Austin – SXSW officially ended Sunday, but that’s a mostly ceremonial date: Saturday night hosts the last of the big showcases. Whether SXSW was structured this way or we accidentally put together a theme, Best New Bands’ Saturday schedule was made up of loud, energetic, party-all-night sets from Joey Bada$$, Sweater Beats, and Earl Sweatshirt. Even aching feet can dance to that.
Joey Bada$$
Joey Bada$$ managed to get a billing to fit the ambition of his name—he played one of the festival’s bigger stages at ACL Live at Moody Theater. That’s not shabby for someone a year shy of the legal drinking age. If I had to guess the reason for his early success, I’d point to his taste for minimally produced hardcore hip hop beats and aggressive vocal style. In other words, I’d bet everything I have that Joey Bada$$ grew up on Wu Tang, and “Christ Conscious” shows that he took those lessons well. It’s a shame Ghostface wasn’t nearby on Saturday night. A duet with Joey would have been one of the best rap shows since 36 Chambers.
Standout track: “No. 99”
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Sweater Beats
The embarrassment of riches at SXSW meant missing a lot of great artists, and because DJ’s seemed to play mostly night shows—i.e., the most active part of the schedule—they were passed over more often than other artists. But if there’s one DJ I absolutely couldn’t miss, it was Sweater Beats. On the EDM scale he falls pretty close to Gold Panda. But Gold Panda really likes soft, pattering, fuzzy production, stuff that’s too low-key for Sweater Beats. He likes his beats sharp and well defined with lots of snare, and his string-section synthesizers are exultant. More than most of his hipster-producer contemporaries, he embraces the unalloyed joy that’s universal in disco and very common in trance.
Standout track: “Cloud City”
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Earl Sweatshirt
SXSW necessarily ends with mixed feelings if you’ve been working the whole time: sad to see the music go, but happy to give your feet a break.
Earl Sweatshirt doesn’t care. Introducing his set, he said “I don’t care if it’s 1 AM, I don’t care if you’ve been tired all week, don’t give me that shit”. With an attitude like that you might expect a sound as brusque as Joey Bada$$, but Sweatshirt surprises you—his music is soft-spoken, biographical, hostile to the world but determined to carry on. It’s not like he doesn’t have moments to get people moving—the crowd at Hype Hotel weren’t struggling to dance, and standout track “Whoa” turns the beat up to club levels. But even then the beat is sluggish and sludgy. Overall, you get the impression that he wants to dance, wants to put on an ecstatic rap show, because he’s tired of being unhappy.
Standout track: “Whoa”
That’s it! SXSW is over. Click HERE, HERE and HERE for some of our earlier coverage. And good news for the non-Austinites, many of these artists are leaving from SXSW to hit other tour dates in America. You also get to look forward to the impending writeup of our interviews with Blossoms, Until the Ribbon Breaks, and Jacco Gardner.
Will Jukes
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