The Last Waltz Done Live At Club Deville
Review: The Cherry Orchard at The Blue Theater
EAST Interview: Nick Henning at Pump Project
Weekend Music Preview: Fabrication 7, Car Stereo (Wars), & More!
Show Preview - An Evening with Daniel Johnston
This winter, Austinist wanted to take some time to check in with some of our favorite local performers, artists and musicians to see what they enjoyed in 2008. Our request was simple: give us a few things that you enjoyed listening to this year, and feel free to include releases that might not have been released in 2008, but that found their way onto your turntable anyhow. We'll be sharing our own list too, but be patient and hear what some of our favorite folks thought was worthwhile in '08.
We'd be remiss not to check in with Matt Sonzala, journalist/blogger, radio host and promoter and supporter of Austin's burgeoning hip hop scene. A recent transplant from Houston, Sonzala came to Austin to work at SXSW and continues to blog prolifically at Austin Surreal. Here's what he enjoyed in 2008:
Mountain Goats - Heretic Pride I'm not the most literate guy in the world. I like to read and stuff, but honestly I think I read all the classics way too young. I spent a lot of my adolescence under the covers with a flash light digging into all the greats, and today, if I find time to sit down and try to tackle a book, I find myself getting totally annoyed with all the allegory and hyperbole and long drawn out descriptions of things that I couldn't give a fuck about.
Like "the sun shone dimly on the coastline/and the birds twittered and the fish sang their bubbly love songs/as I stood at the waters edge and contemplated the possibility of life on Pluto/and whether or not such creatures would imbibe in the same spirits that a drunken imbecile like myself might on any given..."
I don't give a shit about that. I mean, I kind of give a shit about your thoughts regarding life on Pluto and whether or not you think aliens may or may not get fucked up, but honestly man, all that other shit drives me nuts.
Not so with the work of John Darnielle, quite possibly the most literate songwriter alive today. Dude can get as wordy as he wants because in the end of every song for some reason I just feel good to be alive. Even if his subject matter is like, death. He's a storyteller that is world's beyond anyone else combining music and lyrics that I can think of today.
Anyway, I saw the Mountain Goats at Antone's at the beginning of November. A sold out show, Kaki King opened up, and joined the dudes on stage towards the end, and as I looked out at the crowd, packed from wall to wall, singing along to Darnielle's every word, it was the first time that I knew in my heart that Obama would win the presidency and there would be some hope in this world. Feel-good music for the intellectual set.
El Remolon - Cumbia Bichera EP Excuse the name dropping, but I was talking to Diplo one day in mid-2007 about new musics he had been finding in his travels around the world, and for some reason the subject of cumbias came up. He informed me that I needed to get hip to this new musical melding of cumbia rhythms and electronic weirdness happening in Argentina. He couldn't really describe it, I mean the boy tends to speak in staccato sentences anyway. He just said "Man it's like cumbia with electronics, it's just like..." That was about it.
Well that piqued my interest, but at the time, no amount of Googling could find me any sort of electro-cumbia-Argentina music. Then the internet caught wind of a club night in Buenos Aires called Zizek, and the site dedicated to the night posted a few mixes and I was like, "Damn, this El Remolon dude is about to change the game!"
So with the help and the gumption of my good friend Sun-Jue Shin - who incidentally also bought me this CD, we got the Zizek crew to come to SXSW in March. I work for SXSW so I didn't actually get to see any of these cats, except for El Remolon for like 10 minutes. On this EP he drops different remixes of his 'hit,' "Cumbia Bichera," and a couple other lilting, spacey, weird-outs in the name of whatever this neu-cumbia movement is. It's the perfect driving music, and has been in my car since March. And yeah, if you know me, I have probably forced it upon you in some capacity.
Bun B - 2 Trill He's really the south's leading voice. The one man making real sense of it all, while his contemporaries Auto-Tune us into the grave. 2 Trill covers everything from corrupt politicians, preachers and police to environmental issues, to well, keeping it real in the streets. Which is important. We should all be so real as Bun B. Essential.
Devin the Dude - Landing Gear I can't help it, I'm a Devin the Dude fanatic, have been since 1993. Full disclosure, yeah I work with this dude in varying degrees, but man, I wouldn't work with this dude if I didn't think he was such a musical genius. A simple genius in fact. One of those geniuses who is genius in his simplicity. He found who he is musically early on and has stuck with it. You want to cool out to some cool-ass rap music, about the things you pretty much think about all the time anyway, stuff that lets you know that you are o.k. man. You might need to spend some time with the Dude. No auto-tune, and no bullshit. Just genuine melody and reality based, however fun, raps.
Wire - Object 47 It's like, generally buying an album by a band, 20-some years past it's prime can be a risk. You wonder what they could possibly still have in them, but then you find yourself listening to said record like every day for an entire season and realizing you can sing the whole thing from front to back, like one of those records you may have bought in high school, 20-some years ago. And it makes you wonder, "Is this really that good, or am I just getting old." And you realize that it's both and it gives you hope for so much. All is not lost.
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Houston misses you, Matt! Rock tha ATX!