I'm not sure how it's happened that I now know my way around the capital of Texas better than I do the town I grew up in, and yet here I am again - Austin, Texas for my fourth
SxSW.
SxSW (or just "south-by", if you're a local or a vet) is a music festival unlike any other, with some 1700 bands playing across four days in some 70 venues in downtown Austin... and that's just the official evening showcases. There's also a huge complement of day shows featuring many of the acts also playing at night, at even more venues and usually free and open to anyone (unlike the night shows, which require badges or wristbands for entry), so the net result is, basically, live music overload.
And queuing overload. The lengthy line to get into the Levis/Fader Fort yielded my first live show of the fest, a decidedly unremarkable set from Lost Angeles'
The Mae Shi. A little more bouncing around downtown caught portions of sets from trailer park soul merchants
Catfish Haven and Brazilian hip-hop outfit
Curumin, but the first act to make a real impression was Scottish folk-rockers
Frightened Rabbit at the Emo's Annex, who previewed their forthcoming album
The Midnight Organ Fight in a stunningly loud and frenzied manner. Fans of anxious guitars and thick Scottish brogues may well have a new favourite band. Subsequent sets from Austin's own
Shearwater at the Mohawk and a performance from an abbreviated version of UK veterans
The Wedding Present back at the Annex rounded out the day in fine fashion, but it was Frightened Rabbit who took the title for Wednesday's best show performed in daylight.
After recharging at the unofficial Canadian embassy at the annual Horseshoe Barbecue, hosted by the owners of the legendary venue of the same name in Toronto, it was back into town for the start of the "real" SxSW. The hot ticket for the day was, unquestionably,
R.E.M.'s show at Stubb's Amphitheatre - one of the larger venues in town but still incredibly small for a band of their stature. I was on the fence about trying to attend - I saw people lining up as early as a quarter to five but after seeing a couple of unremarkable shows early in the evening, I swung by to see just how bad the lines were and was inside as it turns out, it wasn't bad at all. Sure, I was a couple hours early for the headliners and had to wait through a couple openers - the depressingly ordinary
Papercranes from Florida and the decently sludgy
Dead Confederate from Georgia - but getting to see R.E.M. come out and rock out the way they haven't in years made it all worthwhile.
The advance word on their new album
Accelerate is that it's a stripped down, straight-ahead rock record and the new material they played, sandwiched between stone cold classics like "Drive", "Second Guessing" and "Fall On Me" certainly seem to bear this out - short, punchy and to the point. And perhaps in keeping with that theme, the band was sartorially simplified as well - Mike Mills' Nudie suits were nowhere to be seen and Michael Stipe, in suit coat and scarf, appears through with his glam phase. And though they're obviously not young men anymore, they played with respectable intensity and energy. Though I'll likely catch them again on their upcoming Summer tour, seeing R.E.M. in a venue this small - sure, 2100 capacity is only small in a relative sense but still - set the bar for the rest of SxSW pretty high.
(Frank Yang aka chromewaves will be reporting from SXSW throughout the event. Ed.)
