AUSTIN, TX - With the year's biggest celebration of indie culture wrapped up, all the music acts, film nerds and social media techies have left the Texas capital and fled back to their (often chillier) homes. However, the memories still remain. Correspondent Emma Roller recaps some of the most memorable music acts from the 2011 South by Southwest festival, taking a look back at what is increasingly becoming one of America's preeminent cultural gatherings.
Emo's Alternative Lounge 3/15
Emo's (603 Red River St.) made one hell of an initial impression as the first notable music venue of SXSW. The half-indoor, half-outdoor lounge featured a lineup sponsored by Pitchfork on its two stages, and with at-the-door tickets going for $10 for non-festival goers, it was a steal.
No Joy: First, the SXSW staff and bands should be commended for their punctuality. Right at 9 p.m. the first opener, No Joy, took the stage and immediately started playing without a sound check. The Montreal natives provided a great warm-up with their fuzzed out pop-punk, and the two female guitarists/vocalists gave them an edge without becoming gimmicky. Despite their youth, No Joy has already toured with Best Coast, and it's easy to see how they've come up so quickly. Their precocious-yet-punky aesthetic tows the line between raucous riot-grrl and indie crowd-pleaser.
Weekend: Next came Weekend, whose wannabe Joy Division stylings became less abrasive with each song they played. It's easy to write off such a band like this as riffing off Ian Curtis or, for a more recent reference, Interpol, without adding much to the conversation. However, these San Francisco natives managed to downplay the pretension heavy in both Joy Division and Interpol's music while maintaining their darkly poppy appeal.
Beach Fossils: When you're a band from Brooklyn and you call yourself ""Beach Fossils,"" you've already given yourself a tough row to hoe to convince indie music cynics that you're not just another painfully whimsical twee band with a penchant for quirky allusions to geology. That said, this group eschewed any possible element of pretension or gimmick, opting instead to rock the crowd's Threadless shirts off with their high-energy surf rock riffs and drums. The lead singer told the crowd the band had driven 34 hours straight to Austin and hadn't slept in three days, but dammit, they were still going to pogo like psychopaths during every song they played.
Stubb's Bar-B-Q 3/16
Stubb's (801 Red River St.) prides itself on serving up hot BBQ, cold beers and killer live shows. Even though on Wednesday night they were sold out of pulled pork sandwiches and the beer prices were too steep for me, they did not disappoint on the latter. The outdoor stage sponsored by NPR offered an eclectic line-up ranging from garage rock, to dubstep, to R&B, to Duran Duran. Although I decided to spare myself the drunken middle-aged requests for ""Hungry Like The Wolf"" and leave before the headlining act, the three opening acts I caught were hot fire. Keep in mind that you can watch footage of all these acts at npr.org/series/sxsw.
Yuck: These London blokes just released their first album last month and opened up the stage with the thrilling highs and sullen lows of any seasoned basement band. A friend compared the band's indie-bopping style to the California band Girls, only with a heavier influence from 90s alt darlings like Sonic Youth or Pixies. Although they may not be the first to give garage rock a darker (some may say whinier) edge, Yuck finds a unique voice by alternating between irreverent and pensive.
James Blake: A British guy standing in line behind me said it would be easier to see James Blake here in Texas than in the artist's native London, and with good reason. The 21-year-old Blake blew the crowd away and was hands-down the best performance I saw at SXSW. Although his first studio album was released last month, he's had success on the British singles' charts over the past year, especially for his cover of Feist's ""Limit to Your Love."" The easiest way to describe Blake is as an accessible dubstep artist, but over the echoing beats and thudding bass emblematic of dubstep, his blue-eyed soul puts him closer to Jamie Lidell or Bon Iver. Blake decimated the audience with his hauntingly soulful single ""The Wilhelm Scream""—a must-listen for anyone, dubstep fan or not.
Smith Westerns: Back to garage rock. These native Chicagoans made their start at the NPR stage at SXSW last year as unknown youngsters with a penchant for Wall of Sound stylings and an uncanny similarity to Ziggy Stardust-era David Bowie. Their second studio album, Dye It Blonde, was reviewed well when released in January, and their performance showed off an effervescence unmatched by many indie rockers these days. Their bittersweet, unreasonably catchy anthem ""Weekend"" stole the show and seamlessly led into ""Dye the World"" for their finale. If you enjoy unhinged, happy-go-lucky garage pop, you will probably like Smith Westerns.
French Legation Museum 3/17 & 3/18
I had no idea what ""legation"" meant until I Googled it. According to Merriam-Webster, it is ""the official residence and office of a diplomatic minister in a foreign country."" Definitions aside, the French Legation Museum (802 San Marcos St.) played host to the unofficial (read: free!) SXSW Lawn Party Thursday and Friday afternoon, complete with two outdoor stages, a taco stand, a beer tent, an ice cream truck and a bevy of both up-and-coming and veteran indie acts. Sitting on a grassy hill, sipping iced coffee and chowing down on a BBQ chicken taco while watching bands play, this was the most idyllic venue at SXSW yet. It was like Seurat's ""A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,"" only with hipsters instead of 19th century French peasants—actually, those two groups of people may not be so different. It may have even rivaled the Terrace, which is saying a lot coming from me.
Twin Shadow: Although Twin Shadow is technically only the stage name of the band's frontman George Lewis Jr., his fellow Brooklyn bandmates made the show instantly appealing. Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor produced their debut album, Forget, but performing live the band left all traces of dream-pop behind in favor of an upbeat, danceable show. Mixing equal parts Smiths and Arcade Fire, Twin Shadow proved that a band you may not like on record can still move your feet on stage.
Janka Nabay: This Sierra Leone native was the ideal act for this ideal venue. A ragtag band of Brooklyn indie rockers backed up Nabay's sunny West African pop with saxophone, surf guitars and xylophone, which neatly matched the quirky atmosphere of the afternoon lawn party. Nabay's genuine joy and enthusiasm was quickly reflected in his audience.
Sharon Van Etten: Next was Sharon Van Etten whose raspy folk vocals summoned comparisons to Cat Power and similar 90s female vocalists. The difference with Van Etten is she is folksy without being hokey and soulful without being schlocky. Even on slower songs, Van Etten's backup band compensated for any possible sentimentality with the jangling tempo of regular rhythm and blues bar band.
Lia Ices: Like Van Etten, Lia Ices toned down the intensity of previous acts with airy Feist-like vocals. Unlike Van Etten, Ices added moody synths that placed her sound closer to more contemporary acts like Chairlift or Florence and the Machine. Her backing band didn't add much, but that may have been the sound tech's fault.
Ted Leo: It was more than appropriate for Ted Leo to close out the lawn party's St. Patrick's Day show—you'd be hard-pressed to find a bigger Irish punk wannabe, not that that's a bad thing. He opened with a lively cover of an Irish ballad to union solidarity (also appropriate), but forgot the words halfway through, said ""Fuck it!"" and careened directly into standbys like ""Me And Mia"" and ""The High Party."" I got to see Ted Leo play with a backing band last year, but playing this show solo allowed for the raw pop of his songwriting to shine through.
