SxSW - Day One

BANDS COVERED IN THIS POST: KENNA | FOALS | HOT CLUB DE PARIS | I CAN LICK ANY SONOFABITCH IN THE HOUSE | CALL ME LIGHTNING | TINY VIPERS | LONEY, DEAR | IAMX

Dear Austin: If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. But more on that later.

The night before Day One, we head back to the PureVolume/Virb party and, after a modicum of finagling, snag festival-long passes. Vodka and red bulls all week! Actually, the vodka and Izze is much better. That Izze Grapefruit flavor is just stupendous. Tonight, we're here early enough to get in some quality Wii time, mostly playing tennis. Man, that thing is great. I make a mental note to get one when I get back home. Right when we get there, there's a bunch of music stuff set up along the back wall including an electronic drum machine and three keyboards. A spontaneous jam session ensues, but man, electronic drums feel like absolute crap.

Eventually we settle into a couch behind the Wii station, and Jesse Stensby tells the funniest joke ever, depicted below:



I can't remember how it went.

On the way back to the car, I pause with Jesse Stensby to take this record cover photo:



Jesse Stensby, Beneath the Surface. Or perhaps, Pull My Finger.

DAY ONE

No rain today, but there's mist, and plenty of it. Walking around on 6th Street is kind of like having someone blowing spittle in your face constantly-- especially when it's misty. Ba-dum ching. Seriously though, the rockers and rollers are starting to roll in now and, as a Texas tour bus rolls past us, I think I overhear the tour guide say, "If you'll look to your left, you'll see a bunch of fucking hipsters."

The general air of local fed-upness with this whole thing is confirmed at various points throughout the day, most pointedly by the bearded dude in a coffee/cigar chop wearing a T-shirt that says, "Welcome to Austin. Remember to Leave." He may have also dosed JoAnna James frozen cappucino drink with Kaopectate. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After a delicious lunch at Iron Cactus on 6th, we meander towards the Fader party, which is known to be the jam year in and year out. On the way, I wonder: Are moustaches still ironic? Or are they now post-ironic? Is it now legit for a man to just have a moustache, not as a punchline, but as a bona fide fashion statement? Has the 'stache jumped the shark?

In case you don't know, The Fader is a music/culture magazine, and they throw a party every year here with plenty of free drinks, so it's pretty much the place you want to be. This year, they've turned a warehouse into a maze-like structure they like to call The Fort. There's a Levi's store in there, although it looks like bands are getting pants for free (damn bands), a blogger room (which is not where I am as I write this), press rooms, an Adult Swim lounge and, primarily, a big outdoor area with a covered stage where bands play all day long. Providing the beverages? Southern Comfort, which, I'd like to note, is not actually whiskey, but is technically classified as a liqueur. Personally, I think it's crap, but whatever. Most of the people there seem to disagree with me. I spot Snowden, who are playing at the PureVolume outdoor stage later in the week, wandering around the party.

Around about 3:45 p.m., Kenna hits the stage with a band of awkward white guys. I was a big fan of Kenna's first album, New Sacred Cow, but it's been nearly four years since that came out, and he obliquely alludes to the delay before explaining to us that his new album, Make Sure They See My Face, has nothing to do with that one. His stuff is hard to peg, really, a fact that's been noted before in the press. He's a black man with a hell of a set of pipes, but he's not really doing either R&B or rock and roll, and he's not really doing a combo either. It's largely epic, generally funky, and definitely futuristic. He plays nothing from his old album, which is a little disappointing, but at least one of the new tunes is an absolute banger. Despite the outward bombast, his stuff is largely built around tiny pieces that are more than the sum of their parts, so I'm looking forward to hearing the new disc in full when it drops in June.

After some considerable techinical difficulty, England's Foals take the stage. Their singer may be the shortest frontman ever, plus he's playing an old Ampeg guitar, the kind with a metal neck. Once they get everything sussed, they explode into furious and spiky post-punk, blending the velocity of Wire's first record with some of the more experimental aspects of their second. The songs are built upon almost incidental sounding riffs that sometimes stray a little further towards technical proficiency (and away from melody) than they really should, but the truly admirable part of the sound is a stuttering, bookish funkiness. They seem like the kind of band that might really open up on record, where texture can take primacy over energy and melody.

Hot Club De Paris take the stage with some swaggering, '70s-style bar rock-- and not a lot more. I guess it's cool because they're British, and this thought in turn makes me wonder if Kenna would quite so interesting if he weren't black. Context counts for a lot in this game. A bar band from Indiana's just a bar band, but a bar band from Liverpool is apparently worthy of playing the Fader party. Three of the guys have voluminous beards and long, shaggy hair but one of the guitarists has close-cropped hair and is wearing a blazer, while the others sport jeans and t-shirt. It looks like he's playing at the Fine Line while the other guys play the Turf. I'm not impressed. (A helpful soul pointed out below that I was actually watching David Vandervelde. Sorry, Hot Club,for besmirching your fine reputation and music, which I've been assured is not bar rock)

Towards the end of the day portion of the Fader party, I start running into lots of Minnesota people: Oren Goldberg and Ryan from the Turf Club, musicians James Apollo and Matt Palin, Modern Radio honcho Tom Loftus, Minneapolis transplant and current San Francisco firecracker Sarah Sandusky and even Chris Riemenschneider from the Strib. I doubt he'll return the favor, but I'm going to give you a link to his blog. And I don't mean to imply anything about his character there. I'm not saying, I'm just saying. I hook up with Josh Peterson, JoAnna James and Martin Devaney, and JoAnna, Josh and I strike out on our own to explore Austin for a while. This where the guy implies that he may have given JoAnna something more than just coffee. I don't blame you Austin, but really, JoAnna's a sweetheart. Be nice.

Later in the evening, I check out I Can Lick Any Sonofabitch in the House (henceforth, SOB) at the 710 Room. Now, I had heard from singer Mike Damron himself that they had broken up, so I was curious to see what was going to happen. Damron had long been wanting to do more solo stuff and things that leaned more on the country side than the rock side. You can read the whole story at their site. Bottom line? SOB tonight is a shell of its former self, composed of Mike and several ringers. They ably navigate through SOB's signature Steve Earle-meets-AC/DC sound, but something's missing. It's just not SOB anymore, but I suppose Damron knows this. Hopefully he'll swing through the Turf Club again soon as a solo artist, since the highlight of the set was his solo rendition of the SOB classic, "Westboro Baptist Church," a venomous screed against Fred Phelps and born again evangelists in general. As Damron told me, he's not a poet-- he's the big middle finger on the left. The song is completely without subtlety, but it doesn't need it.



Loftus told me to check out Call Me Lightning, who hail from Milwaukee, WI (not NY, as the sign outside Red Eyed Fly reads), and are on Frenchkiss Records. They could handily be categorized as a Frenchkiss band, sharing as they do a penchant for propulsive and shouty post-rock that never gets too angular to be impactful, much like labelmates Les Savvy Fav and The Plastic Constellations. Plus, they're a power trio, and there's just something about power trios. It's an elemental musical combination, sharing something with genre pics like westerns and kung fu flicks. A guitar, bass and drums are tools, and you use them a certain way in a power trio. They mostly stay our of each other's way, frequency-wise, so they're never fighting for space in the mix. They can all just be themselves. I look around a realize that I need to buy some slip-ons or some Vans or something. No way can I get my legs into the kind of jeans I see everyone wearing. Josh (who's joined me) and I decide to weather the storm and wait for baggy jeans to come back in style.

After this, I make my way, alone, to what is easily the highlight of the night, Loney, Dear's set at Emo's IV. Unfortunately, I don't have photo credentials (yet-- I got 'em now), so I couldn't take any pictures. Loney, Dear (who hail from Sweden) put out a great record on SubPop called Loney, Noir not s long ago. It's a collection of gentle tunes and some great pop moments that recall, oddly enough, the BeeGees, mostly due to the falsetto vocals. However, rather than being grounded in disco, Loney, Dear is a distinctly acoustic and folk-tinged act. All of that left me completely unprepared for the majesty of their live show. Live, the songs expand and grow around the fantastic melodies, and it's easy to be swept away into it, which is just what happens to me. About two and a half weeks ago, my mother passed away and, after a week spent with family and friends in Chicago, I've returned to work and to this trip ready to get back to life. Most of the time, it works great. But during "The City The Airport," which is nothing if not an upbeat pop song, I find myself crying, just a bit, and I can't help but think about the way a crystal wine glass will shatter at the sound of a human voice singing its resonant frequency. I find it hard to privilege individual and subjective experience of music above all else-- I'm more than aware that what I'm bringing to Loney, Dear's performance is above and beyond what most people will go in looking for. But they must be doing something right. I recommend you catch them when you can, and, if you're in Minneapolis, that time is this Friday, when they open for Of Montreal at First Avenue.

The rest of the night unspooled in what I assume to be a typical way, stopping in to various bars, including checking out the new project from Sneaker Pimps' Chris Corner. They're called Iamx and they filled the Elysium with so much fog I couldn't take a decent picture. It basically sounded like apocalyptic dance music, and you'd probably dig it, if that's what you're into.

Around about 2 a.m., we all reconvened back at the van, where rides were dispensed to a couple of pals (Brian and Eric Stromstad) and we headed home for a well-deserved nightof rest. Unfortunately, it was not to be. The key to the apartment had been lost, and now we were standing outside at 3 in the morning, with no help in site. Plans were made to scale the building and go in through the balcony, but this proved impractical. Calls to the owner of the apartment went unanswered, and why shouldn't they? It's 3 in the morning. Stromstad, who works for the Varsity Theater, is good enough to let us crash his hotel room, and Stensby and Steller split a bed while Kimball, Perkins and I hit the floor. No toothbrush, no jammies-- just a comforter on the floor of a hotel and a towel and my sweater for a pillow. Five hours later we rise and get coffee, then finally manage to get in touch with Russ, who lets us back into the apartment. We're idiots. Firmly. Showers get showered, phones get charged, and we head back out, short on quality sleep. Very short.

We have to do this four more times?