It seems that SXSW gets more organized every year - nearly a month in advance, version one of the massive SXSW Super Grid showing all panels, talks, films, and band showcases is now up for your perusal. As with any conference taking place in 100 venues with 2,000 bands and hundreds of films, expect these grids to shuffle often in the next few weeks due to last-minute programming additions, changes, and deletions. One other music note: the banner showcases at Stubb's, Auditorium Shores, Austin Music Hall, and ACL Live/Moody are notoriously absent from this initial grid, so expect some show 'reveals' in the weeks to come for some of the bigger names like Fiona Apple and The Jesus and Mary Chain. more ›

Music nerds, take note. South By Southwest organizers just sent out a release saying that 2,000 music wristbands will go on sale at 10am via wristbands.sxsw.com at an initial price of $149. These wristbands grant the wearer space-available access to all evening SXSW showcases from March 13th to March 18th. Over 2,000 bands will perform at the 2012 edition of the festival at approximately 95 venues. more ›

Elbow: It was fitting that Manchester's reigning kings of melancholy played to a tired but pleasant crowd under a grey, drizzling sky. Affable frontman Guy Garvey didn't waste any time taking credit for flying in the weather from England to help "these scorched lands." It had been over five years since the group last set foot in Austin, during which time they've grown massively in stature in Europe - so it was a rare treat to catch the band in this part of the world. more ›

The Arcade Fire returned to Austin City Limits on Saturday after a four-year absence as conquering heroes. The group remarked that they had just two shows to go before shutting down their year-and-a-half long The Suburbs tour down for good, but no weariness showed in their performance. The 15-song set drew equally from Funeral and The Suburbs, with little material from Neon Bible - a smart move, since Funeral's generally anthemic nature provided the correct counterpoint to the mid-tempo cuts like "Modern Man" (which, despite the cliches, really does sound like Springsteen) and "Suburban War." Early on in the set, Win Butler seemed sillier than usual, teasing ACL for going upscale by having 'seats and stuff' and wondering aloud why Texas was on fire but all the golf courses remained green. The band even stole a fake tree from the backdrop and used it as a drumstick on one number. As polite Canadians, though, they gently placed it back where it belonged immediately afterwards. more ›

Santigold was in a tough position heading into this high-profile show: she has a new album ready to roll, but nobody has heard it yet. Friday's set showed both the artist's awareness of the awkward situation and a lot of cleverness, as she deployed every trick in the book to keep the crowd on her side. For starters, she came out firing with familiar material, leading with "Go," her collaboration with Karen O from earlier this year. She then followed immediately with both hits from her debut album, "L.E.S. Artistes" and "Lights Out." The former led to frenzied crowd pogoing, while the latter reminded us that selling a single to a light beer for ads can sometime dilute a tune's impact. more ›

The Austin City Limits Festival has just sent out an announcement that Sunday tickets for the event are now completely sold out. While 3-day passes for the 2011 event have been sold out for months, the single day Sunday passes were available for $90 until this morning. more ›

ACL Festival week just got even more interesting: on Tuesday, September 13, C3 has just announced that Wisconsin's Bon Iver will perform at the Long Center. While the venue isn't often used for rock concerts, those who have seen it employed for past shows such as Leonard Cohen or Sufjan Stevens can attest that it's a fantastic venue for nuanced listening. Fellow indie-folk singer Kathleen Edwards will open the show. Tickets are onsale from Friday at 10am via www.C3Concerts.com, www.longcenter.org, and the venue box office.

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Some fun and last-minute news from Twitter: the Swedish trio Peter, Bjorn, and John have arrived in Austin early in advance of their Gimme Some tour dates that begin tomorrow evening at a sold-out Antone's. In addition to eating at Juan In A Million and hanging out at country bars, the band's Peter Moren has decided to play an informal gig tonight at Ruta Maya Coffeehouse on South Congress. Tickets are just $5 and are available at Ticketfly. Austin singer Arum Rae Valkonen will open the show. more ›

If there was one thing that was evident during The Kills' performance at La Zona Rosa last night, it was that Alison Mosshart and James Hince are an entertaining bunch. While their show was nothing spectacular or mind blowing, Mosshart and Hince handled themselves like professionals. They balanced the right amount of posturing and energy to propel their brand of drum machine charged, blues inspired rock in a set that placed several cuts from their recently released Blood Pressures amidst many favorites from their back catalog. more ›

It wasn't so long ago that we watched Cut Copy debut tracks from 2008's In Ghost Colours from atop a couch at the Karma Lounge. The assembled crowd didn't know quite what to expect, as the record wasn't out yet, but the teaser single "Lights And Music" wasn't a red herring: the record was chock full of synth-y dance anthems that soundtracked a million parties in the years to come. In the space of a year, the band graduated from the obscure dance bar to Emo's and then to a sold out victory-lap gig at Stubb's, which ranks along with LCD Soundsystem as the happiest audience we've ever seen at that venue. more ›

It is no overstatement to say that The Arcade Fire are one of the two biggest indie-rock bands on the planet at the moment (in a comic coincidence, the other, Radiohead, seem to accidentally be competing with them for press this week.) On Sunday, The Arcade Fire won a surprising but well-deserved Grammy for Album Of The Year just three records into their career, and closed out the telecast to a viewing audience of 26 million people. Later in the week, they were confirmed (along with Eminem) as the headliners of Bonnaroo 2011 in Tennessee. And on Friday evening, they quietly announced a handful of North American tour dates featuring three stops in Texas.

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The February opening of the ACL Live venue at The W Hotel in the 2nd Street District is an exciting milestone for Austin music lovers, but has also led to some understandable confusion. Most of this stems from the fact that the venue is a dual-purpose concert venue: the ground floor will be used for roughly 20 Austin City Limits TV tapings each season, while the entire three levels of the space will be (far more frequently) utilized as a 2,700-seat space for touring concerts - essentially, a slightly larger venue than Stubb's. So - will every event at ACL Live be taped for TV? Well, no. But the state-of-the-art theater will attract some roadshows that may have otherwise skipped Austin - to boot, both Janet Jackson and John Mellencamp have already announced dates in April.

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The Frank Erwin Center has some big news this morning: they've announced a stop of Lady Gaga's epic Monster Ball tour on Wednesday, April 6th at the Frank Erwin Center. Ticket prices range from $51 to a whopping $177, and go on sale this Friday at 10am at TexasBoxOffice.com and at select H-E-B stores.

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Good luck figuring out Jamie Lidell. The British-born Lidell first attracted notice for his solo production work with collaboration with producer Cristian Vogel in the band Super_Collider. Lidell's roots were in dance music production, but with 2005's Multiply, he embraced his love of retro soul and channeled everyone from Prince to Stevie Wonder to Otis Redding. It was a surprise twist for the artist, and one that found him a rather large legion of fans when took the record on the road with Beck for his 2006 tour. It also didn't hurt that Target licensed the track "A Little Bit More" for a lengthy TV ad campaign. more ›

Sometimes, an album you listen to has a easy reference point: The Suburbs and mid-period Springsteen, for example. This is not the case with The Love Language's beautiful and catchy Libraries. While it evokes loads of influences, you can make of it what you will: different tracks remind us of everything from Los Lobos to The Walkmen to classic rockabilly to fellow North Carolinians The Rosebuds. more ›

Crowded House, put simply, are a sterling pop band. The band was formed 25 years ago from the ashes of new wave hitmakers Split Enz ("I Got You", "History Never Repeats") by singer-songwriter Neil Finn and drummer Paul Hester. The two, according to Finn, "wanted to be in a three-piece band that could fit into one rental car." After adding Melbourne bassist Nick Seymour, the trio was complete. The trio burst out of the gate in the United States in 1987 with Top 10 hits "Don't Dream It's Over" and "Something So Strong," which remain the group's biggest American hits. From here, the band's global presence diverged wildly: while 1991 album Woodface propelled them to arena-rock status in the UK, Europe, and Australia, the group remained largely a club-level band in the United States.

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Robert Plant is about to turn 62, but apparently, getting older doesn't mean playing it safe. After 2007's one-off Led Zeppelin charity gig prompted concert promoters to stack piles of cash at Plant's door, he rejected the overtures to continue touring his Americana project Raising Sand with Alison Krauss. After collecting no small amount of critical acclaim for that endeavor, Plant has now blown it all up again, emerging with a new brand of weirder, louder roots rock in his current project, Band Of Joy.

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Fans of late '80's and early '90's college rock sure have a lot to be excited about. After last week's announcement that The Pixies would stop by Austin to play Doolittle, we now find out that late September will also bring us the Pavement reunion tour. Given the gnashing of teeth from local music bloggers when Pavement weren't on the ACL Fest lineup, we suspect many Austin music nerds are pumping their fists this afternoon.

An absolute giant in the indie-rock pantheon, the band will perhaps forever be tagged with the terms 'slacker' and 'lo-fi', but to place them in a stylistic bucket would be a disservice. Pavement were witty, wise, weird, willful, and wistful, and could write an alt-rock hit when they felt like it, but mostly, they just followed their whims. Their brief eight-year run of albums has been lovingly reissued by Matador for those who missed them the first time around, and this tour should provide some wonderful nostalgia for the band's many fans.

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After nearly a decade of treading water in the USA, Phoenix became full-on rock stars in 2009. Their LP Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix landed on everyone's Top 10 list (including ours), they won a Grammy for "Best Alternative Album", the band drew huge crowds at festivals including ACL, the track "1901" became a huge radio hit, and they brought the house down during a rare club gig at La Zona Rosa in December. more ›

The reclusive and curmudgeonly genius Van Morrison is barnstorming across Texas arts venues in January, and will make a stop at the recently refurbished Bass Concert Hall on Saturday, January 23rd. The man nicknamed "The Belfast Cowboy" and "Van The Man" is often described as a mercurial performer, and one never knows whether his concerts will be a thing of rare beauty (like when we caught him in 1995 in a British casino) or a rote run-through devoid of interest (as some found his ACL Festival performance of a few years ago). If you're the gambling kind, note that the stakes are high: tickets start (!) at $85 for balcony seating and go up to $350 for preferred orchestra seats. We'll hope on your behalf that he delivers the goods. A presale is currently live - the password is "WAVELENGTH." If you've had a particularly good or bad concert experience with Van Morrision, let us know in the comments. more ›

With Elvis Costello, it's all about timing. The restless nature of the man's creativity seems to dictate that he never stay in one place for too long, be that physically or creatively. As such, fans hoping for a pass through Costello's greatest pop hits were likely disappointed at the setlists that emerged last week both at Austin City Limits and at Bass Concert Hall. We suspect, though, that those fans were in the minority. As fans of Costello's great mid-80's record King Of America, we welcomed the chance to see Elvis return to a genre he seems awfully good at given that he's not exactly a folk or country lifer. more ›

If there's a musical genre that Elvis Costello has missed over the past 30 years, hold on a year or two and he'll probably record an album to cover the omission. The eclectic nature of Costello's prolific catalog began all the way back in 1981 with Almost Blue, a collection of country covers that featured Hank Williams and Gram Parsons tunes. Since then, he's often veered away from his main job as a rock singer-songwriter to tackle chamber pop (1982's Imperial Bedroom), roots rock (1986's amazing King Of America), classical (1993's The Juliet Letters), easy listening (1998's Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted From Memory), torch songs (2003's North), and even opera (2004's Il Sogno). In recent years, he's done collaboration albums with both New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint and indie-pop darlings Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice. Confused yet? more ›

North Carolina's Bowerbirds couldn't be more understated in their approach. When we last saw them at South By Southwest, they hardly looked big enough to be a band, and they didn't have much equipment. Yet when they started playing, the crowd fell silent, and some beautiful and unexpectedly huge sounds emerged. The combination of he/she vocal harmonies, basic acoustic guitar, and simple percussion somehow emerges as something greater than the individual parts.

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With nearly 150 million records sold between them, we'd wager that you already know plenty about Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Bob Dylan. For some, this might be a dream bill of classic American entertainers, while others might view it as a cash run by a bunch of aging legends past their prime. With Mellencamp and Dylan in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and Nelson in the Country Music Hall, what one can't argue is that this is a rare opportunity to view three hugely popular (and populist) musicians in a relaxed setting. So if this is your thing, put on your sunscreen, leave work early, and start packing the car for Round Rock. To help inform and prepare you for tonight's show, here's some information you may not be aware of: more ›

If you thought you'd never see this day, you're not alone. Tonight, the Austin Music Hall will get jaw-droppingly loud thanks to the pioneering shoegaze sounds of Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine. After over 15 years of inactivity, the group emerged to play a few dates in 2008, and are currently working (off and on) on completing the third full-length album they started back in the '90s. The band are fresh from a noisy, brilliant performance at Coachella, which Billboard described as "the most radical, difficult and unforgettable hour of music in [Coachella's] decade-long history." more ›

There's always an incredibly annoying interesting thing that happens when a band loved by many in the "underground" all of a sudden finds its music blaring from such awful places as the radio or the nightclub or the in-house music station of your local Target Superstore. And that "interesting" thing that happens is that apparently all the talent that made the band unknown darlings in the first place disappears, thus leading a flock of one-time adorers to shout and cry things like "I used to love them, but now they SUCK." more ›

One of our fav-o-rite bands here at the Austinist is Denver's ultra-eclectic DeVotchKa, a band that skillfully skirts what just about anyone would expect from an indie scene that most often pulls only haphazardly from old world influences. And yes, we mean accordion. We also mean a four-piece band in which every member plays multiple instruments, and not just in that screw-around manner, but actually knowing how to play them. In advance of DeVotchKa's sure-to-be crowd-pleasing performance this Sunday night at La Zona Rosa, we hopped on the ol' internets for a chat with Tom Hagerman, the band's fantastically essential violin and accordion dynamo. more ›

On The Killers' debut album Hot Fuss, the group became hugely popular by striving to be the next Duran Duran. Their second album, Sam's Town, found them grasping for a fusion of Bruce Springsteen and Queen, but coming up mostly empty save for two great singles ("When You Were Young" and "Read My Mind," both of which need no defense). Over Thanksgiving weekend, the band released Day and Age, which finally dropped them off at a musically appropriate spot: mid-'80s, pop star Bowie. The album literally begins by sounding like "Young Americans," and it makes a lot of sense: The Killers are more serious than the average pop group, but are too pretty and radio-friendly for indie rock. And despite some questionable grammar, there's no doubt that recent single "Human" will sound as great in a basketball stadium as it does in your car. To that end, the band arrives on a high after being announced as a Coachella 2009 headliner late last week - to put that in perspective, the other two are The Cure and Paul McCartney. more ›

The Welsh band Los Campesinos! are young. Not Hanson young or anything, but they were playing between classes in 2006 at Cardiff University, so precocious, to be sure. This pasty and feisty collective of seven men and women wowed crowds at the Filter party and the Arts + Crafts showcase at last year's South By Southwest, and now return just under a year later to promote their recently released LP We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. more ›

John and Paul. Mick and Keith. Roger and Pete. None of those famous duos are actually coming to Austin this spring, but you want to know who are turning up? Bret and Jemaine, aka Hip-Hopopotamus and Rhymenoceros, aka winner of the fake 2008 Grammys for best New Zealand act and best manager and the actual 2008 Grammy for Best Comedy Album. They're also in some show on HBO. Flight Of The Conchords will play the Bass Concert Hall at the University of Texas on May 7th for all the ladies of the world (and anyone else who'd like to purchase a ticket.) more ›