There’s not much a music critic can say about the car crash that killed two people at SXSW and injured at least 23. A few blocks of Red River Street, where the Mohawk is, hold a long strip of clubs. At 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday night, many of them were busy if not spilling out onto the street, which was as usual blocked off for pedestrians who expected nothing more hazardous than an encounter with a clumsy drunk on foot, when the car crashed through. It could have been any crowded city street with a car out of control, but it was SXSW.
On Thursday, just about everyone’s first reaction on seeing friends, acquaintances and the people they only run into once a year at SXSW was relief and wonder at what a few blocks’ difference might have made. I was inside Stubb’s, a block away and unknowing.
The festival had to continue. Thousands of people, including many members of baby bands, had made sizable investments and commitments to play and attend shows; SXSW was to be a career milestone. They were here to do a job. Thousands of others were in town and would throng downtown Austin anyway. The Mohawk and an adjacent club, Cheer Up Charlie’s, resumed their schedules in the evening, with SXSW reasoning that people would show up anyway and even more would end up in the streets if they arrived at closed clubs.
The streets and clubs and outdoor shows were full again on Thursday night; plenty of people were drunk and happy. But there was sorrow, too. No one should have to die for a concert. I’m going to go back to writing about the music, my job.
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BONZIE
Delicacy and drama, surrender and anger, made a riveting combination when Bonzie — a songwriter, born Nina Ferraro, and her band, from Chicago — performed on Wednesday afternoon. “I am not my own person,” Bonzie promised someone, to an accelerating strum and beat, in a odd sort of love song; “I wanna hold back and I wanna let go,” she proclaimed in a galloping rocker. Her songs often started out as if they were going to be folky, only to have the band surge in behind her as her voice darkened and her gaze turned steely and unwavering, insisting on the strength it takes both to give yourself and to break away.
DAMON ALBARN
Damon Albarn, of Blur and Gorillaz, comes across as a songwriter of great deliberation, and he has found a knotty subject — the seductiveness, emptiness and pervasiveness of technology — for the album he previewed on Wednesday night at Stubb’s: “Everyday Robots,” due for release April 29. Sticking to new songs, his set — recorded for NPR Music — abstained from instant gratification; it was presented like an album, not a jukebox of singles. The music started slow, sparse and dirgelike, offering thoughts like “When I’m lonely I press play,” hinting at the Beatles, slow-groove soul and the descending chords of “Hotel California.” It was a gradual buildup, but by the end of the set the band sound had grown thick and crunchy with distortion, the tempos had perked up and Mr. Albarn was singing, for some reason, about an elephant, with a group of gospel singers joining in. It was an early glimpse of songs that may well sound better with familiarity.
TEMPLES, BOOGARINS
Even the equipment warmup is fun at what has become an annual SXSW event and one of my favorites: the daylong international psychedelia marathon presented as a preview of the annual Austin Psych Fest. Because every band has assorted echo gear to play with, the preliminaries already have sound bouncing all over the place. But I’m even more charmed by the bands that have devoted themselves to the sonic, structural and ensemble nuances of music made well before they were born.
One band I saw was Temples, an English band that (except for the drummer) had early Pink Floyd haircuts, a lead singer whose voice is a vintage nasal high tenor and songs that could drone and swell — electric 12-string guitar was an option — but that were grounded in pop structures that might turn a Beatles riff inside out or find the midpoint between skiffle and T. Rex.
The other was Boogarins, from Brazil, where in the 1960’s psychedelia was also tropicalia, with its rebellious underpinnings. They had the sweet melodic convolutions of tropicalia, some playfully unconventional meters and, at times, some of the modal hypnosis of San Francisco bands like the Jefferson Airplane. Neither band is some wave of the future, but each one takes its psychedelia beyond erudition, into immersion.
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