Team Reverb is on the scene at the South by Southwest Music Festival this week. Here’s what a few of us saw on Day 3.
Best musical moment: SXSW offers so few opportunities to actually sit down and take in all the art around you that you have to take them when they present themselves. And thatap why itap been an annual tradition of ours to seek the dimly lit Esther’s Follies -– and its seated room -– for stand-up comedy at each festival.
Indie comedy goes with indie rock just swimmingly, as my colleague John Wenzel pointed out in his book And Friday’s most memorable festival moment came when Eugene Mirman took the stage as the middle showcase’s headliner. As usual, Mirman was goofy and cerebral in his ramblings, which jumped topics from Facebook to SXSW.
Of course he had to rant on his festival experience, and his bit on his label Sub Pop’s showcase that evening –- about the raunchy password that unlocked the Sub Pop corporate credit card at the bar – was funny and seemingly off the top of his head.
But picking Mirman is a bit of a cheat in this notes column, which is supposed to be all about the day’s most defining musical moment. And so for the sake of consistency, let me write a few sentences on No Joy.
The Montreal band knows a thing or two about guitar tones, sludgy walls of sound, droney vocals and that hair-in-your-face image that works so well with the music’s aesthetics. They won over a humid Klub Krucial –- which owns the title of worst SXSW venue of 2011 so far -– with their ear-piercing guitar assault, and they certainly made a fan out of me. My roommates, too, as we’re sitting here in the hotel room the following morning talking about their fuzzed-out love of melody. —Ricardo Baca
What’s keeping Austin weird: Yesterday morning was my first encounter with the concept of the “South By Southwest Girlfriend.” An anonymous friend met a girl on Thursday afternoon and she had moved in with him four hours later. “I’ll never see her again after Sunday,” he said. A beautifully bizarre arrangement that keeps Austin weird. —Paul Custer
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Ricardo Baca is the founder and co-editor of and an award-winning critic and journalist at The Denver Post.
Loren Speer is an international activist and longtime Reverb contributor. He sleeps with one eye open and can crush glass with his bare hands. In addition to , Loren writes for and the Huffington Post under the pseudonym The Bartender.
Paul Custer is a Denver-based writer and regular contributor to Reverb.
