Shout Out Out Out Out played the first great set of my SXSW,
closing out Wednesday night. The Edmonton, Alberta, electro-rock sextet
are kind of like United State of Electronica, if that band were snarky
and dark and bitter instead of lovey and huggy and cartoonishly nice in
an almost-cultish way. They’re also a little less poppy and a lot more
track-y than U.S.E, regularly stretching their songs out to eight
minutes or so, with two drummers (one of whom twirls his sticks and
hams it up in a terribly endearing way) providing meaty backbeats and
the odd cowbell, and four guys alternately playing racks of
synthesizers and (up to four simultaneous) bass guitars, one of the
four singing vocodered vocals. Their songs “Guilt Trips Sink Ships” and
“Bad Choices” are my current jams.
Saw the Pains of Being Pure at Heart twice, and though they
played basically the same set each time, I could see them do it again
many more times and be perfectly happy. This is by far my favorite new
band I saw at SXSW (though not the best live show I saw—more on
that below). They played most of their self-titled debut album,
including library romance “Young Adult Friction,” with its coy
double-entendre refrain of “don’t check me out,” and swoony,
sleepyhead’s love song “Come Saturday.” On Thursday, they played a new
song called “103,” which, they joked, was the number of showcases they
were playing at SXSW (they actually performed about a dozen). The next
night, they substituted newish song “Falling Over” for “103.” They were
short sets, but so, so sweet. Live, the band are every bit as shy and
dreamy as you’d expect from their recordings. The sound wasn’t
great—on Thursday, there was practically no definition to either
the guitar or the keys, rendering certain notes or melodies that were
crystal clear on the album mere smudges live; on Friday, there was
clearer guitar but no keys audible whatsoever—but I am enthused
enough about their songs to forgive any lackluster mix.
Caught Wavves twice as well, and was confirmed in my
suspicion that dude’s got some really solid punk-pop songs underneath
all the willfully home-recorded tape hiss of Wavvves—live,
the band’s drums and guitars come through loud and clear. “So Bored,”
in any condition, remains an unshakeable sing-along.
The Pains may be my new fave band, but Max Tundra put on the
best live show I saw at all of SXSW. His solo setup included three
keyboards (for the nerds: a Juno-D, a Yamaha CS-01, and a Casio VL-1),
a glockenspiel, two kinds of melodica, a toy microphone, a real
microphone, a guitar, and a thumb piano. He sang and played keyboards,
fluidly improvising over backing rhythm tracks, cycling from keyboard
to keyboard to melodica and back, always just on time over his own
confusing, off-kilter backing beats. When he had his hands free for
even just a beat or two, he would jerk his body and fling his arms
about in high spasmodic fashion. Contrasted with this bad/amazing
dancing was Tundra’s pitch-perfect R&B crooning and pretty-dazzling
keyboard playing. Simply an amazing, insane live performer.
If Max Tundra was the best performance, then electronic pioneer
Silver Apples was perhaps the most historic. Originally a duo,
Silver Apples is now just one man, Simeon, as drummer Danny Taylor has
passed away. Back in the day, from what I can glean from photos, Simeon
would just play an array of oscillators, bending the tones into notes,
almost like playing multiple theremins. Now he was playing one or two
such devices over backing rhythm tracks on a CD; with the relatively
restrained drum programming (think the preset beats on an old organ),
it was easy to draw a straight through-line from these guys to
Kraftwerk. Silver Apples’ songs are as psychedelic as they are
electronic, full of trancey drones and Simeon intoning something like
shamanic poems over the sounds. He said that when the band originally
wrote and recorded these songs, from 1967 to 1969, “It took a while for
people to catch on to what we were doing; we waited them out.” Simeon
chanted colorful nonsense while rotating a crank arm on the front of
his device, bending the note, jiggling vibrato out of it, pulling it
down low into bass gurgles or high into piercing sine waves, playing
with harmonics and dissonances. He closed with Silver Apples’ first
(and greatest) song, “Oscillations,” and it was a transcendent recital.
Truly the original Simeon Mobile Disco (sorry).
It was nice to see Saturday’s SXSeattle day party at
capacity—even after the free beer ran out—for Natalie
Portman’s Shaved Head. Even better was Blue Scholars‘
headlining set. Geologic and Sabzi played a couple fine new songs, one
with a line about how they “used to listen to 2Pac” and how some new
shit is “cool/It’s cool/But it’s not what I’m used to.” They played
another, “808 Love,” dedicated to Hawaii, where Geo grew up, whose area
code just also happens to be the make of one of hiphop’s favorite old
drum machines, making for the song’s chorus about “808 love” and “808
kick/So thick it makes your heartbeat skip.” 