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South by Southwest band reviews

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Robert Plant gives a whole lotta love to Music Hall crowd

Robert Plant & Strange Sensation
Austin Music Hall, 12:15 a.m.

He may no longer jam with Jimmy Page and lines lace his 56-year-old face, but Robert Plant's wrinkles only go where the snarls have already been. Now playing with five imaginative rock minstrels — two more than what he was accustomed to with Led Zeppelin — Plant is now more versatile than ever, no longer curbed by Page's rebel solos. His "Heartbeaker" vibrated as the sweaty, sinister opener, and "Shine It All Around" showed off the most worthy components of his new band, including guitarist Justin Adams, who echoed Page's improvisational riffs, but added a bombastic dash of harder, louder resonance. No need to worry, Plant's Zeppelin balloon has not deflated yet — he brandished the microphone stand like a wizard's staff and sang as if his voice represented every fiery passion on Earth. He relived "Black Dog" with rigid defiance. The nostalgic "That's the Way" astonished my eyes with tears and "Whole Lotta Love" shook the walls with its atomic reverberations. "There is musicality that comes out of folks and if you are not careful, you can lose it," Plant preached to the crowd at the Austin Music Hall. Don't worry, sir, you haven't lost your groove one bit.
— Jeff McCrary

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Flamboyant Gogol Bordello finds a home at Emo's

Gogol Bordello
Emo's Annex, 1 a.m.

Iggy, Mick, "Weird Al," and now Eugene Hutz — ringleader of a caravan of immigrants from Russia and Israel who call themselves Gogol Bordello and incite extras from "Mad Max" to pogo-dance to their "Gypsy punk cabaret." Prosit! Hutz is rail-thin and dresses the part of the flamboyant pirate down to his hoop earring, handlebar mustache, red bandana, and chains of metallic disks adorning his waist and neck. Word has it that he made his way to a remote region of the Ukraine when the nuclear meltdown occurred in Chernobyl, and then fled to refugee camps in Poland and Hungary before pursuing his personal manifest destiny in New York City, which ultimately led him all the way to Emo's outside stage, where he was flanked by a raucous fiddler, accordion player and rhythm section, none of whom were gun shy around a microphone, the conduit for their novellas of struggle against political tyranny. After the opener, an invisible curtain parted to reveal two dolled-up, military vixens from the Gogol Dance Troop breaking the fourth wall of sorts by integrating their routines into the musicians' presentation. Hutz took turns grabbing each by the hair until they screamed themselves into the overall act. Then he added, "I never wanna be young again," and with the amount of vaudevillian anarchy he and his revelers of iniquity projected, who can blame him?
— Michael Hoinski

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Soundtrack of Our Lives produces prophetic score

Soundtrack of Our Lives
Austin Music Hall, 11 p.m.

The Soundtrack of Our Lives is indeed what one might want to hear as a daily musical score — visionary, bold, even tenderly affectionate. The Swedish pack sounds like the prophetic combination of U2 and Wilco; mixing straight up rock with the energizing abandon of the experimental. “Heading for a Breakdown” proves as much. Its predictable chorus is cut unpredictably short to deliver more a more tentative stroke of melodic wit. Drummer Fredrik Sandsten may have been wearing a referee’s uniform but by no means did he follow the standard percussion rulebook. I kept expecting dynamic vocalist Ebbot Lundberg, who wore a cultish black robe, to walk across the crowd like Christ on water. Guitarist Ian Person, in his red jumpsuit, gave the crowd a vibrating ride with his six-string Ferrari that flushed the entire warehouse district with its foreign-tuned engine.
— Jeff McCrary

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Punk legends Metal Urbain rocks in French

Metal Urbain
Tambaleo, 1 a.m.

Un, deux, trois, quatre! The French music showcase at Tambaleo ended with a black trenchcoat bang when legendary Metal Urbain broke into their first song, "Panik," 15 minutes after the appointed hour. (The group must have enjoyed the benefit of a laptop three decades after its inception.) Guitarist Hermann Schwartz looked like he would otherwise breathe slurred French and wine into tourists' faces at the bottom of Montmartre. Thursday, however, he was hammering crunchy classic punk riffs out of his Marshall and backing up Eric Debris' call-to-arms punk diatribe. If they were younger and living in Austin, they'd be playing at Elysium every week. The small but dedicated crowd smelled like incense and danced furiously. While all the other showcasing artists sang in English, Metal Urbain proudly shouted phrases unintelligible to non-Francophone Americans. Actually, out of context, you'd think these guys were kind of dorky if you didn't know they helped launch the entire genre of synth-punk in 1976. They deserve the credit, and they appreciate it as well. They weren't too punk to say "merci beaucoup" at the night's end.
— Margaret Myrick

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MoJoe mixes hip-hop, funk and soul

MoJoe
The Vibe, 9 p.m.

Cities such as Houston, Dallas and Austin are helping to support the claim that Texas has evolved into the Third Coast for all things hip-hop. Among the many up-and-coming bands, you'll find San Antonio's MoJoe trailblazing the way for other Lone Star artists. The intense rhymes and incendiary beats in MoJoe's short set at The Vibe had the audience swaying, singing and chanting for more. "Classic Ghetto Soul," the band's debut album, adequately describes its pure and true-to-"old school" sound.

Most obvious to any listener is the mixture of hip-hop, funk and soul that solidifies MoJoe's signature tunes. You can draw similarities between Charles "Easy Lee" Peters and Marvin Gaye, too, if closely listening. Peters' voice, like Gaye's, is velvety, non-threatening and can easily convey his stories about family life. But don't think this band of five is all seriousness. MoJoe also comes with a catchy side that seems to engage its audiences easily. Cued by the lyrics of its song "Voodoo Hoochie," MoJoe definitely put a spell on its crowd.
— Gissela SantaCruz

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One long, melodic, head-boppy, foot-tappy song from Hot Hot Heat

Hot Hot Heat
La Zona Rosa, 12 a.m.

A guy in the audience at La Zona Rosa on Thursday said he thought British Columbian band Hot Hot Heat sounded like a more energetic version of the Strokes. A fair enough assessment, but this band leans less toward the garage and slightly more toward the mainstream. If Herman's Hermits had been filtered through an almost 40-year funnel and re-emerged in the Age of Irony, they might have delivered this kind of edgy power pop.

Edgy and rapid; keyboardist-lead singer Steve Bays, he of the oh-so-high afro and nasally vocals, led his mates through song after song with the speed of a tiger whose tail's on fire, holding a mike with one hand as he played with the other. In just over 30 minutes, they'd done about 10 songs, including "Naked in the City Again," "Talk to Me, Dance with Me," "No, Not Now" and others from "Make Up the Breakdown." They also delivered cuts from their upcoming album, "Elevator," but the selections began to sound so similar, it seemed like one long song after a while.

One long, melodic, head-boppy, foot-tappy song. But hey, if it's got a beat and you can dance to it, what else matters?
— Lynne Margolis

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Mambo Kings was the world headquarters for Latino rock Thursday

Maneja Beto, Plastilina Mosh, Andrea Echeverri
Mambo Kings, all night

Latino rock couldn't have enjoyed a better night than the one at Mambo Kings on Thursday. While I only caught the last two numbers of local rock-en-español artists Maneja Beto, they lasted 10 minutes, and there's no better way I could have spent the time. And from the looks on the audience's gleaming faces, I wasn't alone. Maneja Beto is known for making traditional Mexican sounds appear alternative, without doing much more than speeding up the tunes and adding the aggressive voice of frontman Alex Chavez. These catchy tunes had fans dancing, taking traditional moves and making them seem hip by giving them a mosh-pit threat.

The rock band from Monterrey that followed, Plastilina Mosh, was even more electrifying. For this band, diversity is the key, from the styles they covered to the fact that each of the band members plays more than one instrument. The other key to P. Mosh — as they refer to themselves in their song "Mr. P. Mosh" — is their obvious desire to motivate audience participation through dancing, jumping and waving. But what really sets this band apart is its chemistry. Never have I seen men hug and high-five one another with such sincerity.

The night, however, was reserved for Colombia's Andrea Echeverri. After three sets of pure testosterone, you knew a woman had hit the stage when suddenly the speakers were draped by pink handmade flags with pretty hearts and stars. Echeverri is a girl's girl. Once you got past the distractingly unfashionable — and can I say, unrock-'n'-roll? — presentation, which consisted of a large pink and lavender muumuu and gel-puffed shape stickers on her forehead, you remembered why you'd gone there in the first place: her voice. Not even bad wardrobe choices can distract from this woman's sweet and soothing sounds. Echeverri is best known for her contributions to the rock band Aterciopelados, but it didn't seem to bother anyone that she was there to promote a self-titled solo album, and not with her usual bandmates.
— Gissela SantaCruz

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Kermit Ruffins would have jazzed even more indoors

Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers
Fox & Hound, 10 p.m.

If Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers had been inside a New Orleans jazz club — or even one in Austin — they might have sounded quite hot. But alas, they were in the cold outside the Fox & Hound on Thursday night for their South by Southwest showcase. Maybe it was the chill that made them sound tepid. Too bad. Trumpet player and singer Ruffins has surrounded himself with a band full of more than competent players on trombone, piano, upright bass and drums. They just never caught a spark on this night, despite their reliance on user-friendly tunes such as Louis Armstrong's "When it's Sleepy Time Down South" or Harold Arlen's "I've Got the World on a String." Ruffins does get credit for coming up with one of the best lines heard at this year's South By — and with possibly starting a new trend, for better or worse. "Everybody take out your cell phones and wave them in the air. With the lights on," he told the audience. Then he added, "We don't do lighters no more."
— Lynne Margolis

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Educated by A Hawk and A Hacksaw

A Hawk and a Hacksaw
Copa, 9 p.m.

"You don't have to sit, my friends," the quaint, courteous young man behind the ramshackle drum kit says, as he strategically duct-tapes a drumstick and castanets to his thigh, adjusts the accordion bearing down on his chest and shoulders and caps his noggin with the kind of fuzzy winter hat that Archie Bunker would wear if it didn't have jingle bells wrapped around the perimeter. "This isn't a library."

No, but an educational experience nonetheless. Accompanied by the demure Heather Trost on violin and glockenspiel, the young man guides his audience through the forlorn Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe, directs them past farmhouses on a rainy day in the French countryside and hastens them away to the exotic destinations of a Gypsy tribe on parade. He is Jeremy Barnes. Once he was a member of Neutral Milk Hotel; now he and Trost are affiliated with the Elephant 6 Collective. Their jaunty, at times disjointed performance at Copa meanders between artistry and entertainment, musical timing and comical timing ("Sorry, I lost my buttons there"). Quite a few onlookers don't know whether to succumb to the goofiness of all this multitasking (a chuckle is shared when the tip of the drumstick affixed to Barnes' hat for occasional taps on a cymbal breaks off) or to absorb the sepia-toned ambition.

Enchantment, however, is not an option. For a finale, Barnes and Trost — A Hawk and A Hacksaw in your South by Southwest roster — abandon the stage and play in the midst of cross-legged devotees on the floor. In the background, the once vibrant red flowers standing at attention in a nook in the drum kit are keeled over, exhausted from all of the traveling.
— Michael Hoinski

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Swaying through the electronica ghetto

DJ Panko, Fingathing
Zero Degrees, 8:45 p.m.

Electronic dance music never took over the world the way its proponents thought it would back in the late '90s, but it has carved out a solid enough niche for itself in the world of pop-music subcultures. As if acknowledging its distinctive place in the South by Southwest firmament, festival organizers seem to have created a handy electronica ghetto — a tight cluster of clubs in the northeast quadrant of the Sixth Street area that on Thursday night included Zero Degrees, Elysium and Stubb's, which hosted such disparately synthetic acts as M.I.A., Fatboy Slim, Fingathing, Diplo and DJ Panko.

Fifteen minutes before the scheduled 11 p.m. showtime, M.I.A.'s gig was impossible to get into; a queue stretched down Red River Street and onto Seventh Street, and the door people were making discouraging noises to most everyone in line. A year ago, did anyone at SXSW even care about electro-inflected British hip-hop featuring political-minded raps by a South Asian expatriate?

Fortunately, those who had just come over from Zero Degrees had already encountered a couple of hours of globally conscious booty-shaking. Barcelona's DJ Panko brought a distinctly Iberian sensibility to the dance floor, cutting and scratching his way through a politically charged set of dance tunes that mated the ululations of Arab singers to the militant beats and divebomb basslines of hard-core jungle. Behind him a video artist projected footage of Arab dancers and musicians and the occasional photo of a U.S. president going up in flames. The visuals weren't subtle, and may even have been dunderheaded, but it was refreshing to at least see someone broaching a conversation that American rock seems utterly uninterested in.

By comparison, Manchester, U.K.'s Fingathing, who followed, seemed a bit thin at first. The combination of Peter Parker's turntablisms and Sneaky's electric-double-bass playing didn't move the dance floor as commandingly as Panko did, and the musical and visual references — they offered a video component as well — to hip-hop, graffiti, sci-fi and professional wrestling felt insular in the shadow of Panko's international outreach. But once Fingathing established their own context, it was tough not to enjoy their music — particularly when Parker and the video artist were advertising their desire to be "Rockin' the World" while Sneaky sawed away on his solid-body double bass, playing a mournful theme that might as well have been lifted from Sibelius.

Finland's part of the globe, too, y'know.
— Jeff Salamon

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McCarty's passion a good match for the modest Johnston

Kathy McCarty & Daniel Johnston
Cactus Cafe, 8 p.m.

The full house at Daniel Johnston's Cactus Cafe set was clearly not composed of neophytes who had just seen "The Devil and Daniel Johnston" at the South by Southwest Film Festival, then decided to take a peek. These were longtime fans, who gave him a standing ovation and shouted encouragement when the "semi-retired" songwriter apologized for being better on his records than he is live.

That is undeniably true, as Johnston's nervous singing and crude guitar playing just barely get the point across — if his famous self-released tapes sound like demos, a live set sounds like rehearsals for demos — but fans here clearly relished hearing the tunes from the author's mouth.

For skeptical listeners, though, the pairing of Kathy McCarty with Johnston was a godsend. Before Johnston took the stage, McCarty put on a set composed half of her own material — Glass Eye-ish songs from her new "Another Day In The Sun," performed with a four-piece starring old bandmate Brian Beattie — and half of his; and if any Johnston novices had wandered into the show, McCarty's passionate and perfect renditions surely convinced them that Daniel Johnston is a Texas treasure and that McCarty (who, after too long away from the stage, deserves more time "in the sun") has an ear for brilliance and an inimitable voice of her own.
— John DeFore

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Zao wows at the Back Room

Zao
Back Room, 8 p.m.

Opening for a British metal lineup, Zao, a five-piece American machine, delivered the speed, rage and sweat that keeps metal an honorable medium. And these Pittsburghers identify themselves as Christian. (Christian metal. Will the subgenrefication never end?) While some critics have complained that Zao's most recent album, "The Funeral of God," doesn't rise above and beyond its predecessors, the live show was sometimes grooving and sometimes thundering. The band screamed desperately the questions to God that only a metal singer cares to ask. Zao's riffage in this Metal Hammer magazine showcase was finely integrated, while the double-kick and bass guitar delivered a pleasant thud to the chest. Granted, the group feels somewhat corporate, but it still managed to thrust enough spontaneity at the hoodied teenagers that they threw themselves at each other on the Back Room's concrete floors. And it was still only 9 p.m.
— Margaret Myrick

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Guitarist Marvin Sewell blesses Jason Moran at Blue Note party

Jason Moran
Blue Note party

Blue Note's early-afternoon private party may have been underattended (most of the names on the guest list at Tambaleo likely had a dozen competing parties to visit), but it offered an intimate look at one of the label's most talented players, pianist Jason Moran.

Moran's last Austin appearance showcased him as a soloist, but this quartet set tilted toward his guitar player, Marvin Sewell; the group spent a lot of time on free-form improvisations with Sewell's electric slide guitar as the main soloing voice. He played bluesy riffs over a Booker T. groove in the first number, flirted with pedal-steel-ish country sounds toward the end, and in between took up an acoustic for a sunny interplay with the pianist.

Moran broke out the sampler now and then, but the set list didn't go the way of the hip-hop-colored work he has done occasionally in the past. Instead, the brief show was a bit of free blues as easy and open to possibility as a festival day that was still barely waking up.
— John DeFore

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