Spoonfed's intrepid Music Editor Dom Haley boozed and cruised his way around Austin, Texas to find the hottest new acts at SXSW Festival. It's a tough old job...
Thursday 18 March: Austin, Texas
The Spider House bar is right down the street from the house we're staying at, and like everything else in Austin, it’s a weird place. One part coffee house, one part biker bar and one part art project, it’s hosting BrooklynVegan’s Day Party today, and seems like the perfect place to sip Mexican beer, nurse our hangovers and watch bad-ass experimental psychedelia and indie bands. After watching sets from The Beets, Lovvers and Golden Triangle, we’re suitable warmed up for another day of mischief in Texas.
Since I didn’t get round to watching anybody I’d wanted to see yesterday, I decided it wasn’t really worth making any concrete plans and it was better to take things as they come. Cramming myself into Lovvers’ tour van, we head down to the centre of town and first stop is to catch a hardcore band called Total Abuse make a noise that's somewhere between Born Against and Modern Life Is War at a local library-based showcase. Next, we head back to Jamie’s Spanish Bar to watch Ben Kweller romp the Beatles Ukulele show home.
Emerging back onto Red River, I start to walk towards the conference centre for a free beer, but walk straight into an impromptu Fucked Up show outside of Beerland instead. I have to admit that Fucked Up have become something of a parody of themselves in recent times, with a knack of replacing the gut punching hardcore and shredding guitars I used to love with too many in-jokes and stupid covers, and they seem to have reached new lows by the looks of this shambles of a gig, with the guys not even completing one song without someone messing up. But the whole novelty of seeing a hardcore band play to a bunch of people in a city street more than makes up for the shoddy performance, and by the time they’re fumbling through a cover of the Sex Pistol’s ‘Bodies’, I’m at the front singing along.
Lacking an official SXSW pass means that I’m pretty much stuck to unofficial showcases, which, whilst usually being the most fun, also normally mean the most travelling around. Hitching a ride with Posy who runs those awesome ‘I Heart’ nights at The Macbeth, we head up the road out of town to the Burger Record showcase at TrailerSpace records. Perched on a hill overlooking Austin and situated between a pizza joint and a liquor store, this place has to be seen to be believed – and we spend the next couple of hours drinking fizzy US beer inbetween watching amazing sets from Devon Williams, Ty Segall and Wild America and watching the spring sun sink slowly over Austin.
The band of the day has to be Audacity, who played one of the most energetic, craziest and down-right most exciting shows I’ve seen in a good long time. Starting off to the strains of a drunken man banging beer cans together whilst chanting “go back to Brooklyn” to a depressed-looking band called White Wires who have just been kicked off the stage to make way for these guys, they proceed to play a set of fast loose garage rock to a room of flailing limbs and smiling faces. At one point one of the indie kids who had come to see White Wires tries to rush the stage, but it’s all laughed off in typical easy-going American style. As one guy told the band after the show, “when that guy did that, it only made you guys seem better”.
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