AUSTIN, Texas -- "This is our last show," singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten said with a mixture of exultation and exhaustion during her final set at the South by Southwest Music Conference. "We made it -- we made it to Saturday!"
Van Etten was among 2000 bands and artists who performed at the 25th annual conference, which concluded Sunday. Many of those artists were like Van Etten, performing as many as seven or eight times during the week, sometimes several sets a day, all hoping to crash through the round-the-clock din that had saturated hundreds of venues clustered around 6th Street since last Tuesday. Austin becomes music's international capital once every year, and the conference has seen attendance skyrocket since it debuted in 1987. Back then it was a little grassroots gathering focused on Texas music, an earthier alternative to the then-dominant New Music Seminar in New York. In its first year, South by Southwest attracted 172 bands and 700 registrants. This year the number of bands hovered around 2,000 and registration exceeded 13,000.
The big music companies rolled out their heavy hitters to flog new albums or tours. Kanye West, the Strokes, Foo Fighters and TV on the Radio all performed in major showcases and big brands like Vice magazine and Perez Hilton hustled to outhustle each other by presenting the most must-see bands in invite-only parties. There there were were the inevitable "buzz" bands, up-and-comers who have generated mounds of media attention in recent months: the Los Angeles hip-hop collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, British soul balladeer James Blake, Chicago power-pop quartet the Smith Westerns. But as usual the heart of the festival was the artists striving for any sort of recognition at all, trying to transform a labor of love into a living.
1. Janelle Monae, “The ArchAndroid” (Bad Boy): The Atlanta singer’s boundary-busting debut album has ambition to burn. It’s a self-empowerment manifesto couched inside a futuristic “emotion-picture” about an android’s battle to overcome oppression – got all that? The music is equally adventurous, touching on everything from lounge jazz to hard funk. A star is born.
2. The Besnard Lakes, “The Besnard Lakes are the Roaring Night” (Jagjaguwar): The Montreal band perfects its marriage of Brian Wilson-like melodic splendor and My Bloody Valentine-worthy guitar roar. While the lyrics are a bonfire of earthly espionage and anxiety, the music shoots for the heavens.
When Sharon Van Etten opened the Pitchfork Music Festival in Union Park last July, she looked a little lost. The big stage dwarfed the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, who had only her guitar for accompaniment.
“First day, first act. Oh, my God,” she said by way of introduction. “I feel like I have something to prove.” Then she did just that. Her voice floated heartbreak and yearning atop trance-like guitar lines. Her ability to make her sparse songs translate to the audience set the stage for her second full-length release, “epic” (Ba Da Bing), which is shaping up as an album-of-the-year contender.
Though the arrangements on “epic” are more orchestrated than anything she’d attempted before, the core remains Van Etten’s songs and the relationship between her strong, transparent voice and her guitar. Van Etten introduced a knockout new song “Save Yourself” at Pitchfork that transcended the vast setting, sounding at once intimate and anthemic. On “epic,” the tune gets a little bit of window-dressing, notably a plaintive steel-guitar backdrop, but it still cuts through as a powerful statement of a woman dissecting a relationship, moving from empathy to disappointment in the space of two lines: “Don’t you think I know you’re only trying to save yourself/You’re just like everyone else.”
Jack Black, circa “School of Rock,” would’ve appreciated this face-melter. The Pitchfork Music Festival got underway Friday in Union Park with enough heat and humidity to prompt promoters to cut the price of bottled water in half to $1 for the rest of the weekend. Pitchfork, we salute you. And festivalgoers (all 54,000 of you by the end of the three-day festival), make sure to hydrate and apply sunscreen liberally.
As for the music, my overall impression of Day One was that we were off to a slow start, with a few exceptions.
The big winners: Sharon Van Etten, Broken Social Scene’s Chicago-centric set, and aerobics instructor/Euro-pop anti-diva Robyn.
The big outrage: Headliners Modest Mouse didn’t perform their biggest hit, “Float On.” I’m guessing their relationship to that 2003 breakthrough song is similar to what Warren Zevon’s was to “Werewolves of London” or Radiohead’s to “Creep” — it’s a once-popular song the artist who wrote it no longer loves. So are they obligated to play it? Me, I want to see a band play songs it is still emotionally invested in, no matter what the setting. If Modest Mouse is going to go through the motions performing “Float On” (much the way Van Morrison does when he phones in “Brown Eyed Girl”), I’ll pass. What’s your take? Let me know in the comments below.
I’m betting that Saturday is going to be just fine with much-anticipated sets by Gary, Ind., MC Freddie Gibbs, the Smith Westerns, and especially LCD Soundsystem. And Sunday should save the best for last with a murderer’s row of St. Vincent, Pavement, Big Boi, etc.
But let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of Friday. Below you’ll find an hour-by-hour account, with entries from yours truly, Greg Kot (GK), and my ever-enthusiastic colleagues Andy Downing (AD) and Kevin Pang (KP):
3:30 p.m. Sharon Van Etten could be forgiven for just wanting to run and hide as she takes the stage shielded from the Sun only by a veil of bangs. She is alone except for her electric guitar and she looks tiny amid the vast setting. She glances at the big screen flanking the stage and says, “There’s a bigger version of me over there,” as if she’d like to trade places with her video image. But, wow, what songs. Her butterfly voice floats over — take your pick — hypnotic/repetitive/trancy guitar strumming. She’s not attempting more than a few chords per song. But the effect is mesmerizing. She writes about broken relationships – an old, perhaps hackneyed subject — with switchblade insight. “Don’t you think I know you’re only trying to save yourself/You’re just like everyone else.” In the space of those two lines she moves from empathy to disappointment. Great stuff. The voice is direct, unvarnished, the sound of truth. “First day, first act, oh, my God … I feel like I have something to prove,” she says with disarming frankness. Mission accomplished. (GK)
4:10 p.m. From a spot near the soundboard, the Tallest Man on Earth appears to stand only about 5-foot-8. Kristian Mattson, the Swedish singer-songwriter who performs under the moniker, openly struggles with both the heat and a bad case of jet lag: “I haven't slept in two days,” he announces from the stage. Not surprisingly, his voice — clear, if somewhat nasal on record — seems to sport three-days growth. There's definitely more than a touch of Dylan in acoustic numbers like “Wild Hunt” and a particularly strong “King of Spain,” which finds the troubadour strumming his acoustic as though he wants to reduce the instrument to kindling. With the sun shining and clear blue skies overhead, it's fitting that so many tunes touch on the natural world; Mattson fills his songs with references to floating bluebirds, sunning lizards and flower-dotted meadows. Heck, even relationships sound more like big game hunts when filtered through Mattson's worldview. “If I don't get you in the morning,” he sings over dancing guitar on “Thousand Ways,” “By the evening I sure will.” (AD)
Clicking on the green links will direct you to a third-party Web site. Bloggers and staff writers are in no way affiliated with these links that are placed by an e-commerce specialist only after stories and posts have been published.