SXSW 2008 :: Day Three

:: Day Two (Thursday, March 13)

:: Photos by Craig Eley (who saw a buncha different stuff from Andre, so…yeah)

The energy was a bit magical at Emo’s where Fuck Buttons played for the Pitchfork party. One writer dubbed the band’s music as beautiful noise and I can’t think of a better way to describe it. Sure, call Fuck Buttons—a suitcase electronics, gearhead duo from Brighton, UK—simple or redundant, but these guys have taste, and that’s the most important thing a band needs. Everything about Fuck Buttons’ music is doled out in measurements of nuance: the foundation begins with buzzy synthesizer chords and the seductive tinkles of Fischer Price piano figures; the beats kick in—hypnotic electronic pulses like the insistent push of the kick drum in their marquee song “Brighter Tomorrow”; cranky, odd time rhythms from dirty tom drum samples. The waves of distortion and crackling noise vocals come later and when they saturate my skull, my body moves back then forth and my eyes roll a little bit but it’s real because when this duo plays there is little else that matters except the air in the room and the sounds that calcify at your earlobes.

White Williams

Fuck Buttons

White Williams preceded Fuck Buttons. Their tracks were more traditional songs, with verses and choruses, that almost didn’t want to be songs. Cuts tapered off into slices of guitar-drone space and keyboard glitches that defied the insistent rhythms that grounded them. It was interesting to watch the band in motion—now a four-piece with a drummer—but I was most drawn to singer Joe Williams’s manipulation of his own voice via an onstage mixing board, perpetually sending his vocals into pits of delay and further turning his ‘70s-tinged electro rock into a dubbed-out head trip. So, after the White Williams/Fuck Buttons combo, I was eager to dislodge from the dim cavern of Emo’s. I left Craig behind and snuck down the streets to the open-air venue, Stubbs, where Spin was throwing their annual SXSW party.

I wondered—standing there at Stubbs and watching the Raveonettes, who played a bluesy rock n’ roll punctuated by moments of noisy, almost deafening guitar attacks that neither impressed me nor turned me off—if Spin would ever do anything essential again or if they had, for that matter, ever done anything essential. But I didn’t want to hate because for the second year in a row they had given me a precious laminate to their exclusive party. Did they think I was essential, that I might write about them in a way that gave them some edge? I have no edge: I was surprised by the sheer noise of the Raveonettes. Was it some effort to regain the viscera they might have shredded when people first shitted a brick about them several years ago? Did anyone shit a brick when they first came out? Did they really write a whole album in one key? At any rate they were playing the Spin party and if it didn’t mean hip, it meant money.

A Place to Bury Strangers

Jay Reatard

It was maybe 90 degrees and with a High Life in hand I ran into a girl I had loved deeply in college. I was reminded how she had broken my heart a bit and taken the missing pieces—maybe she threw them into the Hudson—so I could never really put it back together again, which meant that Vampire Weekend was being very competent on stage. The Raveonettes had long ago descended, thinking that they no longer cared about cred when there was so much money to be made at an outdoor barbeque joint in Texas. I was running through all of these memories from college—drinking, girls, and books—and I felt, again, old.

“These guys are straight-up prep-rock,” I told her.

“So are you,” she replied, smiling. We clinked our beer cans and it felt like a college afternoon. Vampire Weekend was just the obligatory soundtrack. I tried dancing to them but shit I just wanted to talk to people and drink beer. The boys from Vampire Weekend weren’t as old as Raveonettes but already, so soon after their ascent to hipster heavens, they had become innocuous. And I can’t tell if it’s worse to be innocuous or just bad.

Fleet Foxes

Craig arrived and we were just one big group of friends: my old girl and her crew, Craig and his crew, the folks from Spin who had let me in, and Perry Farrell. Yes, Perry was onstage, skinny and desperate, his skin grafted from the backside of some Southern California rehab dropout. He too, has lost the cred, but cred just doesn’t matter in Spin World, which wasn’t a planet so much as a crowded venue. Farrell will always be a hero in Spin World and he knows I will always listen to Nothing’s Shocking. But he wasn’t performing, he was introducing L.A. legends X, the afternoon’s headliner.

They walked onto stage, old and punk as fuck. Like, damn, that’s a middle-aged woman with red hair, lipstick, and sunglasses and she’s screaming her face off. The guitarist looks like Dick Dale, but that doesn’t keep him from shredding the life force out his shiny little Gibson. They played “Los Angeles” and Craig and I were punching each other in our faces with smiles. It really was awesome and just then I remembered how this had happened last year at the Spin party when the Buzzcocks came out and knocked us the fuck out of our Onitsuka Tigers. I forgave Spin—not quite sure for what (perhaps for believing so willfully in the undying power of rock?)—and realized that this is what the Spin party does: every year it gives us one of rock’s foundations, a history lesson, a forty minute reminder of the bands that broke ground twenty or thirty years ago. It’s not like they trotted the Sex Pistols onstage either. X is real. Buzzcocks are real. The show kicked butt. We ate at Stubbs BBQ and it was like pouring sticks of butter, lightly garnished with pork, down our throats.

I like the Spin party, I really do.

Matt and Kim

Tilly and the Wall

It’s a rare sight to see as many people as joyful and excited as when Tilly and the Wall took the stage on Friday night at the Habana. I’m pretty sure the tap dancer is extraneous, but whatever, she has a great time onstage, twirling around singing into the air sans microphone. Her compatriots, all five of them, are like a miniature festival of chants and sunshine guitar strums. Their rendition of “Urgency” had us bellowing, “I feel it in the streets!” and pushing down our beers, shaking our hips all over each other. I felt perhaps a tinge of Midwest pride. The band had rumbled all the way down from Omaha to show these insiders how to have a party; it was, after all, the Polyvinyl/Team Love showcase, so I suppose a little Midwest celebration had been in order all night long: Team Love might hold court in New York but we know it’s just a satellite to Saddle Creek back in Nebraska and Polyvinyl is the shining light of Champaign, IL. Headlights had played earlier and singer/keyboardists Erin Fein had dazzled us with her sweet vocal turn on “Cherry Tulips.” Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin bounced around the inside stage of the Habana and despite a blasé second album, the live show remained a romp. People ran around the Habana with smiles all over their faces, bar tabs swelled. I was happy too but I also couldn’t get Fuck Buttons out of my mind; or for the matter, out of my mouth. Someone would approach me and I would drop a love letter to Fuck Buttons all over their ears. Twelve, maybe thirteen hours later, and I was still considering their blanket of fuzz, those screeching vocals that, despite their off-kilter pitch, wanted to hold me not stab me, and it hit me: Fuck Buttons was the first noise band I had heard that wanted to love me with their music. They didn’t want to punish me into a revelation, they wanted to hold my hand while screaming us into the light. Noise music’s next trump card may well be some perverse form of accessibility, no?

Tilly wrapped up their set. Our group was all giddy. Closing time was all around us and plans were being made for after hours but I stole away from the Habana without telling a soul and lost myself, drunk and ecstatic on the streets of south Austin.