Today kicks off with the Mae Shi at midday at Maggie Mays on 6th St downtown Austin. All the bars are literally next to each other and there are possibly about three hundred of them as well as a bunch of shops, cafes and out door spaces with bands adorning them. It’s scorching. The Mae Shi are pretty good, their gimmick is using coloured tents to surround the crowd. Seeing them constantly in England makes this a bit of an underwhelming spectacle for us, totally over-shadowed by the fact that Scott Reynolds, the singer for the classic pop-punk band ALL is doing sound for the show.

Next up are Austin youths The Strange Boys who are playing the second of their eleven SXSW shows, at a Fat Possum Showcase. Combining stripped-down garage punk and Beatles-esque penmanship they’re incredible; a totally suitable soundtrack to a slack-jawed, lazy day spent drinking beer in the Texas sun.

Immediately after, Annihilation Time rock at Emo’s. Claiming to party like “your mother puking after you’ve forced her at knife point to eat the faeces of a 43 year old retarded homeless man”, they are an amazing mixture of crust punk and Thin Lizzy-style guitar licks, drawing on such influences as Black Flag, Black Sabbath, the Sex Pistols and Metallica (who are playing a secret 200 capacity show at this years SXSW) plus all the other once great dinosaur bands roaming the earth. This show is notably attended by Watford hardcore stalwart, Frank Carter of Gallows fame and LA resident Keith Morris, of Circle Jerks legacy

A couple of hours later and I’m watching the Henry Darger inspired, lo-fi shoegaze phenomenon that is Brooklyn’s Vivian Girls at the patio bar of ‘Red 7′ on 6th Street. Three heavily tattooed, cute punk girls make simple, honest music played in an effortless Shangri-La’s style. Their straight-up, not-giving-a-toss style is easy to appreciate: although they’re never going to astound with their musicianship, a set comprising all of the classics off their début album and a few new ones goes down very well.

At this point a new level of festival Zen has come over us, probably on account of the beautiful weather, free alcohol and totally awesome bands, the most imminent being, King Khan & the BBQ Show. Heading back to Emo’s outside barn-type structure we manage to catch four or five songs by these two comical garage rock musical geniuses. As we enter they play their hilarious current 7″ single ‘Animal Party’ that documents a boisterous autobiographic tale of a house party over run by pigs, monkeys, zebras and pizza boys! The show is rammed and well executed, with the addition of ‘Zombies’ and a couple of other perfect motorik rhythmical songs which follow the ‘shout-and-fall’ modal frame typical of 1950s R’n'B recordings.

Having survived this far off of unofficial showcases, we decide to grace ageing punk rock pioneers ‘The Circle Jerks‘ with our presence at an official show inside Emo’s. However the 200 plus people waiting in line outside of the venue suggest otherwise and we head to the ‘Wichita Records’ showcase at Red 7. First up are The Mariachi Bronx, a Hispanic performance by LA anti-hipster, tough guy crew The Bronx, which is well received. There follows a tiring set by Lissy Truille whose only interesting feature is that the line-up includes the original bassist from influential pop-punk act Saves the Day. This lacklustre set is closely followed by the finely tuned Sky Larkin, and a raging straight set by The Bronx

As two-three-four o’clock draws closer, rumours of house parties, free Red Bull Parties with complementary alcohol and bed leads us away from downtown Austin, which is probably for the best.

Steve

http://lovvers-letscommunicate.blogspot.com/