The New York Times : Music | Critic's Notebook - A Fan Base Without Borders

Santigold, with microphone, was joined by her fans onstage last Tuesday, the first official night of this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, Tex. (Photo by Ben Sklar for The New York Times)
(AUSTIN TX USA) It was a hot Texas afternoon on a small outdoor stage, with an audience of perhaps 100 people. But the New Zealand songwriter Kimbra was elegantly styled — asymmetrical pale-blue designer dress, deep red lipstick — and grinning like a trouper as she led her band on Thursday afternoon. It was her fourth of eight performances at the 26th annual South by Southwest Music Festival, the four-day music-business convention enfolded by five nights of showcases that ended on Saturday night, bringing more than 2,000 acts — songwriters, bands, rappers, D.J.’s and more — to perform all over Austin, with a long Internet afterlife.

The singer and songwriter Kimbra. (Photo by Ben Sklar for The New York Times)Kimbra has a platinum debut album in Australia, a guest vocal on an international hit (Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know”) and a contract with an American major label, Warner Music, that will release her album, “Vows,” in the United States in May. Her smart, breezy, intricate songs are propelled by style-hopping grooves, lighthearted nonsense-syllable hooks and a voice that can be flirtatious or biting. She’s a complete 21st-century pop package. And like many of the acts clamoring for attention at SXSW, she was taking nothing for granted.

Now that music is, for a vast majority of listeners, just one more form of digital content — commodity priced and often free — musicians are less likely than ever to make a living simply through sales of recordings. Yet they have an unprecedented opportunity to be heard and seen worldwide. The catch is that they also have nearly infinite competition, since everyone has the same opportunity, and they face impatient ears. That can have musical consequences: a push for the instant pop gratifications of catchiness, generality and a good beat.

SXSW, which began in 1987 as a showcase for regional and independent music, has long since become the spring season preview for virtually every niche and echelon of the music business. It has grown ever more inclusive, and more attractive to a pop mainstream eager to exploit every promotional outlet. Once a place to discover baby bands and local heroes trying to go national, SXSW now also features reunited or restarted bands — among them the Jesus and Mary Chain and the dB’s — along with million sellers and chart toppers.

Both Bruce Springsteen, who had the week’s No. 1 album, and the New York City band fun., which had the No. 1 single, played to capacity crowds. Mr. Springsteen gave the convention’s keynote speech, retelling his own musical evolution and rejecting any restrictive notions of authenticity. “We live in a post-authentic world,” he said, then added: “The elements of what you’re using don’t matter. Purity of human experience and expression is not confined to guitars, to tubes, to turntables, to microchips. There is no right way, no pure way of doing. There is just doing.”

This year there were evening-long showcases for rock from Mexico, Brazil, Australia, Spain, South Korea and China; for songwriters from Mississippi; for New Orleans bounce music; for hip-hop from Minnesota. There were bluegrass bands, jazz groups, death metal bands, reggae bands, Latin alternative rockers, soul revivalists and at least one string quartet.

The hip-hop artist Nas. (Photo by Kitra Cahana for The New York Times)Hip-hop, once a small fraction of SXSW, reached its tipping point this year. Its superstars — Jay-Z, Kanye West, Eminem, Lil Wayne, Rick Ross — converged on SXSW, and two major rappers, 50 Cent and Nas, each gave a concert performing an old album in its entirety. Hip-hop showcases for newer figures like Kendrick Lamar, ASAP Rocky and Big K.R.I.T drew full houses; the R&B hit maker the-Dream had an audience for his synthesizer-driven love songs at 2 a.m. Electronic dance music also surged into SXSW; the Grammy-winning dubstep DJ Skrillex had teenagers attempting to climb walls to get into his packed club sets.

The festival also brought premieres and re-emergences. Fiona Apple, who has a new album due in June, gave her first public performances outside Los Angeles in five years (and they were intense ones). Jack White, of the White Stripes, previewed songs from his first album under his own name, and Norah Jones devoted an entire set to songs from an album due in May.

But for a regular SXSW-goer like me, the purpose of the festival is to hear new music. Or at least music that’s new to me. A New Yorker could be rightly jaded by many of the baby bands that played SXSW this year. If they weren’t from Brooklyn — which was exhaustively represented by acts like Santigold — then many had played the CMJ Music Marathon in October, lineup that suggested surprisingly little change in six months. There were also many mid-career bands like Blitzen Trapper and Built to Spill: worthwhile groups that already have extensive catalogs but were still playing multiple SXSW gigs, trying not to be taken for granted. Still, there were more than enough worthwhile discoveries amid the SXSW din.

Among them were two very different bands drawing on Celtic folk tradition. Arborea, a duo from Maine, treated its own songs and traditional staples — “Careless Love,” “Black Is the Color” — as meditations, with whispery vocals and hints of Eastern modality. It used a different pair of instruments for each song — guitars, banjo, harmonium, ukulele — to create sparse, eerie folk mantras. Daughter, led by Elena Tonra, floated her melancholy voice and death-haunted lyrics in arrangements that surrounded her like turbulent weather: gusty cymbals, clouds of electric-guitar reverb.

There was more upbeat folk-rock from the Lumineers, a Colorado band that wrapped pensive thoughts about time, love and mortality in foot-stomping melodies that they delivered with the enthusiasm of street buskers. Haim, a group led by three sisters, sang poppy, upbeat advice with strong harmonies and a hint of 1970s Southern California, then segued their chiming choruses into grand guitar crescendos.

The electronica composer Nicolas Jaar performed in a duo with an electric guitarist, whose strummed textures brought some physicality to Mr. Jaar’s looming sustained tones and boom-chunk bass lines. The Suicide of Western Culture, an electronic duo from Spain, put an ominous undercurrent under dense, driving marches coordinated to video that merged dizzying motion with messages like “Hope Only Brings Pain.

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TheeSatisfaction, a female hip-hop duo from Seattle, rapped about politics, justice, sexuality and general feistiness in self-made beats that could be abstract and disorienting, but might also dip into smooth R&B.

Doomtree, a multiracial hip-hop coalition from Minneapolis, put the crunch of rock samples behind forthright messages of defiance and self-confidence. Idle Warship united two experienced performers — the rapper Talib Kweli and the singer Res — as an alliance of equals; backed by a live band, the group made rap-rock seem like a promising idea again.

Pond, an Australian rock band, toppled the stateliness of Britpop anthems into psychedelic turbulence, melting down grandiose riffs or pushing them toward screaming tantrums. Reptar, a band from Athens, Ga., worked up to kinetic, danceable rock that mingled electronics with African and Caribbean cross-currents.



Galaxy Express, from South Korea, harked back to the crashing, roiling protopunk psychedelia of the MC5, slamming away with conviction. Carsick Cars, from Beijing, reclaimed a different era: the alternative rock of the late 1980’s and early ’90’s, with the sound of frenetically strummed guitar radiating a nervy, consonant euphoria.

Any SXSW experience is by definition a partial one, with at least a thousand bands unheard. Still, for me this year’s festival came across as an odd mix of simplified pop ambitions and inertia.

Bahamas — the Toronto songwriter Afie Jurvanen, who has touches of Dylan, rockabilly and Dan Hicks — might have summed up SXSW 2012 best with the chorus of one of his sly, understated songs: “Every time I feel like it’s all been done,” he sang, “That’s O.K., that’s all right, I’m alive.”

http://www.nytimes.com
By Jon Pareles

Featured Artist : Galaxy Express
SXSW Korea Showcase (Planning/Production) : DFSB Kollective
International Agent/PR/Distribution : DFSB Kollective