SXSW REPORTS

Most SXSW festivalgoers fled Austin on Sunday. MAGNET’s Mitch Myers stuck around an extra day to survey the wreckage and try to remember what happened over the weekend.

Well, I’ve finally wrapped up my 10 days of SXSW action, and boy, are my feet tired. Thank goodness MAGNET scribe Corey duBrowa did most of the heavy lifting over the weekend. But I must point out, to leave Austin on Sunday rather than on Monday is to overlook Alejandro Escovedo’s annual festival closeout at the Continental Club on South Congress. Not that I made it to that show either, but at least I was still in town. I’d already seen the Alejandro Escovedo Orchestra (18 musicians strong!) perform on Saturday night at an outdoor party on South Congress. In general, South Austin serves as a nice antidote to the vicious downtown overkill on Sixth Street, providing multiple parties with lots of great Americana artists all week long. One small highlight was Jason Isbell performing a letter-perfect version of the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” I like that song.

And speaking of parties, the word is that the countless day parties downtown (and elsewhere) took some energy away from the conference itself, luring attendees away from industry-driven panels at the convention center. Not that the music panels were that interesting: Spiels on Woodstock’s 40th anniversary, Neil Young’s Decade project on Blu-Ray and the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue were all pretty mild. The panel on the genius of Doug Sahm’s “Mendocino” was OK, but the evening concert celebrating the release of Keep Your Soul: A Tribute To Doug Sahm at Antone’s bar was closer to the source with performances by Jimmy Vaughn, the Gourds, Sarah Borges, Dave Alvin and the surviving members of the Texas Tornados.

Other noteworthy gigs include Ed Harcourt’s amazing pop-romantic performance at Elysium, PJ Harvey kicking ass at Stubbs and the same Echo & The Bunnymen show that duBrowa wrote about. I also saw the world premiere of Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young Trunk Show. This is Demme’s second Young concert film, and he’s really starting to get the hang of it, mixing the visual playlist of solo acoustic tunes and loud jams with an exceedingly deft hand. Still, no matter the quality, this flick is still for Neil freaks only.

Not much else to say, except they’re made of tough stuff down there in Texas, and by Monday morning, the streets were all clean and SXSW was just a memory. See you in 2010.

Jason Isbell’s “Seven-Mile Island” (download):

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MAGNET’s Corey duBrowa wraps up a week’s worth of reports from Austin’s SXSW with one last missive from the front:

“If I said I’d lost my way/Would you sympathize?/Could you sympathize?”
—Echo & The Bunnymen, “Rescue”

Riding the elevator down to the lobby of my hotel at the unholy hour of 5:30 a.m. (just in time to catch my early flight back to Portland, Ore.), I passed a series of bleary-eyed stumblers clearly making their way back “home” from wherever they’d been the night before. As Echo & the Bunnymen (pictured) once sang—and did, live, earlier in the evening—“Won’t you come on down to my rescue?” seems an appropriate theme for the conference’s messy, final day, and it’s precisely this juxtaposition of seemingly opposed realities that makes SXSW what it is: part indie, part major; 50 percent conference, 50 percent Roman toga party; half-cocked, half-amazing.

Exhibit 1A: the concluding day of the festival’s musical lineup. On the one hand, the Twittersphere was abuzz with the long-rumored appearance of Kanye West at a private party hosted by Fader. I can hardly think of an artist less appropriate for SXSW than West, whose highly calculated, careerist hip hop stands in stark contrast to the sort of unsigned indie-band routinely seen maniacally running around between seven back-to-back daytime gigs. And yet on the other, artists like West (as well as Metallica, which put in an appearance at Stubbs Friday night, and a reunited Jane’s Addiction, which played a private function Thursday) do, in fact, sit side-by-side with the festival’s more typical fare each year.

So even as we marveled at some of the last day’s musical offerings—such as the afternoon run-of-show at the Mohawk’s sunny outdoor patio, which featured Portland’s terrific Viva Voce, Scotland’s snoozy Camera Obscura and Japan’s Peelander-Z (the most hilarious, energized, out-and-out insane display of comedi-punk/metal you’ll ever witness; seriously, go find this band on its current North American tour so you can fall in love with enthusiastically reckless live performance all over again—we also found ironic some of the strange bedfellows the festival’s sprawl created (such as seeing Spoon’s Britt Daniel walking down Fifth Street all alone; he was in town to participate as part of the daytime panel “Producers Making Classic Records”), then seeing the woman whose album he’d just produced, San Diego’s Anya Marina, later that evening at Maggie Mae’s (unfortunately, her wisp of a voice and compellingly written material was somewhat wrecked by a vortex of bad sound/technical issues). At the Chop Shop Records showcase that evening, you could witness Denmark’s Asteroids Galaxy Tour (authors of “that iPod commercial song” called “Around The Bend”) and Kansas City’s terrific Republic Tigers (who’ve had songs placed on Grey’s Anatomy and Gossip Girl but whose Travis-inspired material and Ian Curtis-indebted stage moves have yet to find a mass audience) in close proximity.

The evening ended at a relatively new venue—Rusty Spurs, which featured a chaotic door situation, hopelessly late gig schedule, boneheaded bouncers and a sticky-hot club packed to the rafters with pissed-off punters—and featured Liverpool’s Echo & The Bunnymen, whose music is still as ahead-of-its-time as it ever was but whose sad, wilted-at-the-edges performance gave the impression that the band has become something of a nostalgia act, with iconic frontman Ian McCulloch devolving into the very cliché of a faded former rock-star, sunglasses, unintelligible Liverpudlian side commentary, ever-present cigarette and all.

As McCulloch himself sang, is this the blues I’m singin’? Hardly—the music industry may be in a state of crisis at the moment, but you’d be hard pressed to tell from the throngs crowding Sixth Street late into the night, every night, throughout SXSW 2009.

Kelley Stoltz covers Echo & The Bunnymen’s “Rescue” (download):

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MAGNET’s Corey duBrowa checks in from the annual bacchanal that is Austin’s SXSW festival and finds that it’s momentarily turned into Portland South:

To judge from last evening’s Rose City-centric bill, Portland’s music-playing massive (in its entirety) must’ve decided to head to Austin for Spring Break this year. Oh sure, the day itself was diverse enough: Paste’s party at Radio Room included sets from San Francisco’s Thao With The Get Down Stay Down (which probed at the previously-invisible line separating Rickie Lee Jones from Cat Power) and Cambridge, Mass.’s Passion Pit (a New Order-leaning act whose set was unfortunately plagued by sound problems, hot/feedback-prone microphones and a somewhat lackluster performance; blame it on the heat, perhaps? The band certainly kept referencing it). Nothing out of order here, so far.

But after a quick dinner meant to serve more as a venue to “parfait” food and alcohol (my friend is the one responsible for altering the English language by turning a word previously known as a dessert-oriented noun into a verb, meaning, “to stack unlike items on top of one another” as a survival technique for SXSW), our crew headed over to Red Eyed Fly and began to notice that everyone in the place was of a decidedly Northwestie provenance: hey look, the Thermals (who rocked a completely packed venue a few hours later)! There’s the Decemberists’ Chris Funk (who added steel guitar and keyboards to Blue Giant across the street; more on that in a moment)! Aren’t those the guys from Shaky Hands and Horse Feathers? Portland’s in the hizzouse, yo. And they came to party, albeit in my hometown’s understated, sort-of-ironic way.

Primal Scream’s “Urban Guerrilla” (download):

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MAGNET’s Corey duBrowa may have spent his daytime hours doing “day gig” things in Austin, but then he donned his finest “none more black” rock attire to get out last evening and partake of the cornucopia of musical happenings going on around town during SXSW.

As it happens, the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy really was meant for the stage.

After hitting a few early shows on Wednesday—the best of which, New York City’s Phenomenal Handclap Band, came on like KC And The Sunshine Band on a serious cough syrup jag; the worst of which, New Zealand’s Ladyhawke (perhaps we should call her “Eightieshock”?), replicated Reagan-era forgettables like Missing Persons and Berlin but without any of the charming or redeeming parts—we headed to Stubbs’ giant outdoor confines, where NPR’s showcase event featured Dayton’s Heartless Bastards, North Carolina punkgrass eccentrics the Avett Brothers and Portland, Ore.’s Decemberists (pictured), who performed their latest LP, 17-song concept album The Hazards Of Love, to a sold-out crowd who basically ate out of the palms of their hands for the next hour and a half.

Ladyhawke’s “My Delirium” (download):

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MAGNET’s Corey duBrowa arrived in Austin yesterday to begin scribing daily posts from the SXSW Music and Media Conference.

It’s 79 and sunny, the smell of barbecue and stale beer is in the air, and the sounds of a thousand skinny-trousered, ironic-facial-hair-wearing indie-rock hopefuls float by on the pollinated breeze. We must be in Austin, ya’ll! In many respects, it makes perfect sense that one of the music industry’s last remaining “major events” coincides with the beginning of the NCAA basketball tournament: Both require major preparation and “making a list, checking it twice” detail orientation in order to have a hope of getting anything of real value from the experience. Both involve prescient identification of this year’s Cinderella stories (the Phenomenal Handclap Band, anyone?), overrated sacred cows marching merrily to the slaughter and shoulda/coulda/wouldas hoping to use their One Shining Moment (or to be more precise for many of the bands, up to nearly a dozen shining moments crazily connected by a crappy Ford Econoline van during the festival’s head-spinning four-day run) to move from “also-ran” to “Pitchfork-ready” status. Both attract a host of school-color-wearing frat-packers who see the event as more of a party than anything else, with scenes involving myriad Stupid Human Tricks such as racing down Sixth Street with one’s girlfriend (or recently met friend with benefits) hoisted atop one’s shoulders proving not at all uncommon, day or night.

Tuesday marks the date in which the SXSW Interactive Festival makes its final stand (tonight I attended a “Last Call” entrepreneur’s event at Fogo de Chão, which involved a number of digitally enhanced-shirt-wearing business strivers getting their geek on) and represents something of a “tweener” date, musically-speaking. It also happens to be St. Patrick’s Day, which ensures that every Irish-garbed drunk within the 512 area code can be seen bobbing and weaving around downtown Austin in an effort to get their party started right. So, groups like the Proclaimers (pictured) play their hearts out for the holiday-making faithful while the Decemberists spend the evening at Pangaea readying themselves for a front-to-back performance of their latest album, The Hazards Of Love, tomorrow night at Stubbs (more on this in tomorrow’s report), with jam-rockers Gomez also in attendance. It’s not exactly a quiet evening, but the riot doesn’t truly begin in earnest until tomorrow—which means that venues are prepped, badges are procured, plans are hatched, handheld devices are charged and final rehearsal sessions are scheduled in anticipation of the week of cheery, music-besotted boozing to come.

The Phenomenal Handclap Band’s “Testimony” (download):

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