The all-ages crowd kicked up quite a mosh pit at the Brickhouse on Thursday for a handful of blisteringly fast and loud punk bands. The hot pink mohawks and raised fists were flying as Domestic Combat, Rotten Youth, Glass Heroes, and Lower Class Brats rattled the roof of the downtown venue.
There is something eerie about people intently staring at a DJ play his set. Records are meant to be spun in high booths at dark clubs where DJ’s can feel free to shuffle through their stack of vinyl and stammer the beat, without looking terribly interesting.
One reason I wanted to see a live performance featuring Joss Stone – the white girl who sounds like a black soul singer (what does that lame stereotype written by critics even mean?) – was to see if she was legit.
Let’s dispense with the written description and let you listen for yourself. Ya dig?
This year more than ever before, the festival sought to showcase local bands making the event truly reflective of Tempe. Inviting a few legendary hometown heroes to play didn’t hurt either. The most exciting headliner was, of course, the long awaited return of the Meat Puppets. Though they haven’t played here for well over a decade the Meat Puppets did nothing less than awe the crowd.
The Black Keys announced their presence at The Marquee on Friday with a flurry of feedback and a crashing wave of pounding drums. There was no chit-chat or pleasantries from the two man band before they began their musical onslaught. They just took their places and banged out their own extra heavy, fuzzed-out version of the blues.
The doods at MySpace have an offer for Valley punk fans that they can’t refuse.
When not relaying one of her tales of love and loss vocally, she would dance away from the microphone and raise the neck of her big hollow-bodied guitar as a queue for her band to release a country hell-storm.
Well, I managed to survive another fun and frantic SxSW festival. While I’m laid up at home recovering, I thought I’d bring you some of the highlights from this year’s fest.
Dax Riggs is humble. Okay, that’s an understatement – the former frontman for indie sensations Dead Boy and the Elephantmen (championed by Henry Rollins on his IFC show), is downright soft and shy. When I shook his hand after a stellar set at the Cedar Door tonight, it was like stroking air.
“That girl weighs like, 60 pounds. I’m serious.”
“White belts are okay, as long as you wear them with irony.”
“There are so many bald guys here. How am I supposed to tell Michael Stipe from Moby from some random dude?”
When walking down 6th Street at 4 p.m. on a Friday during SxSW, pedestrians hear all sorts of music spilling out of the clubs. Sometimes they peek inside, sometimes they stop for a brief moment, and oftentimes, they just keep walking. Today, there was a performer at the Chuggin’ Monkey that not only filled an empty club, but drew a crowd of dozens outside the window that continued to grow and stuck around for his whole set, staring through the windows while bobbing their heads and smiling.
Phoenix-based hip-hop artist Intrinzik is a consummate performer. Before Intrinzik took the stage at Volume, Bushwick Bill of the Geto Boys jumped onstage and busted out a fierce freestyle rap that left the audience pumped up and delirious. It was a hard act to follow, but Intrinzik managed to pull it off.
I was gonna kick sooo much ass at Rhino Records’ Geekus Musicus Maximus challenge today at the Austin Convention Center. The 305-question music trivia test (dubbed the RMAT, for Rhino Musical Aptitude Test) wasn’t supposed to lead me to this rattling revelation: I don’t know nearly as much about music as I’ve always thought.
What the hell am I doing here? It’s 11 a.m., I drank an entire bottle of red wine by myself last night, I have a bad hangover, and this brunch dealio at the Four Seasons looks way more swanky than I feel.
Actually, I don’t feel swanky at all, and aside from my friend and independent musician Jody Gnant (the reason I’m at this thing), I don’t know any of these hundreds of people who are dining on crepes, drinking mimosas (yeah, gimme three, please), and lounging around in the shaded grass by the lake.
I don’t consider myself an emotional person. I rarely cry at sad movies, I don’t dote over puppies and babies, and naturally sappy people annoy me. But Sia, the Australian sensation who’s been building a buzz via distribution through Starbucks around her sixth album, Some People Have Real Problems, made me cry. I’ve seen hundreds of shows in my lifetime, but I’d never seen a performer who could actually make me weep. Until Sia. And she did it with a single note that left an audience of hundreds absolutely breathless.
Shortly after the last Concrete Blonde reunion tour (for the Group Therapy album in 2002), front woman Johnette Napolitano gave me an interview for a small press publication called Musik Kulture magazine (now-defunct). One of the things she said toward the end of the interview was, “If the world went to hell tomorrow, we’d all be out in the desert, stomping our feet and clapping our hands.”
By: Jonathan McNamara Green food coloring and clover do not a happy St. Patty’s Day make. It takes proper Irish food, proper Irish brew and of course proper Irish music. Enter our friends Flogging Molly who will be paying Phoenix a visit this March 16-17 at Tempe Town Lake. Haven’t…
A lot of people think things like catchy band names and cool album covers are irrelevant in the Digital Age, when most people download their music and nobody can afford to pay $18.99 for an unheard CD based solely on how cool it looks. (That’s not a good idea, anyway – the last time I did that, it was a Blowtorch Betty CD, and I regretted letting my eyes make decisions for my ears).
But I don’t whole-heartedly agree with the idea that a band’s name isn’t as important as a band’s sound, especially at a massive festival like SxSW, where thousands of unknown artists are clamoring for a break and playing all over the place. I have gone to see bands I’ve never heard of play at SxSW, based on solely on their band names. Last year, I went out of my way to catch this band from India that was cleverly christened Menwhopause, and I didn’t regret it. The music was a great mashup of acoustic rock, heartfelt harmonies, and complex compositions – sorta like Dave Matthews Band, but with a better moniker and fewer sweaty gesticulations from the singer. And I was eternally amused at the crass name one band from Houston took – The JonBenet. I never got a chance to catch one of their shows last year, but they’re slated to perform again this year.
But now they’ve got more competition. Going through the 2008 SxSW performer schedule, I found a whole slew of mostly-obscure bands with outrageous (and sometimes, outright stupid) band names. If you’re going to be in Austin for the festival this year and find yourself with some down time, consider checking out some of these intriguingly-named acts:
Tenor saxophonist Ravi Coltrane – son of music (and not just jazz) giants John and Alice Coltrane – performed two 50-minute sets with a foursome that showcased drummer E.J. Strickland, pianist Luis Perdomo, and bassist Drew Gress.
With more than 1500 acts at this year’s SxSW music festival, it’s pretty obvious that festival-goers won’t get to see everything, even if they could make hella clones or disperse themselves into cognitive atoms. For me, SxSW is all about running around the blocks to catch such-and-such band at such-and-such place, before shuttling off through the melee to catch the next thing. And while there’s plenty of cool, undiscovered stuff to serendipitously stumble upon, I always like to make a rough guide of the shows I want to catch at SxSW. Here’s a day-by-day breakdown of the acts that will inspire me to run even faster through the streets to see their sets. My “absolutely-cannot-miss” gigs are in bold:
Last night Diplo short for “Diplodocus” hit Clubhouse Music like a primeval force from the Jurassic period
