SXSW: Writeups [Part 2]

Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside at Mohawk’s Billions Day Party (3/17):
After surviving the first official night of the music festival and umpteen days of SXSW-fueled activity in Austin, Sallie Ford & the Sound Outside made rolling out of bed and straight into the Mohawk surprisingly refreshing. Despite their name, the band performed an intimate set on the inside stage. The Portland, Oregon based quartet appears young and fresh with a retro look that matches their knack for vintage rock and blues songs. With the release of their debut EP Not An Animal, the band’s first trip to SXSW aligns with the purpose of the festival - the opportunity to prime their fan-base for their first LP, Dirty Radio, due on in May. With Ford’s wailing Winehouse-esque vocals and the Sound Outside’s jazzy jams, their quick morning set was just enough to leave us wanting more.

Parts and Labor

Parts & Labor at Longbranch Inn’s Impose Party (3/17):
While thousands rushed to Auditorium shores for The Strokes, locals and loners casually mingled at this E. 11th watering hole in a neighborhood not yet overstocked with bars and infiltrated by crowds. Following sets by Sun Araw and Mood Duo, the Brooklyn-based band gave an enthusiastic set full of hardcore-driven, experimental, noise-rock. Their formula is that of organized chaos - distorted guitars and keyboards, heavy feedback, and steady percussion. They barely fit on the small stage and often spilled into the audience during their energetic set which pulled songs from both Receivers and Constant Future.

- Jessica Skinner

Yuck at Club Deville (3/16):

Yuck are a British foursome whose debut album, released in February, is great. It’s full of fuzzy guitar tunes reminiscent of '90s luminaries such as Dinosaur Jr. and Yo La Tengo. A friend we were with at the Fat Possum day party (party name: “I’m An Alcoholic and I Hate You”) described Yuck as “Superchunky,” which assessment we pretty much agree with.

Yuck affected weariness onstage, which could have been jet lag or something, but the sounds conjured were crunchy, loud and glorious. The band churned through a set consisting of cuts from that debut album. Singer and guitarist Daniel Blumberg laconically paced between his stage-right microphone and the drum set as the sonic squall engulfed band and crowd alike. With his tangle of curls, piercing blue eyes and thin face, he looked like a young Bob Dylan, hunched in an oversized button-up shirt. He was joined onstage by fellow guitarist (and fellow ex-Cajun Dance Party member) Max Bloom, and bass player Mariko Doi. Behind them rose the Chia fro of drummer Jonny Rogoff. They closed with “Rubber”, a titanic slow-burner with swarms of fuzzed, flanged guitars and crashing cymbals that soared for upwards of seven minutes.

Black Lips at the Shangri-La (3/19)

If you’ve ever seen Black Lips play, you are no doubt aware that things can get quickly out of hand. A cursory inventory of things that have appeared on stage during a Black Lips show includes urine, vomit, fire, chickens, penises belonging to various members of the Black Lips, and electric race cars. The quartet from Atlanta have a drunken affability that’s always been hilarious to this writer. They seem to have a tenuous control over proceedings, and so it was with a mixture of excitement and trepidation that we headed over to their not-so-secret set at Shangri-La.

For about ten minutes, something like order prevailed among those gathered beneath the small white tent in the bar’s backyard, until the Lips launched into “O Katrina!”, from their 2007 album Good Bad Not Evil. It was a crowd starter. The remainder of the forty minute set was a colorful blur of moshing, flung beer, and general delirious mayhem. Crowd surfers circled overhead, and the band played loudly throughout, a mixture of some “old shit,” some “new shit,” and, of course, “that country shit,” in the words of guitarist Ian St. Pé. Coming at the end of a booze-filled day, near the end of a booze-filled festival, the crowd was spring-loaded with a maniacal jubilation made all the more raucous for being compressed into a mere forty minutes. Everyone had sought to lose their minds, and did.

The Black Lips closed with “Bad Kids”, their shout-a-long paean to misbehaving youths, during which the beneficent reckless abandon peaked. By this point, a thin red line of blood was snaking its way around my girlfriend’s right big toe, and another friend was on the verge of dance-induced sickness. St. Pé crossed the stage to flick tongues with the band’s other guitarist, Cole Alexander, and bassist Jared Swilley had to stop playing several times to grab hold of his microphone stand, which was being knocked around by stage divers.

Big Freedia

Big Freedia at the Eastside Drive-In (3/19)

Big Freedia is a fucking trip. The cross dressing (genetically male, phenotypically female) queen of a sub-sub-genre of hip-hop known as “sissy bounce,” Freedia came out to the Mess with Texas stage in a fashionable leather jacket, looking very powerful at 6’2”, and promised us a party. The congregated masses got what they’d come for.

Bounce music is a New Orleans-bred offshoot of hip-hop that features relentlessly fast beats, call-and-response chants, and flagrantly sexual lyrics. Sissy bounce is bounce music as performed by drag queens and homosexuals, though that term - coined by a New Orleans music writer - holds little purchase in The Big Easy itself. In the last year or so, sissy bounce has expanded beyond its home base, picking up and enthusiastic following as an authentic fringe movement and an unhinged, sweat-soaked spectacle. Freedia has performed here several times in the last year, including at Fun Fun Fun Fest, and sissy bounce even got the full New York Times Magazine treatment back in July.

It was 8:00 on Saturday; we were tired, we were weary, but we would not stop dancing. The sampled beats boomed out at the start of the show, and immediately, out of nowhere, Big Freedia was surrounded by a coterie of backup dancers shaking innumerable asses and breasts. For one song, she selected volunteers from the audience to join the onstage revelry and “shake they asses,” which happened. We’re not sure if the music stopped for more than ten seconds, ever. Freedia introduced her hit, “Azz Everywhere”, as “self-explanatory,” before selecting more dancers from the flesh pile up front. You can pretty much guess how that went.

- Phillip Pantuso