So, erm, I’m back from Austin and trying desperately to grind out a day at Proper Job, after flying into Edinburgh at seven this morning and coming straight to work without even time for a shower. My colleagues, particularly the ones who sit close to me, will no doubt be thrilled I made the effort.
So, how did Friday, Saturday and Sunday at SXSW go? Well only Friday was much of a music day, to be honest, with not all that much on on Saturday in the first place and the revenge of the ten-day cumulative hangover destroying all energy for anything other than drinking Margueritas in the sun on Sunday.
Friday was a very good day of tunes though. I got up at about two in the afternoon (I did this all the way through the festival, and highly recommend it as an excellent tactic for avoiding hangovers) and sauntered into town to catch the tail end of the Scottish Showcase at Latitude 30, and then scarfing some dinner with Peej, C&B and a stray New Zealand lady called Michelle and heading up to Antone’s for the evening showcase.
It seems to me that this is the best way to do SXSW, I reckon. Instead of spending a pile of cash on a badge or a wristband, just catch a lot of the free day parties, and then pick one really good evening showcase and pay your way into to it for about fifteen dollars. As long as you don’t particularly want to gig hop in the evening and don’t mind missing the odd thing here and there, this seems like the cheapest and most sensible tactic to me. And when I say missing out on some stuff all I really mean is that you might have to compromise and see something merely excellent instead of truly amaaazing, so it’s hardly a tragedy.
At Antone’s we caught five bands: Plants & Animals, Basia Bulat, Quasi, Shearwater and Liars. I’d heard talk of Plants & Animals before but never listened to their stuff, which is something I will be putting right asap, as they were really excellent – top guitar-bothering and loads of energy. Basia Bulat was just boring, basically, and genuinely disappointing as I was hoping her live performance might help me see what other people see in her recorded material, but if anything it was even more dull live.
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Quasi are a band I know nothing much about, but they were spiky and noisy and most enjoyable, and I know I was pretty wasted by this point but the two main attractions – Shearwater and Liars – were both brilliant. Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg has always been one of the more impassioned performers you’re likely to see, and I really like their material as it is, so seeing the two combined has been an absolute treat both times I’ve seen them live.
Liars were equally furious, but present a somewhat surreal image, as a band. Basically, they are fronted by a deranged Australian who, were he in a less well-establised band, would instantly be accused of being a cut-price Nick Cave. The rest of the band basically just look like a rather young bunch of polite Manhattan design students – preppy and polite and like their conversation might be just slightly too pretentiously intellectual to be all that bearable. The look of them is at such odds with the raucous, dirty noise they make that I spent the whole gig wondering just a little if someone was maybe playing a joke on me.
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Waking up (late, again) on Saturday I was rather shocked to find that Austin was fucking freezing, all of a sudden. After two days of splendid sunshine this was something of a rude suprise, and after three nights of brutal drinking it seemed to knock the stuffing out of pretty much the whole festival. C&B was up early enough to catch an excellent Wave Pictures and a rather jaded-sounding Slow Club at a day party, but we basically spent the day supping beers and shooting the breeze with Peej, Mrs. Peej and Mrs. Peej’s sister.
The bars were really nice, and confirmed my growing jealousy at the sheer number of excellent music venues Austin has at its disposal, most with big, wide, accessible stages and really meaty sound systems. Lucky fuckers.
Sunday was a lot warmer, but with little to no music on and even less will to seek it out, we basically spent the day wandering around on South Congress, eating breakfast tacos, contemplating the purchase of ludicrous cowboy boots and finally settling down to drink Margueritas in the sun. I didn’t really suffer from hangovers because I generally slept them off, but by Sunday I’d lost any real drive to traipse around seeing bands, and a day spent chilling in the sun listening to Vic Galloway telling massively inappropriate jokes and erm… drinking even more Margueritas was a perfect way to bring the expedition to an end.
Trying to get yourself heard, as a band, above all the extraneous noise and attention-whoring must be a nightmare but for a music fan, provided you relax and don’t take the whole thing too seriously, SXSW is a pretty fucking brilliant festival.
This record is something of an onslaught of choral, guitary prog-pop madness so constant that by the end of it you feel rather compelled to check that you haven’t lost your trilby in the whirlwind. It’s also a record which generates very polarised feelings for me.
