A million bands, a million clubs, a million people, one big headache: SXSW, the annual music festival and conference in Austin, took place last weekend, and for the first time in a long time, Fort Worth was scandalously underrepresented.
You’d have to go back about five years to find the last time so few bands made the trip. There were about 10 times as many bands from Austin and Houston, and five times as many bands from places like Portland and Brooklyn. I used to live in Brooklyn, and I know it’s a borough of New York City, and I know that it’s packed with people. I also know that it’s about the size of LaGrave Field – so you mean to tell me there are five times as many SXSW-worthy bands in Brooklyn as in all of Tarrant freaking County?
Total bullshit, but what else do you expect from an event that has reneged on its original mission to showcase up-and-coming unsigned bands? SXSW is nothing but ACL on 6th Street rather than in a public park, and with industry panels during the day. The only North Texas outfit I happened to catch was PPT as part of a showcase sponsored by the Fort Worth-Dallas rap trio’s record label, Dallas’ Idol Records. Black Tie Dynasty, another Idol band, also played but didn’t go on until way past my bedtime. PPT’s crowd was pretty big but totally lame. The rappers tried their damnedest to get some energy going and, to their credit, never wavered for a second, but a group can do only so much.
Not counting the local bands that played unsanctioned showcases, the other official local representatives – Best Fwends, Calhoun, Theater Fire, and the Quebe Sisters – got stuck in crappy time slots or at crappy joints. Caroline Collier, Weekly scribe and drummer for local prog-rock trio Proud Warrior, caught Calhoun’s show at the Creekside EMC at the Hilton Garden Inn. “They deserved a better venue than the Hilton for their showcase, but everything sounded great,” she writes on her blog at www.myspace.com/carolinecollier. “… Their set and new material were nothing short of beautiful.” Afterward, she went to another club and caught – what else? – a Brooklyn band, Nada Surf. “Hundreds of folks waited in line, then pushed their way to the front of the stage for the concert,” she writes. “After doing the same thing for a few tunes, I couldn’t help but wonder why.
Compared to Calhoun, Nada Surf is musically minor league. So why isn’t Calhoun taking over satellite radio, too? They’re far more deserving than most of what I heard. Far more creative. Far more captivating.” Don’t bother racking your brain, Caroline. There is no rhyme or reason to success in the music industry. All that an excellent, relatively unknown band can do is keep on plugging away. They can’t do anything else. … Congratulations to Sky Eats Airplane.
The hard-electronica Fort Worth quintet recently signed to Equal Vision Records out of New York and recorded a 10-track album with producer Brian McTernan (Circa Survive, Senses Fail, Hot Water Music). The band expects to release the CD this summer, when they will be on the road as part of the annual Warped Tour. Visit www.myspace.com/skyeatsairplane.
Contact HearSay at hearsay fwweekly com.
