I’m not a huge fan of this venue but loved this band. He’s My Brother She’s My Sister – Thursday 11pm at Valhalla I have to appreciate a band that works so hard *together.* They have been in the biz for a while and know how to put on a show. We saw them twice! Once a day show at Mellow Johnny’s and an evening show at Frank. Super grateful a friend tipped me off to this day show. Better live than recorded & they just sound great. Incredible energy and distinctive vocals all backed by string instruments. Miracles of Modern Science – Wednesday 8pm at The Jr We’ve already bought this and have been listening on repeat. Knowing that it featured Emily Wells & Kid Koala didn’t hurt and we were grooving away to the tunes. When we walked into the day party, we weren’t quite certain what would be playing, but this has been a staple of my March experiences. This is a new project from Dan the Automator, as outlined in this great post on Laughing Squid. Most Unexpected Discovery & Highest Likelihood of Going on Repeat Play I’ve been humming Coming Home non-stop since this show. ![]() ![]() Singing in a combination of English, French and Swahili, it drew me in and even had me dancing. This Kenyan band knows how to put on a show, with great jackets, stylized dance moves and natural crowd banter. The band played some favorites such as Book of Love and my personal favorite, Come Back to San Francisco. This show was much mellower than others we saw, but was delightful in every way. I just couldn’t resist this! I adore The Magnetic Fields and love their music to no end. This show violates one my main rules for SXSW music, which is not seeing bands you can see on tour elsewhere, or that are really popular. ![]() It’s also a lesson in what bands have to do to get people to engage with them even in a live space. The show was pure revelry from start to finish and featured hardcore fans requesting songs and the band playing them, namely: I Don’t Need My Friends to Tell Me Who My Friends Are aka I.D.M.F.T.T.M.W.M.F.A. My notes just say “Fan-FUCKING-tastic.” Lead singer Nardwuar the Human Serviette got into the crowd, managed to get people to stop texting and tweeting, and had everyone bow low on the ground. Next thing you know, the SXSW staff agrees that the band can perform one more and trio goes all coffee shop set on us and performed an acoustic song from their album Would Things Be Different. We were saved by the arrival of Bill Murray and his entourage, who had left the Jack White show to come hear the Spring Standards. There was quite a bit of protest as people wanted to hear more from the group. Unlike other performances I have been to at SXSW, people didn’t just pick up and go. At 1:40 the band told the audience that they had been asked to stop playing because after it is a hotel and people needed to sleep. Every person in the room was captivated despite the exhaustion by the tight performance. The audience was lazing around on the chairs in this top-of-the-hotel cocktail lounge. This was a 1am show on Friday night after the band had been playing multiple shows every day for several days. The guy sitting next to me had never seen them before and kept saying “this is incredible.” Yes, they are. They have wonderful harmonies, seem to work closely as a team, and run the gamut from sweet folk to more full blown folk-rock. They have basically become my go-to band. I try to rank shows in the top 10 order, but this year there were several that blew me away for very different reasons. This year I managed to see 39 bands, 2 movies and help a friend with a brand new baby during music. The track “Fill Us With Fire” was released as a single last week, and Mute UK sent us a press release to help promote the album and the single.Every year I go to SXSW Music, I keep a handwritten notebook alongside me to take notes of each show I see. Tomorrow’s World is Erasure’s latest offering, released last October. And of course, he hasn’t stopped creating music with Andy Bell as Erasure. ![]() He also reunited with Alison Moyet as the duo Yazoo for a recent tour. He was one of the founding members of Depeche Mode, and he recently teamed up with Martin Gore as VCMG, and the album Ssss is set to released next month. Vince Clarke is one of those names, and he’s been quite busy lately reprising many of his early musical collaborations. Sometimes I blink twice when I see teens wearing the same sorts of clothes that were popular when I was their age, but I smile a bit looking on the music scene and seeing names I recognize. Given that fashions and trends seem to make a comeback after about the same frame of time has passed, I see that today’s young generation is taking part in ‘80s nostalgia, and electronica and synthesizer genres are experiencing a resurgence. Synthpop was big in my late teen and young adult years, which was about 15 to 20 years ago. Jaklumen wrote about Erasure’s latest and upcoming release.
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