By Greg Kot / Chicago Tribune
AUSTIN, Texas —The South by Southwest Music Festival wrapped up over the weekend, but not before 2,000 bands and artists from around the world had serenaded the city at hundreds of clubs. There were plenty of established performers at the conference, but the focus was on the upper-and-comers, the bands that will define the next year of music and beyond.
Here are some of my favorites from SXSW 2019 (listed in alphabetical order):
The Beths: Beyond the catchy songs the Beths packed into their 2018 debut album, “Future Me Hates Me” (Carpark), there was a standout feature: the intricate vocal harmonies that gave each of the melodies a richness several cuts above the typical indie-rock recording. Live, the band demonstrated that those harmonies are the real deal as singer Elizabeth Stokes was backed by the nuanced multi-part harmonies of guitarist Jonathan Pearce, bassist Benjamin Sinclair and drummer Tristan Deck. The band echoed the ambition of its New Zealand predecessors, the Chills, which also played several sets at the festival. Led by the brilliant songwriter Martin Phillipps, the quintet layered the arrangements with countermelodies on violin, keyboards, guitar and vocals. The spidery treble-tinged guitar lines and melancholy lyrics on a 1984 song such as “Pink Frost” still sound timeless, as did the more recent songs from the Chills’ latest album, “Snow Bound.”
Black Midi: In the buzz band sweepstakes out of England at this year’s festival, this four-piece would be in the top 3. They’re not cookie-cutter, unless you think a fondness for early ’90s art-punk circa Slint and U.S. Maple is a winning commercial formula. The band’s twisted, slow-burn arrangements, noisy spasms of guitar and panicked vocals conjured visions straight out of a horror movie —think Danny Boyle’s post-apocalyptic “28 Days Later.”
Black Pumas: The Austin favorites need to be seen to be appreciated. Many of the songs don’t go much beyond “let this love take you higher” bromides, but on stage the co-ed seven-piece band led by singer Eric Burton explodes past the cliches. Burton started out as a street busker, and his presence on stage is robust, a whirlwind of movement and gesture. His vocals — rough-edged to pleading as the moment demanded — bounced off his backing singers and the audience in a free-flowing call-and-response conversation. He directed the band rather than hewing to tightly scripted arrangements, the songs as spontaneous as the emotions that guided them.
Cimafunk: Erik Alejandro Rodriguez, aka Cimafunk, was rocking gold bellbottoms in one of his showcases, and his nine-piece co-ed band was neck-deep in the Afro-Cuban funk. Cimafunk is based in Havana, but his music is a melting pot of Cuban folk, rhumba, bolero and hard-edged, shape-shifting dance music from James Brown to Fela. His band had the chops to make it all go, and the set was less a series of songs than a nonstop river of rhythm.
Mara Connor: The Los Angeles-based singer got the call to play the festival two weeks ago, and dove right in. Connor has only one song available on Spotify, but it’s a good one, and she’s got a bunch more that she showcased in the first of a handful of sets in Austin. A conference of this size can be a particularly unforgiving environment for a solo act, with audience chatter frequently overwhelming the music. I saw at least three such performances the same night that Connor performed, and it had to be discouraging for the artists. But Connor wasn’t fazed. She demonstrated poise and a clear voice with above-average range, and helpfully brought along her own homemade promo that she handed out at each gig.
Fontaines D.C.: Veiled by cigarette smoke, singer Grian Chatten looked agitated from the get-go, pacing the stage and thrusting the mic stand with each drum beat. His words poured out in a sing-speak style that brought to mind the dyspeptic tone of the Fall’s late Mark E. Smith or an angry Jonathan Richman. The Irish quintet revved up a percussive assault, guitar noise and drone melting into drums and bass to create one big rolling tide. “My childhood was small, but I’m gonna be big,” Chatten vowed. Talk about willing your dream into existence.
Jealous of the Birds: When Naomi Hamilton first played South by Southwest in 2016, she wrote the song “Plastic Skeletons,” which became her set-closer on her Belfast band’s latest trip to the festival. It’s a travelogue of impressions wedded to a combustible arrangement, and it outlined a world of possibilities and promise that Hamilton is beginning to fulfill. The singer-guitarist affirmed a knack for compressing knotty wordplay into evocative songs, none more so than the recent “Marrow.”
Mojo Juju: Mojo “Juju” Ruiz de Luzuriaga with brother Steven on drums was a force as a singer and guitarist, and she needed to be. Her perspective is that of the eternal outsider, a woman of Aboriginal and Filipino heritage searching for home. “The search is my religion,” she said. Her songs, a mix of soul, blues and folk with a dash of rock, outlined her pain and staked out her mission. “I don’t belong inside your narrow definition,” she sang on the potent “Never Again.”
Pip Blom: The co-ed quartet from Amsterdam makes a pop-punk racket that edges toward chaos. Spazzing out — rather than precision performance—is paramount. The band blitzed through a clutch of increasingly catchy three-minute songs as if they’d just been liberated for recess at school, led by namesake singer Pip Blom, who swayed in time to the rhythm down strokes on her guitar. Her brother, guitarist Tender Blom, and bassist Darek Mercks kept trading can-you-believe-this? smiles as they stomped around the stage, but no one in the room looked like they were having a better time or expending more energy than Gini Cameron, a dervish on drums.
Tasha: Chicago singer-songwriter Tasha goes it alone on stage, a woman and her guitar, and a handful of gentle, patiently developed songs. It doesn’t sound overwhelming, but the singer is in no hurry to bowl over her audience. Instead she bides her time. The softer she sings, the closer listeners must lean in. Her voice boasts a quiet strength, and her songs offer hard-won consolation, a touch of tenderness in an unforgiving world. She goes about her work with a smile, and engaged the audience as if they were friends, collaborators. Her guitar playing proved to be as nuanced as her vocals, her fingers drawing expression out of the silence.
Trupa Trupa: Gdansk, Poland’s Trupa Trupa first made an impact in America last year at South by Southwest, and the quartet returned this year to debut songs from a forthcoming album on Sub Pop. The band dedicated its performance to Gdansk Mayor Pawel Adamowicz, an ally and friend who was recently murdered. “These are new radical, dark, anti-hate-speech songs,” singer Grzegorz Kwiatkowski said by way of introduction, as good a way as any to describe the band’s stark aesthetic. The lyrics were often snippets, phrases, designed to provoke rather than soothe, hint rather resolve: “I dream about no one, no way, no one,” “I’ve got nothing to hide, I will just disappear.” The minimalist constructions prized dynamics and drone over melody and often built hypnotic force.
Yola: The British singer Yola Carter recently recorded her debut album with producer Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, and she displayed an electrifying voice informed as much by country music as soul or folk. Her concise songs all boasted catchy refrains, and she proved adept at building these country-soul melodies to ecstatic gospel crescendos. Yet the singer never forced things, never seemed to be in a rush to show off. Her powerhouse displays always served the songs.
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