Friday review

A typical day at SXSW doesn’t start until half way through the normal working day. Any part of the festival that’s stupid enough to be staged before 2pm is a forgone conclusion. You’re not going to make it.

It won’t come as too much of a surprise then that I missed The Buzzcocks early afternoon performance, and staggered in late to catch home grown choral ensemble The Polyphonic Spree, who are also playing tomorrow under the cunning guise of ‘Thee Spree’. As if nobody wasn’t going to work that one out.

Swapping their snow white frocks for slightly more hipper indie / paramedic outfits could possibly signal a change in direction for the group. Even the lead singer Tim DeLaughter is sporting a new hair cut. But when they open with ‘Hanging around again’, it’s hard to think of one good reason why the band would want to diverge from such a uniquely symphonic sound.



There were about 15 or so members in the band today. I use the term ‘about’ rather ambiguously as The Spree are famed for having anywhere between 8 and 24 people on stage at any one time, and when they start moving around I tend to start thinking there’s hundreds of them.

I decided to just have a bit of a wander around the festival and take in some of the sights, sounds, and smells (unfortunately the smells couldn’t be avoided). After spending the best part of ten days in Austin, since the beginning of SXSW, I’d become accustomed to all the cultural differences. Like the fact the flush in the toilet always seems to be in the wrong place, that all the zebra crossings are missing the zebra bit, and that there are three types of traffic lights for pedestrians, all of which just mean that you’re going to get run over very soon.

Wandering around the festival is a bit like playing Grand Theft Auto, and driving between the different districts. There are different areas of the festival, catering for different tastes, and they seem to attract the stereotypes that you would associate with that type of music. This is by no means a bad thing, as people from all walks of life seem to be enjoying themselves and there is a unifying feel at SXSW that you only get at the really good festivals.

Over in BD Riley’s (an Irish pub if you hadn’t already guessed) Bournemouth’s Delorentos were playing to a frightfully small crowd, while their biggest supporters seemed to hang around outside, occasionally yelling out ‘you rock’ in a way only American’s do.

Pam Tillis was entertaining a modest crowd at the Convention Center. It was a bit of a geriatric convention this one, and Pam’s fans seemed to be mainly made up of middle aged pot bellied truckers, speaking in that delightful southern trawl that makes them sound so intelligent.



Next up were The Watson Twins, who I had got mixed up with The Olsen Twins (easily done), performing material from their ‘Southern Manners’ EP. It’s a dull affair musically, made a bit more enjoyable by the humorous banter from the twins. Their music is too pop for folk, and too folk for pop, so it sits right in the middle, taking flak from both parties but never quite achieving brilliance as either.



I stopped off to watch The Cinematics for the second time in two days. It was just Ramsay Miller and Scott Rinning, both with acoustic guitars, playing relaxed versions of their brilliant songs. It was a different side of The Cinematics to what I had previously seen and I often feel the depth of how good a group is can often be measured by how well their music translates acoustically. The pair end on a Jeff Buckley cover (Grace) before moving onto their 4th show of the day.

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