ON THE SCENE REPORT >>>
Saturday at South by Southwest had the the longest lines of the entire week, the most people, and the strongest winds. It felt like the apex of all the week's hectic festivities — an overstuffed explosion of bodies and noise, drunkenly warring against the forces of nature (wind, sun).
During an early afternoon set by New York band the Forms, a fuse was blown after their second song and a sudden gust of wind lifted an entire canopy off the crowd and flipped it over, nearly tearing down low-hanging strands of lights and causing at least one can of beer to empty, geyser-like. It felt like a bad omen, and the band ended up with only enough time for three songs, though all sounded great. Their combination of electric mandolin, tribal rhythms, stabbing synths, and Tuneyards-esque harmonized yelping proved pretty hard to resist.
As I milled about on the East Side, I eventually found myself outside of a record store called Trailer Space, where a DIY punk show was being thrown. Inside, Hoboken band Personal and the Pizzas (their Jersey roots are real, their affected accents are not) were performing. Various Northwest DIY mainstays were drinking in the parking lot. I couldn't stay for long, and soon after I made my way to Cheer Up Charlie's. I arrived not a moment too soon: the venue was already near capacity by 6 p.m. The venue's afternoon/evening programming included sets by Diamond Rings, Dirty Beaches, Austra, Pains of Being Pure at Heart, and Dan Deacon (hence the crowd).
Pains of Being Pure at Heart took the main stage at sunset, playing a dramatic, captivating cache of their tender Reagan-era rock. "Let's fucking destroy this shit!" frontman Kip Berman shouted at the top of their set. After their blistering opening number, he clarified his statement: "We mean that in a mild-mannered, pussy kind of way." The band, while rather gentle on record, were explosive live, and for their fourth song onwards, kids were moshing in the middle of the crowd.
I had to leave PBPH early to try and get a good spot for the Dan Deacon concert right around the corner, but that proved to be a futile exercise — the narrow lot behind Cheer Up Charlie's was so congested with people that all I could see was Deacon's infamous glowing green skull grinning from its perch atop a pole next to the Baltimore musician's gear table. I could tell it was going to be a wild show (but when are Dan Deacon shows anything but wild?) when I saw at least one Deacon lookalike in the crowd, a man wearing four pairs of sunglasses and a disco ball on a chain around a neck, and a guy crowd-surfing before the music had even started. That crowd-surfer would prove to be the first of many others, and Deacon's typically-ecstatic set had the entire lot dancing so hard that great nose-clogging clouds of dust kept getting kicked up in the revelry. Though there was the apparent danger of the power failing during the set, Deacon soldiered on, leading the crowd in a dance battle and other hive-mind inanity. The highlight, certainly, was the distorted new song Deacon played. He later revealed to the crowd that his next full-length record is "completely written" but not recorded. Needless to say, I can't wait. All of his Bromst and Spider-man of the Rings material sounded incredible in the sweaty Austin dusk.
I closed out my night with the much-anticipated set by white-hot LA rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. They took their sweet time getting onstage, but when Tyler the Creator came barreling out in a ski mask and ironically cheesy eagle tee, the crowd flipped. The band, as aggressive as ever, taunted the crowd and ran around the strange with the energy of sugar-high toddlers. Amps were mounted, mics were indifferently tossed offstage, and after three insanely intense songs, the band threw their mics on the floor in disgust, walked offstage and never returned. This may sound anticlimactic, but it was also remarkably savvy. They'd played other, assuredly better sets this week, and by bailing on a concert sponsored by the magazine whose cover they currently grace (Billboard), they maintained their "fuck everything" cred and gave all the music biz bigwigs in the crowd something to tweet about in the morning. Was it the performance I was hoping to see? Was it worth missing out on personal favorites Gobble Gobble (one of the best live bands in the world)? Did it properly close out this exhausting, euphoric week? Of course not, but it was a show I'll never get, which I'm sure was exactly the point.