SXSW Dispatch part two

by John McCarthy on Tue, 2009/03/24 - 1:49am Post to Twitter

‘Place is packed’ scribbles the woman in front of me on her notepad as I peer over her shoulder trying to nick her words so I can use them as the intro for my review of Little Boots. She’s right you know, half the population of Texas appear to have squeezed into Emo Jrs and, as a t-shirt in a local gift shop reminds us, ‘Texas is bigger than France‘so that’s quite a lot of people.

LB has been elected as this year’s woman ‘Most Likely To’ by the broadsheets and for the most part the diminutive English lass lives up to the hype - ‘Meddle’, ’Mathematics’ and ‘Stuck On Repeat’ are all nimble electopop tunes worthy of the mighty Ladyhawke. She also gets extra pop points for using a mini Moog and stylophone during the set, although some of these points have to be taken away again when she wanders into bad late-80s Stock, Aitken and Waterman territory with ‘Every Little Earthquake’.

If continues in a ravey direction in the future she‘ll be fine though and crowd seemed to love her. Afterwards the myriad photographers troop out of the door, happy that they’ve got hundreds of pictures of Ms. Boots smiley face to put on their websites, and the fans head next door to be entertained by three slightly scary men from L.A.

Say what you want about the Mae Shi’s brand of shouty rock but you can’t deny that them boys know how to put on a good old fashioned show. They race through a fiesty collection of songs, mostly made up of material from their new album, but at an MS concert the songs are added bonus compared to their onstage antics.

For forty minutes they bounce around, hang from the rafters, give each other piggy backs, walk amongst the floor of the venue while playing their instruments and, most impressively, unfurl a parachute over the top of the crowd. A real multi-coloured parachute. Can you think of any gig you’ve ever been to which wouldn’t have benefited from some mid-concert parachute action? Thought not.

All this crowd interaction tomfoolery means the next band up are gonna have to be pretty impressive to maintain the level of entertainment. Step forward ‘The Pains of Being Pure At Heart’. Their set starts with lazers beaming over the heads of the Pitchfork-reading masses and couple of explosions from cannons which have been placed on either side of the stage. Or rather it doesn’t.

It actually starts with four nice indie kids walking on stage to play some nice indie songs. They start with "This Love is Fucking Right" and "Young Adult Friction" before running through the majority of the songs from their much loved debut album. There’s no whistles, bells or devices used to slow the motion of an object through an atmosphere by creating drag. It all feels a tad anticlimactic.

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, I’ve played that album to death over the last couple of months and so hearing the songs played again note perfectly is good but a little underwhelming. At SXSW unless someone puts on a really captivating performance you’re left sulking because there are always twenty other shows which you could’ve gone to instead.

Therefore it seems necessary for a band does something different to stand out from the crowd, like giving the lead singer a drum kit to hit during the chorus of the song, Lots of artists seem to be doing that at SXSW this year. Yes I mean you Fanfarlo. And you Ceci Bastida. And you Efterklang, you big lovable bundle of Danish fun..

And lets not forget We Have Band. They do it too. But I’ll forgive them for following the crowd on this occasion because I love We Have Band

I really love them.

I love them because the three band members take turns to enthusiastically shout ‘Oh!’ on their track ‘Oh!’ and it makes me smile.

I love them because they have a song called ‘We Have Band’ which means I can use the word ‘eponymous’ when reviewing it.

I love them because they sound even better live than they do on record.

Most of all, I love them because they have a big bag full of art rocking disco songs which sound like they’re from the future and it’s a future I want to live in.

Downloads:

Little Boots mixtape
We Have Band: Oh! (Yo Majesty remix)
POBPAH: Come Saturday