Everyone will tell you about how they saw the Black Lips/Fratellis/Stooges or whatever. We’re just going to tell you about a choice few of the oddest musical moments we stumbled across at SXSW this year. The odd ones were our favorites.
First and foremost, Malajube. We went to their official showcase and were bitterly disappointed that we were unable to hear or see the band at all due to the weird venue layout. We finally caught them on Saturday afternoon at the NY2Lon/BrooklynVegan party and realized we’d forgotten our digital camera! We stood up front and snapped individual shots with our camera phone and this composite sort of expresses what it may have looked like if we weren’t so scatterbrained.
They’re dreamy. It was l’anniversaire de Thomas (keyboards) as well as St. Patrick’s Day, which called for many cheers and for some reason Julien (singer) kept calling the audience slackers. It may have been our outfits.
Our next favorite odd moment was seeing Liam Finn play a 2:30PM showcase at a place called Miss Bea’s that was a long, hot walk away from everything. We think Liam came to SXSW just to play this show and eat some BBQ, as we didn’t find any other parties or showcases listing him. He played alone with an electric guitar and some looping pedals, a la Feist, to us and about 7 other people. It was like finding buried gold.
Our final favorite odd moment was catching Bonde do Role at the Fader party. For those of you who haven’t given them a listen yet it was like Girl Talk music mashed up with CSS on-stage theatrics. We’re not sure if it’s going on our iPod but they are a great party band. We couldn’t take our eyes off of them and this picture is worth a million words explaining why.
