bass lines.
The band made perfect sense in both contexts. They delivered excellent sets both times. Next year, I look forward to them opening some big, slick rock show at Stubb’s or on stage at Mess With Texas. The stuff could work anywhere.
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March 21, 2009
SXSW Review: Beach House
(Cedar Street Courtyard, Friday night)
There’s a reason Beach House is so frequently dubbed “dream pop.” From the moment Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally took the stage at the Cedar Street Courtyard, the narrow performance venue and bar carved out of the space between two buildings, they made every effort to give their set the same ethereal and otherworldly energy that characterizes REM sleep.
Setting the tone with the slow, methodical “Gila,” off of last year’s “Devotion,” Legrand’s lilting voice and Scally’s understated guitar quickly established an atmosphere of quiet beauty. Underneath soft green lights and surrounded by walls covered in ivy on either side, Legrand’s voice was buried underneath layers of reverb that made her sound less like a live presence and more like a voice in your head.
The tempo changed three songs in, with the comparatively driving “Used to Be,” off October’s 7-inch single. Legrand picked up the pace and Scally was granted the occasional guitar solo, though they served more to punctuate the lyrics than anything else. The addition of that most quintessential of upbeat instruments, the tambourine, to Legrand’s arsenal signaled a transition to a slightly more pop sound that took hold through the rest of the set.
By the time they closed with the catchy “Master of None,” it was clear Beach House’s atmospheric take on pop had struck a chord — a previously uppity audience had put down the iPhones, lowered the cameras and been swept up in waves of bittersweet pop melodies. In retrospect, between the punk rock stylings of preceding band Pete and the Pirates and the later frat guy reggae of Bedouin Soundclash, it had all seemed like a particularly poignant dream.
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SXSW Review: The Ettes
(Friday night, the Mohawk Patio)
In a world that can often be very male-dominated, it’s refreshing to see women. The Ettes, a Nashville-based punk outfit consisting of two women, singer/guitarist Coco and drummer Poni, along with male bassist Jem, definitely rocked the Mohawk Patio on Friday night.
Poni’s drumming was nothing short of explosive, adding an addictive energy to the songs that made the band another highlight, along with Gringo Star and the Hold Steady, of what was one of the strongest showcases of the week. Likewise, Coco’s inspired vocals proved that she was worthy of comparisons to Blondie and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
She noted that the band had been fired up by the Sonics earlier in the night, and although the Ettes weren’t exactly covering Little Richard, there was definitely a similar excitement in the air for the set, especially on the songs “Reputation” and “I Get Mine.”
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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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SXSW Review: Sam Amidon
(Friday, 18th Floor of the Hilton Garden Inn)
Sam Amidon doesn’t write his own songs, but instead rearranges traditional folk numbers. The result is a somber, sobering trip to centuries past, where life’s hardships and heartaches seem slightly removed from today’s.
If that sounds heady and slightly depressing, it is. But at Amidon’s Friday performance at the top floor of the Hilton Garden Inn, the twenty-something musician offset the seriousness of his music perfectly with a bizarre brand of deadpan humor.
Amidon began the set with his somber acoustic version of “Wild Bill Jones,” a usually upbeat bluegrass number about a murder committed in cold blood out of jealousy for another’s love. At the peak of the song, just as Jones is shot down, Amidon sang, “He let out a dreadful moan.”
“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR,” he then screeched with a straight face for a good minute. When he finally dove back into the song, the befuddled audience erupted in laughter and applauded.
The set was full of similar surprises. During a bluesy banjo number, Amidon repeatedly asked, “Whaddya say, banjo?” before his smooth-moving solos. At the end of the song, he walked to the back of the stage and asked, “Whaddya say, pushups?” Then he did twenty or so. Again, the audience ate it up.
Humor aside, the music and the stories behind it were captivating. In “Saro,” an immigrant to the United States pined for the love he left behind, while in “O Death” the speaker pleads with his inevitable end to “Spare me over just another year.”
To wrap things up, Amidon enlisted the audience to help him sing the words to “Relief” by R. Kelly: “Isn’t it a relief/That we are one/The war is over/There’s an angel in the sky/Love is still alive.”
“It’s not true, but I guess it’s a nice thought,” he said.
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SXSW Review: Superdrag
(11 p.m. Friday, Pangaea)
Superdrag, Knoxville’s perennial underdogs of power pop, blasted through a short set of three-and-a-half-minute pop nuggets during their powerful set at Pangaea.
The “ultra lounge” with bottle service appeared to be one of the most unlikely places to catch a band that spent the better part of the last two decades traveling around the country in a van, living out of the lint in each other’s pockets, but there appeared to be fans in the roped-off area that were taking advantage of the club’s exclusive (and expensive) bottle service. The attention to alcohol was quite ironic considering frontman John Davis’ reported battle with alcoholism and his re-born Christian sobriety that suffuses its way into his newly penned lyrics.
Superdrag reformed last year after a 5 year hiatus; their set included a sampling of songs from their lengthy career and several new tracks off their new album “Industry Giants,” which was released on Tuesday. Retooled (and seemingly quite sober), the new Superdrag actually featured the return of the original lineup: vocalist / guitarist Davis, bassist Tom Pappas, guitarist Brandon Fisher and super-steady drummer Don Coffey.
The band opened with “Slow to Anger,” the opening cut from their new album. With Davis repeatedly scream-singing “slow to speak, slow to anger” during the verse, the lifted biblical passage transformed into a mantra, appearing aggressive in tone instead of a plaintive adage.
“Keep It Close to Me” and “Down on the Inside” followed quickly, cracking forth out of a glowing tube-amp distortion squall from their dual guitar attack. Davis diced up buzzsaw leads on his Gibson SG during the bridges and choruses, recalling the elements that allowed Superdrag to put the power in power pop.
The band also made sure to include their 1996 radio/MTV hit “Sucked Out.” The song blasted with fury and contempt of a music industry that is now taking it hard on the chin just as Superdrag is elevating like a fiery-winged phoenix. After a rollercoaster ride of a career that began in 1992, Superdrag is clicking right back up the hill again.
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SXSW Review: Kylesa at Red 7
(Red 7, midnight Friday)
OK, ow. Man, I’m getting old.
There were a couple of reasons the Savannah, Ga.-based metal band Kylesa’s set worked so, so well at Red 7 Friday night.
First, they are, in general, an absolutely top flight metal band, blending thrash, doom, bullet-belt hardcore and whatever language Neurosis made up into something startlingly heavy and absolutely perfect for running into each other. Their new album, “Static Tensions” (Prosthetic/20 Buck Spin) might be the smoothest yet admixture of these elements, codifying them into that which sounds like nothing except Kylesa.
Second, their bass player since the first album, Corey Barhorst, is back in the band after a hiatus from rock for greater than a year. This is crucial. While guitarists/screamers Philip Cope and Laura Pleasents are the only consistent members, Barhorst has been there since nearly the very beginning and his hard-swinging bass and on-stage energy is crucial to making their live set as good as it can get.
Third, two drummers, sometimes in lock step, sometimes playing off each other, both setting up rolling thunder for the other three players to vibe off.
Add it up and it makes for thrilling, visceral metal, enormous, crashing riffs, some of the head-banging-est music at SXSW (word to Metallica, I guess). It also makes for the most kinetic pit I’ve been on the edges of in quite some time. From life-long metal heads to hardcore Kylesa fans juiced to see their best frontline back in action to guys who just like running into each other … well, my back is killing me. And I was just on the edge.
But I’d do it all again. No question.
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SXSW Review: Tricky at Austin Music Hall
(Friday night, Austin Music Hall)
Oh, Tricky. What the heck was I thinking?
I blame myself, really. Your debut album, “Maxinquaye” is without question one of the best albums of the 1990s - dark, sexy, druggy, weird, smart beat-science and atmospherics, a sweaty, one-night stand of an album suffused with languorous menace. The follow-ups, the even-druggier “Nearly God” and the excellent follow-up “Pre-Millennium Tension,” were nearly as good.
Then the wheels kind of came off over the next few records and by the millennium we all moved on. Dude’s tried to come back a couple of times, but last year’s “Knowle West Boy” got OK reviews. Friday night at Austin Music Hall, maybe my man could deliver the show I’d always wanted to see.
Um, no.
“Rocking out” has never quite been one of Tricky’s skill sets, as much as he might like. At Austin Music Hall, he alternated between letting his backup singers do the work (the classic “Karma Coma” didn’t sound quite so classic here) and bellowing into the mic and jumping a round a bit. So the rocking was a little weak by default.
The other problem is his best music has always been deceptively detailed and that couldn’t have worked at the still-mostly-lousy sounding Austin Music Hall either. Most of the songs came off as early 90s industrial dance music - big beats, big sounds, not much else. Even classics such as “Karma Coma” were roughed up by the sound and presentation. The closer, “Vent,” a scary juggernaut on album, felt overlong at the show, straining under the effort to make it transcendent, Tricky, shirtless and wearing suspenders, doing his best ranting like a madman.
As one local musician put it on his Facebook status, “(I) did not know live music could be as bad as Tricky was tonight.” I wish I could say I disagreed. I really do.
Photo by Jay Janner
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SXSW Review: The Hold Steady
(Midnight Friday, the Mohawk Patio)
The Hold Steady probably didn’t need to come to SXSW. They enjoy a cult following of people who think they are the best band in rock ‘n roll, as evidenced by a crowd on hand for their Friday night set at Mohawk that sang along to every song as they pumped their fists in the air. There was crowd surfing, flying beer and even a guy who showed off a tattoo on his back that read “damn right he’ll rise again” — the same tattoo belonging to a character in their song “Your Little Hoodrat Friend.”
The fact that the band maintains that kind of hold on their audience is impressive. Constantly on tour, they play Austin at what seems like six-month intervals. Their set lists, pulled mostly from last year’s release, “Stay Positive” and 2006’s “Boys and Girls in America,” don’t vary much, but for as many times as they play signature songs such as “Stuck Between Stations,” “Party Pit” and “Massive Nights,” these guys always seem to make it seem louder and more passionate then the last time they played it.
“Killer Parties” is almost always the closing song, with Craig Finn giving the same goodnight speech about how we’re all the Hold Steady, and the crowd always eating it up. Finn has taken the Bruce Springsteen comparisons to another level, as they are at the point where, like the Boss, they can draw energy from the fact that the crowd knows exactly what to expect from the performance.
This all happened Friday night/early Saturday, and with the exception of some technical problems with Galen Polivka’s bass gear and some newer songs that weren’t quite as epic as the rest, the show was another highlight of the festival. “Constructive Summer” and “Sequestered in Memphis,” both from the most recent album, have both reached a similar status as the crowd-pleasers from “Boys and Girls,” and the organizers of the showcase gave them an extended hour-long time slot in which to stretch out, which made it feel less like a SXSW showcase and more like a Hold Steady show.
Photo by Jay Janner of The Hold Steady at a day party at Red 7 on Thursday, March 19
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