Live from SXSW – (Wednesday, nighttime)
Posted by Val in Concert Reviews, Highlights, RandomSXSW…much like the music scene itself is the sort of place where it’s easy to feel incredibly important one minute and incredibly insignificant the next. A band can be utterly praised by media like Pitchfork or Spin (among others) and then slammed by the same source a few months later. Similarly, I saw a band that opened for The Arcade Fire get turned away at a showcase tonight.
I’ve experienced both ends of that this week. I can get the VIP treatment one night and then a few nights later get treated like the scum of the earth. Wednesday night – I was on the guest list to see Times New Viking, Yeasayer and Simian Mobile Disco at the Free Yr Radio party and from the looks of things, this definitely seemed like the place to be. Besides running into record label types and people that the internet has made famous (bigger bloggers) I also saw John Norris from MTV News there. Yeah…THAT John Norris. How old do you think he must be…because he looks really good…like mid-30s good and there’s no way he’s that young. We were geeking out like crazy as we contemplated whether he uses botox.
We didn’t pay much attention during Times New Viking as we were still indulging on the free cornbread (I kid you not) but they reminded me a little bit of Mary Timony or Love of Diagrams…but more raucous and noisy. They weren’t the sort of band that were amazing enough to draw us in from our free cornbread (and, okay, free Shiner) but they are the sort of band that I’d want to check out later.
One of the first things I noticed about Yeasayer’s setup is that the crash cymbal looked mighty beat up. I’d seen a dented crash during Scissors for Lefty as well but this piece of metal actually looked torn. This became apparent later as I saw Anand Wilder punching the crash cymbal and really beating the everloving bejeezus out of it. It’s the sort of show where I liked their album filled with Chicago-esque melodies, Middle Eastern influence and TV on the Radio-style zeal but MAN did they bring that zeal to the stage. “2080″ and “Sunrise” were my favorite sing-a-long moments.
My friend and I have some Atlanta pride and we were talking about how we were going to break it down on the floor MJQ-style and that these people just didn’t understand. Apparently, they did understand as the Simian Mobile Disco performance initiated a full-floor freakout. These guys are of the Daft Punk school of lighting thought, and I sincerely hope that nobody with epilepsy was at La Zona Rosa or they’d have been in trouble. It’s nice to see these guys actually jumping and bobbing along onstage as they operate the synths and beats. Plus they had this mixer with enough wires and holes to make htem look like they were phone operators from the 1930s. They went through a lot of the good stuff off of Attack Decay Sustain Release, my personal favorites of the night being “Hustler” and “It’s the Beat” but the whole set was a dance party…and a visually exciting one at that. We got out of that club for the night feeling like we won at life.
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