Rachael Sawyer

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• Posted Album Review: The Alchemy of Sunset's 'Gold Dissolves to Gray' to Austinist
  Listening to Sunset’s Gold Dissolves To Gray, the fourth full-length album from Austin’s Bill Baird, invites to mind that brilliant line from Noah Baumbach’s Kicking and Screaming: “I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday.” The best thing this effort has to offer is its terrifically timely and magnetic aesthetic of nostalgia for the new. At its high points, Baird seamlessly cobbles together a fresh sound that is both reminiscent (of 60s glam and 70s psychedelia) and of-the-moment, nodding to albums like Department of Eagles’ In Ear Park, dating all the way back to last year. (But yes, we were missing it already.)
• Posted Headlights, Anni Rossi and Pomegranates [At Emo's Wed] to Austinist
  Headlights is not a band out to blow your mind; they probably just want you to make out to their music. Their sound recalls breathy, late-night phone conversations between teenagers. And hey, it’s always past your parents’ phone cut-off time somewhere. As long as prom-night indiepop culture and its Michael Cera-laced accoutrements persist in this endless loop of recreating and reconstructing age 17 (what, if we revisit it enough, we’ll finally get it right?) we may as well sit back and bask in its flushed cheeks and hearts all a flutter. And there’s absolutely nothing not to like about Headlights, including their new album, Wildlife.
• Posted Preview: Hidden Cameras and Gentleman Reg [Saturday at Emo's] to Austinist
  Pornographically peppy Canadian indie fronstman Joel Gibb has describes his Hidden Cameras sound as "gay church folk music." (This is a congregation we would definitely join.) He has also called for a ban on marriage, and suggested "let's do it like we're underage.” While he cheerfully scampers through lyrics we don’t need his degree in semiotics to interpret (and blush at), audiences at Hidden Cameras shows have in the past been treated to not-so-hidden go-go dancers, cheerleaders, video, glockenspiels, very irreverent choirs, and other things perhaps best described as etc. Just think of an agitprop Polyphonic Spree cabaret show peppered with Foucault references. You may also be asked onstage to play tambourine.
• Posted Creature Comforts: Ola Podrida’s 'Belly of the Lion' [Album Review] to Austinist
  If only most romantic films were as honest as an Ola Podrida track. More contained, if not as muscular, as 2007’s self-titled album, Belly of the Lion plays nimbly with the tension between his expansive sound and his inward lyrics. Its opening track, “The Closest We Will Ever Be,” initiates a theme inverting the typical freedom-of-the-open-road ballad. Against tableaus of sprawling Americana play out not visions of freedom, but tender appreciation for interpersonal tethers. Mournfully, but without resignation, Wingo sings, "There's always some shadows within the prettiest of scenes/ I'll cast one on you, and you'll cast one on me…That’s alright if this is the closest we will ever be.”
• Posted Fun Fun Fun Fest Interview: Red Sparowes' Dave Clifford and Greg Burns to Austinist
  Lacking lyrics, Red Sparowes nonetheless have plenty to say. This instrumental rock band is erudite, expansive, and poised to release on their next album the culmination of their career evolution. On the eve of Fun Fun Fun Fest, our conversation with Dave Clifford (drums) and Greg Burns (bass/pedal steel) touched upon just about everything from Mao and the Sophists to the trouble with labels beginning with post-.