By John Anderson

South X Midwest

AUSTIN, TEX. -- Texas was carved from the Southwest territory by visionaries and madmen, the same people who presumably made Austin its capitol. In the intervening years, the state has enjoyed a firebrand, shoot-from-the-hip reputation but is, in most ways, politically quite conservative, which makes the notion of Austin as the center of state government rather amusing.

Given the freewheeling, live-and-let-live, whatever-dude atmosphere the city cultivates -- "Keep Austin Weird" is posted everywhere on everything -- it almost seems as if the penance for having won Texas' highest office via conservative support is that you're forced to serve your term in this loony bin.

For the past two decades, Austin has famously hosted South By Southwest (SXSW), arguably the world's most heavily attended music festival. Well, it's heavily attended now; when it began in 1987, it was as quirkily charming as the city's idiosyncratic residents.

Originally conceived as a way for labels to view unsigned bands in a live context as a central method of expanding their rosters and getting grassroots bands in the majors, SXSW quickly grew into a multi-tiered showcase of independent as well as established mainstream (well, not too mainstream) musical talent.

While unsigned bands still have a substantial presence here, they're largely overshadowed by contracted indie artists and relatively high-profile artists affiliated with well-bankrolled labels. It might not be the indie farm club that its organizers envisioned two decades ago, but it's still an amazing way to experience music across an implausible number of musical genres.

And because SXSW has become a musical and cultural crossroads of a sort, all manner of odd confluences are likely to color your day during the festival. In my five days here, I stood next to Elijah Wood in the F-G section at Waterloo Records, ran into Greg Dulli on the sidewalk on Sixth Street, met comedy mastermind Harry Shearer and World Café radio host David Dye and saw that guy with the dark-rimmed glasses from the Outback Steakhouse commercials filming a SXSW segment for Australian TV.

You sort of get used to it after a while. "Hey, Neil Young, decide what you want on your bratwurst and move on because I've got a show in 5." That didn't actually happen, but it could have, and that's the point.

The smaller moments are perhaps more compelling. I was treated to a three-song set by an itinerant songwriter named Marc Lee. "They call me Guitar Marc," he rasped, his voice rough from last night's cigarettes and libations.

He and his anonymous buddy sat in a quartet of stadium seats outside of the building where Cincinnati-based MOTH's afternoon set took place on Thursday. Lee played a trio of terrific originals -- semi-humorous "Plan B," about a succession of life's fallback positions that sounded like it could have been penned by Butch Hancock or Robert Earl Keen, while the second was a more traditional ballad called "In the Wind." As his hung-over compatriot tried in vain to provide some lead guitar, Lee apologized for the unexpected changes in the song.

Photo By John Anderson

South By Southwest 2006 saw Cincinnati well represented in Austin, including Wussy.

"It's only four days old," he said. "I'm still moving stuff around."

These were not young bucks addled from the adrenaline of youth and the buzz of creation -- they were journeymen, gray, grizzled, missing teeth and blocks of memory from last night, last week, last month and a lifetime before today.

"You'll hear about me someday," said Guitar Marc as I headed off to the MOTH set.

I assured him that I was hearing from him right now. He grinned a gap-toothed smile and nodded, then finished with a slow Blues jam about being thrown out of the house by his woman. It was not a young man's tale of hormonal heartbreak and abbreviated lust, but the weary tale of a past-prime housemate with too much history and hard living to be out in the cold again. And he sang it with a smile.

Brother, that's Austin in a nutshell.

Cincinnati was well represented at this year's SXSW, with the most local entries to the festival we've seen in many years. Most importantly, the quality of the area's bands was high throughout and it seemed as though everyone was well received by the festival's attendees.

Newport's favorite art-damaged Indie Punk quintet, The Minni-Thins, offered a raucous and manically intense set Wednesday evening. Although lightly attended as one of the evening's first shows, the Minnis delivered an incendiary performance for the enthusiastic 30 or so in attendance; one girl was so seized by the moment her glasses flew off her face during her frenzied dance.

Guitarist/vocalist Jeremy Strickland played like a man possessed and howled the lyrics to band faves "Ugly Uda" and the set's frenetic closer, "Let Me Be Your Liquor Man." Like the barking mad lovechild of Pere Ubu and Jon Spencer's Blues Explosion, The Minni-Thins sent a palpable shock wave through the small but vocal crowd, leading Strickland to declare the Minnis' SXSW debut a qualified success.

Given the fierce level of their performance and the rousing reaction that followed, it's hard to argue with that conclusion.

Photo By Brian Baker

The Minni-Thins.

The next afternoon, MOTH was scheduled for a daytime gig at the Tambaleo, an old warehouse building with a bar and an art gallery within its structure. SXSW is rife with day gigs, and they tend to run as efficiently as the nighttime showcases, but Tambaleo's was not one of those.

The 1 p.m. show didn't begin until nearly 1:45, an eternity in the SXSW time frame. MOTH did a truncated four-song set that made up for its brevity with a surplus of heat and intensity. Brad Stenz and Eric Diedrichs presented a solid wall of stellar Guitar Pop, bassist Eli White provided a thunderous foundation and drummer Kevin Hogle bashed with a graceful abandon.

MOTH closed their over-before-it-started set with a fiery version of "Immune to Gravity," the title track from the latest MOTH album, in the racks locally for several months but just now enjoying national distribution.

"Man, that was fast," Diedrichs laughed after the mini-set. "But it felt good."

The band had done a private party the night before and was slated to do a late-afternoon gig at the Rockstar Energy Stage that same day, so the Tambaleo show was like a four-song rehearsal. For all the trouble it took to get there -- traffic, missed turns -- they all seemed pretty stoked about the results, given the rushed atmosphere and the miniscule crowd.

Most entertaining were a couple of extreme MOTH fans from Minneapolis, Ben and Ryan, who had flown down to Dallas and then endured a three-hour bus ride into Austin for the express purpose of seeing all three MOTH performances at SXSW. Although Ben had no trouble admitting his self-confessed "religious" zeal for MOTH, he insisted that the phrase "man groupie" not be utilized as a descriptor.

He bought me a beer, so I must respect his wishes.

Later on Thursday afternoon, singer/songwriter Peter Adams offered a short set at Darwin's Pub. Adams has an amazing story -- a home recordist with no previous band experience, he recorded his debut album, The Spiral Eyes, in his basement studio. It found its way to the right people, and before you could say "fjord" he's got himself a top-selling album in Sweden.

Sadly, the Swedish contingent was not at Darwin's for the show, just a handful of regulars who downed their beers and bolted midway through Adams' wonderfully understated set comprised mostly of tunes from Spiral Eyes, including powerful renditions of "I Evolve," "More Than You Know" and the set's closer, the impishly moving "Elevators."

Photo By Brian Baker

MOTH

Adams' band is a marvel of atmosphere and restraint, a beautiful accompaniment to his songs of angst and alienation, which he couches in the warmest possible tones. The Spiral Eyes is a great album -- Swedes are a notoriously intelligent people -- from a songwriter with boundless potential and a crack band to help him along the path.

Thursday night's 11:30 p.m. show at Friends was not literally a Cincinnati show, but its local appeal was undeniable. Before Greg Dulli belonged to the world, he was Cincinnati's divine fuck-up, a guy who once famously absconded with food from Meat Loaf's hospitality tray after his show at Bogart's but who was so bloody charming and entertaining while he did it that it was completely forgiven.

When he showed up as the frontman for The Afghan Whigs in 1988, not many would have dared to predict the band's incredible success and even fewer would have bet that Dulli on his own would surpass it. Since the Whigs' dissolution, Dulli has moved several times (he's in L.A. now) and dabbled in various sonic projects, including his work with Mark Lanegan and his new band, The Twilight Singers. Regardless of the genres he's touched on in the past, this new iteration of the Singers is all about the Rock.

With a set list comprised of selections across their catalog, including their brand new Powder Burns, the Singers were absolutely energized for a club that was packed front to back, wall to wall. The bar staff eventually opened the bar's front windows directly behind the stage so the 100 or so people on the sidewalk who couldn't gain admittance to the club were able to hear the show.

Dulli, dressed in Johnny Cash black, strapped on a black Gibson and roared through a tumultuous set of Singers' songs as the band provided a propulsive foundation for his primal vocal stylings, which weren't mic-ed to their fullest potential. Dulli remains a master of context, delivering his lyrics with the impassioned fervor of a Punk throater and the smoldering sensuality of a Soul stirrer.

Ever the showman, Dulli slowed down the show to light a cigarette and occasionally turned toward the windows so the folks on the sidewalk could get a taste of the show we were being treated to inside. This was not merely a great performance for Dulli and the Twilight Singers, but one of the highlights of this year's entire SXSW.

Friday's Cincy representative was longtime local favorites Over the Rhine, who had a couple of big shows on the same day. The band's SXSW experience didn't go according to plan, as Karin Bergquist explained at the band's mid-afternoon set for the Paste Magazine soiree.

"We just got back from New Zealand, and it was hard to come back," Bergquist confessed. "It was summer down there, and gorgeous."

But that wasn't the monkey wrench in OTR's gears; multi-instrumentalist Rick Plante was called away on a family emergency, and so the band was forced into "living room acoustic trio" mode. From the Paste stage later, Bergquist quipped, "One less electric guitar in town this week. Nobody's gonna die."

Photo By Brian Baker

More Cincinnati presence at SXSW: Karin and Linford from Over the Rhine.

OTR might have hoped for more on the occasion of their return to Austin after a long absence, but the faithful were clearly not disappointed when the band hit Antone's stage for the 10 p.m. slot Friday. Bergquist's crystalline-perfect vocals enthralled fans and the uninitiated alike -- a good many were in Antone's early to avoid missing Neko Case's 1 a.m. show -- and every tastefully gorgeous fill presented by Linford Detweiler was followed by rapturous applause. After a set featuring tracks from Ohio and Drunkard's Prayer, the band launched into a new song that might be called "I Think It's Good." The song, like Over the Rhine's entire set, was quietly captivating and a rousing success.

Kicking off Saturday's Cincinnati events, Rhonda Everitt, known in the area under her band de plume Pale Beneath the Blue, began her duo singer/songwriter tour with Allison Tartalia, a kindred musical spirit from New York City, at Book Woman bookstore. Billed as the East Meets Midwest 2006 tour, Everitt and Tartalia tag-teamed their set, each doing a pair of songs on either keyboards or guitar before acquiescing to the other.

Tartalia veers toward a Tori Amos style spiced with a Ricki Lee Jones Jazz edge, while Everitt hews closer to the Pop edge of that equation, as evidence by her song "She Dangled It in Front of His Face Like a Cat Toy," tentatively the title track of her upcoming full-length.

Although it is, by Everitt's admission, not her normal musical mode, it hints at an expanding playfulness in her presentation. Rest assured, she hasn't abandoned her thoughtful and evocative style, as she offered the quietly beautiful "Little Secrets" and "Untitled" from her six-song 2004 EP, Hologram.

Tartalia rolled through the alternating set with a number of gorgeous and delicately-executed piano ballads from her new CD, Ready. The pair will be on the road until late April, with local stops at the Chicks Rock Fest at Southgate House April 7-8 and at Dayton's Trolley Stop April 17.

The Saturday night wrap-up began with one of the most anticipated shows of the Cincinnati caravan: Wussy's appearance at Opal Divine's outdoor stage. After a spectacular set from Mekons founder Jon Langford, the stage was primed for Wussy's SXSW debut.

Although sound issues dogged the set, the band was unwilling to blame the sound guy (even though they probably could have), and they bulled through the difficulties with minimal disruption. Chuck Cleaver had the quote of the festival when, after a couple of minor miscues during a brand new song, he looked at the audience and said with a laugh, "All the good musicians in Austin, and you came to see us."

In spite of the occasional glitch in performance, Wussy presented the kind of set Cincinnati audiences have come to expect and love from the quartet: raw, visceral and utterly real. Lisa Walker's evolution as a first-class frontwoman continues at a breakneck pace, as she handles her guitar duties with a ferocious grace while finding the quirky emotional heart of the amazingly emotive lyrics she and Cleaver craft separately and together.

Cleaver still possesses the innate ability to wring the most complex sounds from the simplest guitar phrases, Mark Messerly is the gifted go-to guy when a song requires the right texture and drummer Dawn Burman keeps a frenetic but channeled control over the beat. The quaintness of their debut album, Funeral Dress, is certainly less in evidence when Wussy takes to the stage -- definitely no criticism.

Photo By Brian Baker

Hamilton's favorite son Greg Dulli.

The translation of these songs from studio to stage is gloriously loose, exemplifying the fun the band is obviously having and pointing the way to the equally raucous experience that Wussy wants you to have right along with them.

For their third consecutive SXSW appearance, The Sundresses proved more than up to the responsibility of closing out not only the evening's festivities at 1 a.m. but drawing the entire week to a close with their appearance at the Velvet Spade patio. With an assortment of tracks from their 2003 debut, The Only Tourist in Town, along with a couple of new tracks (including "The Barking House") and a Horror Blues cover of the theme from Spider-Man, The Sundresses sent an absolutely righteous noise into the warm, wet Austin night air.

MOTH's Hogle and Diedrichs and the Minni-Thins' Strickland were in attendance to show support for the home team. (They all tried to do the same thing for the Wussy show but went too far in the wrong direction on Sixth Street to recover from their mistake in time to make it.)

With the same fierce abandon they've displayed from the start, the Dresses' Jeremy Springer and Brad Schnittger took turns wringing hellhound Art Punk Blues sounds out of their guitars and hammer-and-tong ferocity from their drums. Makenzie Place remains a compelling tornado of a bass player, vaulting around the stage with a storming intensity.

"Cincinnati's ... full of creepy, creepy, creepy motherfuckers not unlike yourselves," Springer told the audience, to which Schnittger replied, "And not unlike us."

It was yet another fabulous display of the Sundresses' visceral art-damaged Blues regimen, complete with Springer flipping off the crowd to show off his new tattoo, the letter "U" inked on the knuckle of his middle finger. It really is just a matter of time before this virulently talented trio attracts the notice of someone outside of the Cincinnati area and that really smart individual takes the Sundresses' darkly twisted brilliance to the world at large.

So another South by Southwest is in the books and Cincinnati can be proud of the way the home town took the sound of southwest Ohio to the heart of Texas. Here's hoping we can continue to send envoys to SXSW with the impressive numbers, credentials and results of the Class of 2006.

SXSW 06: Best of the Rest

Photo By Brian Baker

The Sundresses

Pilotdrift: The sextet from Texarkana had one of the best albums from last year, Water Sphere, and the band's translation from studio to stage is impressive. Pilotdrift's love of soundtrack music turns into a pastiche of Pop, Prog, Jazz and driving Rock. And imagine the spectacle of all six band members whipping out some sort of percussive instrument to close the set.

Laura Veirs: The Seattle native triangulates a sonic position somewhere between Suzanne Vega, Edie Brickell and Brian Eno. Relying on her latest album, Year of Meteors, for material, Veirs put together a sterling set featuring guitarist/bassist Carl Blau and flawless rhythmatist/producer Tucker Martine.

You Say Party! We Say Die!: You know you're in for something special when bass player Stephen O'Shea leads singer Becky Ninkovic onto the stage blindfolded and she proceeds to sing the first three songs without taking it off. YSP!WSD! shimmy and shake with the infectious vibrancy of early Blondie and the B-52s, concentrating less on the Pop and more on the Punk.

Rob Dickinson: The former Catherine Wheel frontman had an underexposed and brilliant album last year, Fresh Wine for the Horses. Dickinson came to SXSW to publicize the album with a powerful solo acoustic set that often veered into the Wheel's noisy Pop with the help of a distortion pedal.

Marah: A lot of bands get compared to The Rolling Stones and The Replacements, but Marah actually deserves the comparison. And how many bands get a ringing in endorsement from both Stephen King and Mojo magazine, for God's sake? A rollicking, roiling and sweat-drenched set of rootsy garage Americana from the Bielanko brothers and their band of merry Philly yanksters as they unleashed numbers from their latest and best album, If You Didn't Laugh, You'd Cry.

Neko Case: The Canadian Pop chanteuse is riding one of music's most unprecedented streaks of success and acclaim with three straight winners with the New Pornographers and four straight bullets in her solo career, the latest being her exquisite Fox Confessor and the Hounds. Case's set was transcendent and completely entranced every lucky soul who witnessed it.

Tapes N' Tapes: While the Arctic Monkeys were stealing the spotlight as the buzz band at this year's festival, Tapes N' Tapes quietly snuck in and created a sizable swell of their own. T N' T previewed their imminent debut album with an engaging and all-too-brief daytime set that felt like a manic cross between the Indie verve of Spoon and the Punk rhythms of Gang of Four.

Eagles of Death Metal: Jesse Hughes and Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme teamed up for their debut album, 2004's Peace Love Death Metal, as a guitar/drum duo (with Homme on drums) sounding like the Rev. Horton Heat channeling his musical expression through Iggy and the Stooges instead of Rockabilly, and coming through the other end like a less ironic Ween. For SXSW, Homme (who doesn't normally tour with EODM) did the dual drummer thing with a gorgeous blonde, while Hughes took center stage looking like Brad Pitt's trailer park doppelganger, flanked by a 60-year-old on a Flying V and a bass player who looked like he might be on parole. Together they created a Rock cauldron that burned like a third-degree scald on the eve of their latest album, Death by Sexy.

-- BRIAN BAKER

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WUSSY, PETER ADAMS and THE MINNI-THINS, as well as other regional SXSW alumni, perform at the Southgate House March 30 for a post-SWSW showcase.