Maybe the best live band ever — Akron/Family played four sets at South by Southwest, and every single one was fantastic
The dust has settled, the crowds have drifted home and Austin, Texas’s annual South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival and conference has wrapped up for another year. Four solid days of non-stop music, partying, schmoozing and debauchery, all in the guise of an industry meeting — and from what I’m told, this year was actually slower than most. Frankly, if this was a slow year, I don’t want to know what counts as bustling.
With hundreds of bands playing at scores of showcases each night, plus throngs of unofficial showcases during the day, even the most dedicated festival-goer would be hard-pressed to take in more than a tiny fraction of the proceedings. In that sense, no review of SXSW could be considered anywhere near definitive. Regardless of this unarguable fact, Fast Forward proudly presents its definitive guide to SXSW 2008.
• Best performance — Hands-down, this one goes to Akron/Family’s Friday night set at Emo’s. At a friend’s insistence, I saw the band four times this week, and have absolutely no regrets about potentially missing three other bands. Akron’s two-hour long Emo’s set was their best, cramming around 15 people onto the venue’s tiny stage, including dancing girls and a full horn section. The show culminated with the band leading the crowd onto the street for a rousing singalong of Auld Lang Syne and an impromptu New Year’s countdown. Hugs were exchanged. It was less a concert than an experience.
• Best day party — The day parties are where publicists and label reps try to win over the media and fans alike with free food, swag and music. There were some tough contenders this year, but in the end, the Absolutely Kosher-Home Tapes-Team Clermont party won out. Removed from the main strip, the party drew a slightly smaller crowd, but the lineup was a killer, particularly Copenhagen’s Slarrafenland, which add trombone and saxophone to the usual indie-rock mix, and Philadelphia keyboard duo Pattern is Movement, which pulled off a surprisingly adept cover of Radiohead’s “Everything in its Right Place.” The reclining lawn chairs may have been a factor, too.
• Best swag — As mentioned, labels try to attract crowds by offering food and goodies. Everything from comic books to water pistols make the rounds, and Paper Bag Records’ one-gigabyte USB sticks earned high marks for usefulness, but this year’s highlight came from Six Shooter Records. The label behind Martin Tielli and Luke Doucet gave out a handsome flask emblazoned with the Six Shooter logo and filled with quality whiskey. If the goal was to garner a plug in our paper, looks like it worked.
• Punk’s not dead — It’s just moved to Israel, apparently. Tel Aviv’s Monotonix weren’t the most buzzed-about band at this year’s festival, but those who saw them certainly had something to talk about. Front man Ami Shalev is a madman, pouring beer and garbage over the drummer, leaping into the crowd and refusing to let fans stand idly by. The rest of the band joined in, too — which meant hauling the drum kit into the crowd, where it remained, unmiced, for the rest of the set.
• Biggest surprise — I hadn’t heard of Fleet Foxes going into the festival, but their sweet Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young harmonies and well-crafted alt-country backings were a welcome reprieve from the abundance of synth-rock making the rounds. They’ve started gathering buzz in some other publications, too — look for them to make a much bigger impact in the next year.
• Hometown heroes — Austin’s own The Octopus Project put on one of the week’s best performances with their Thursday night set. This is a group that has the visual side of their performance down — at one point early in the set, they released garbage bags full of balloons into the crowd, and each balloon contained a flashing LED light. The result was like a rave with thrashier guitars and more Theremin solos.
• Biggest regret — If you can call it a regret. Lou Reed’s keynote speech was a huge draw this year, as Reed is unquestionably one of the most influential figures in modern music. Still, his keynote speech was at 10:30 a.m., and there comes a point where sleep takes priority over listening to aging rockers pontificate. The odds are he had some interesting points to make, but so did my subconscious.
