Austin and London – Indie folk has always been a slippery label for me. I understand the desire to connect with an older musical tradition; it’s the execution that’s been throwing me off. Good songwriting, passionate performance, crooning backup vocals, banjo shredding, etc., seems to sacrifice the hardship it wants to reproduce. Which is fine,
Austin – This headline guarantees Charli XCX a spot on a pink card in some future edition of Trivial Pursuit. More immediately, it seems like a looming, hilarious instance of the career-launching/overshadowing single—“Creep” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” come to mind. Before “Boom Clap” and the Icona Pop collaboration “I Love It,” British pop singer
Austin—Another weekend of ACL brings another weekend of Late Night sets. This time I wound up on 6th Street west of I-35 to see Poliça, the Minneapolis electronic group that has been releasing music for two years, starting with 2012’s Give You the Ghost and following that up with last year’s Shulamith. Their music is
Austin—For someone signed to Atlantic Records, Max Frost still feels a lot like a local artist. His debut EP, Low High Low, couldn’t carry him out from under the shadow of his breakout single, “White Lies.” Add to that the Pentecostal enthusiasm of his hometown audience, the extra helping of love he’s gotten from local
Austin – One of the biggest names in music festivals is getting bigger this year, growing to a second weekend to accommodate a larger lineup, and, maybe more importantly, a larger crowd. Austin City Limits presents a mix of pop music’s biggest new names and some welcome reunions (Outkast and The Replacements? My mind has
Austin – “Are you going to ACL this year?” Since 2009, my answer was always “No.” I could never remember which day I’m supposed to spend refreshing the page for ticket sales, and I could never remember to save the money for scalped/second-hand tickets. For the scatterbrained and the sweat-averse, the ACL Late Night circuit
Austin – (Ed.: This is the second part of Best New Bands’ two-part interview.) The artist known as Slow Magic has so far kept his name and personal life hidden beneath his neon zebra mask and tattered scarf. The costume has gotten a lot of attention in the last three years, while he’s worked almost
Austin – The artist known as Slow Magic has so far kept his name and personal life hidden beneath his neon zebra mask and tattered scarf. The costume has gotten a lot of attention in the last three years, while he’s worked almost non-stop between tours and two album releases—his latest, How to Disappear (on
Austin – The Preatures’ breakout EP Is This How You Feel? took its queues well. The Sydney band’s 2012 debut, Shaking Hands, introduced us to a group with a nice premise and an ambition to draw from a lot of different music, but arrangements that were too cluttered for the eclecticism to be obvious or
Austin – Warning: don’t go to a Slow Magic show expecting to stand around. Also, probably don’t wear your favorite flannel. The zebra-masked producer stopped at Austin’s Holy Mountain recently, for an early date of his first headlining tour. The tour supports his second full-length record, How to Run Away released earlier this month on