The underground performances that happened off the SXSW clock were just as eclectic as the official events: There were the big names like Grandmaster Flash spinning for Microsoft and Joan Jett taking the stage late night at a warehouse party--sounding just as fierce screaming out the lyrics to "I Love Rock and Roll" and "Crimson and Clover" as I imagine the butch ex-Runaway did in her prime. But then there were also the buzzed-about indie performers like singer Jesse Sykes, melting the room with her velvety croon at the acoustic stage at The Stranger's Seattle showcase. Next to the Vice party, though, the best off-the-radar event I went to included a performance by TV on the Radio, who brought their post-punk soul to an industrial wasteland of rusted machinery and vintage Coca-Cola signs housed between the train tracks and a dried-up riverbed in South Austin. (The band played after a good drums/bass/effects act called Parts and Labor, a trio who sounded at times like a more melodic Lightning Bolt on anxiety suppressants.) But really not even the haphazard firecrackers exploding during TVOTR's set could distract too much from the intertwined harmonies of Tunde Adebimpe and Kyp Malone, whose voices mingled gorgeously like a two-man gospel choir even as the lyrics spoke of broken hearts on a tenuous mend.
If San Francisco's Comets on Fire attempted any sort of love songs, I'd imagine their stories would be more about sloppy fumblings occurring when you're in such altered states you can't tell if you're fucking someone or high enough that you're hallucinating the heartbeat in bed beside you. Even more than the Fever, this was the SXSW band that drew me in more than once, playing music that sounded, at their clearest, like Zen Guerrilla being funneled underwater by a technician on acid, and at their brilliantly least cohesive like multiple bands playing Blue Cheer songs on different narcotics at the same time. Ethan Miller's unintelligible vocals and the guitars in the noise/space/psychedelic rock band oscillated through a machine called the Echoplex, which twisted and tortured the input into gales of delayed feedback, an instrument that Comets' Noel Harmonson rocked like he was soloing on lead guitar. All together, the band was heavier than getting steamrolled by God, and witnessing this psilocybin-spiked act was, for better or for worse, one of the few instances where one could truly talk about getting hammered in Austin without that word having anything to do with a hangover.