Unless your browsers have various reputable music websites open at all times and your inbox is a constant stream of messages from convincing labels, promoters, and knowledgeable friends, it might be hard to figure out which shows are worthwhile. Sure, you can go by the reputation of the club or you can assume that because you’ve heard a band’s name before that it might be worth a look. But did you hear that name because the band was good or terrible? Compound that problem by about 100 and you have South By Southwest. The big difference is that at SXSW the vast majority of the shows are free and there’s also no telling what will be popular on any given night. Why there was a non-moving line for three hours to see Cloud Nothings and Speedy Ortiz and no line to see Kelis (of “Milkshake” fame) is a mystery. Regardless, we went down, checked out sixty-eight different bands over six days and found sixteen that will be coming through D.C. and Baltimore. Here’s what we thought of them.
Since the term “indie rock” has become too much of a catch all for boring singer-songwriters with a half decent grasp of the guitar, it’s with trepidation that I call Yellow Ostrich a fine indie rock band. They’re better than that. The songs are catchy and memorable and while most of the tunes are pretty songs that complement Alex Schaaf’s voice, there’s an edge to them that comes out in well-timed irregular guitar riffs and nonstop onstage charisma.
Yellow Ostrich will be at DC9 on April 2nd with Pattern Is Movement.
Two years after playing their first official SXSW showcase and five years after their first trip to Austin, the underlying nerves we spoke of in 2012 are gone. Single “Stutter” from their upcoming release, Lithium Burn, has showcased the band at their most jittery and experimental, but the most impressive part about Wednesday night’s set at The Ginger Man were the instrumental breakdowns that built the intensity near fever pitch and then ended suddenly. Singer Dan Scheuerman has also found the best way to indulge his inner desire to break the fourth wall. He meandered into the crowd during set closer “You Get To Say Whatever You Want,” and belted the closing bridge within two inches of the guy who up until that point, had been the most apathetic person in the crowd.
Deleted Scenes will be at Rock and Roll Hotel on May 22nd to celebrate the CD release of Lithium Burn.
This Baltimore band has a history of polarizing their audiences. One diehard fan in the crowd at the Haven on Wednesday night hailed from Scotland, and another fan from Australia had been playing their Letterman performance on repeat. Then there are the people (and by people, I mean myself) that have purposely shown up late to shows in order to avoid seeing their set. I can’t have been the only one. No one has been able to fault Future Islands for lack of originality, but sometimes the combination of borderline cheesy ’80s synth, theatrical performance art and death metal vocal flourishes could be more off putting than winning. Until now. Sam Herring and co. proved that this assortment of odd reference points and influences can in fact be a recipe for success once everything is entered in correct proportions. The performance they gave was stunning.
Future Islands will be at the 9:30 Club on May 1st with Ed Schrader’s Music Beat.
Gritty, unhinged garage rock is perhaps the most prevalent sub-genre at SXSW and after awhile all of the fast guitar bands tend to blend together. This Fullerton, Calif. band didn’t have anything out of the ordinary in terms of either instrumentation or live performances to differentiate them from the masses. That said, is a set of quality straight-up rock and roll songs with fist pumping choruses ever really a bad thing? It’s clear why they’re on Burger Records, a hub for such straightforward rock bands. They’ll fit in perfectly at Comet Ping Pong.
(Disclosure: I only saw them at a party that I helped organize but I cannot take credit for that particular booking feat.)
Audacity will be at Comet Ping Pong on April 20th with The Coathangers.
Vertical Scratchers are new Merge Records signees but singer/guitarist John Schmersal has spent a lot of time impressing audiences as a part of both Enon and Brainiac. Don’t expect something as frenetic as either of those two bands. Instead, Vertical Scratchers takes the most vital parts of 1990s college radio pop songs and distills them to two minute nuggets. “Wait No Longer” is an early contender for song of the year and it’s only just over a minute long. Also, it was fun to watch the blue Christmas lights attached to the drum kit fly up whenever the drummer made a particularly hard hit on the kick drum.
(Disclosure: I only saw them at a party that I helped organize but I cannot take credit for that particular booking feat.)
Vertical Scratchers will be at DC9 on March 23rd with Boogarins.
Civilian must have been a very draining album for Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack. The gut-wrenching yet somehow triumphant emotional weight of songs like “Holy Holy” and “Civilian” were particularly evident when placed in contrast with the new material that comprised most of their set at The Parish. Stack still drums while playing the keyboards, but those dissonant and unsettling synths have a much more dominant presence than they have in the past. It’s a left turn that, upon first listen, appears to work reasonably well. These synth and bass-heavy tracks are by no means dance music (although Wasner can do that, too), but they’re also not going to make us cry the way that “Holy Holy” did following the moment of silence for the SXSW crash victims.
Wye Oak will be at the 9:30 Club on May 6th with Braids.
Playing only three songs is not the ideal way to leave the crowd wanting more, but technical problems forced this quartet to cut their set in half. Even for those three songs, the women from Los Angeles were entrancing. Operatic vocal harmonies and new-age inspired songs might not always make for an interesting performance, but Warpaint also had a wash of muted but effective shoegaze-y guitar riffs at their disposal. Three songs really weren’t enough.
Warpaint will be at the Black Cat on March 24th with Cate LeBon.
One gets the sense that Schoolboy Q’s sets are usually no-miss, ultra-dynamic affairs. As it was, he turned a series of perceived setbacks into an engaging performance. Miffed at the lack of space on the makeshift stage in the back of the Stubb’s outdoor lot, he decided he’d at least get closer to the crowd by standing on a speaker in the photo pit. When that move put him in the middle of a sea of professional and iPhone photographers, he requested that his fans make their way to the front. When he decided that the crowd wasn’t sweating enough, he demanded more people start moving their arms in the air. He didn’t have the guest stars, the time or the space that fellow emcee Future had at his disposal, but his voice had the nuance and flow that made his request for dancing an easy one to oblige.
Schoolboy Q will be at Baltimore SoundStage on April 27th with Isaiah Rashad and Vince Staples.
Cloud Nothings went from breakout act in 2012 to reliable draw in 2014. It was harder to get into a Cloud Nothings/Speedy Ortiz show than it was to see pop/R&B star Kelis. (That’s not a complaint; Kelis was phenomenal). Singer Dylan Baldi seems to have grown into the vocal growl that made Attack on Memory such a success for them. They basically powered through their set of gritty rock tunes, slapping the audience with heavy guitar riffs from new songs off of upcoming album Here and Nowhere Else until finally injecting some nuance at the end of their set with “I’m Not Part of Me.”
Cloud Nothings will be at the Black Cat on April 16th with Ryley Walker.
Remember about two-and-a-half-years ago, when Erika M. Anderson seduced the DCist music staff with an album (and consequently, a live show) that angrily and sweetly revealed her deep emotional abyss? Yeah, she’s back, y’all and she’s not done. After intoning her way through familiar songs like “California” and “Marked,” she punched the air repeatedly with her yellow leather gloved hand and revealed newer songs that relied more on electronic elements like drum machines but spared none of the meta-grunge howl. Then as if to pay homage to the church she was playing in, she finished up her set with a self-described “hymn” of looped vocals and haunting melodies that filled every inch of the sacred space.
EMA will be at Rock and Roll Hotel on April 24th with The Downtown Boys.
One can only assume/hope that their showings for the rest of the festival must have gone better than the show at Buffalo Billiards. The upper floor of what is ostensibly a sports bar right off the overcrowded nightmare that is 6th Street could not have been a worse place for a dream pop band that depends on cultivating a sense of drama unfettered by the rumblings of St. Patrick’s Day drunks below. That drama was further derailed by technical issues that both delayed their start time and then stopped the set for a few minutes after the first song. The audience responded accordingly by standing passive no closer than four feet from the stage, at least for the first three songs. “Medusa” is catchy as hell, the duo smiled through the setbacks and their impressive songwriting and performing chops were clearly at work, but this one just didn’t go their way.
GEMS will be at The Sweetlife Festival at Merriweather Post Pavilion on May 10th. The festival is already sold out.
This is another band that did not benefit from the oversaturation of punk and garage rock at SXSW as they’re a band that falls squarely into the talented, fun and unremarkable pool. They served as a good shot of adrenaline to the thigh for the caffeine deficient first thing in the afternoon, but nothing other than singer Bridget Battle’s formidable growl stuck around in my brain three bands later.
Tweens will be at The Gold Bar in Baltimore on on April 2nd with with Expert Alerations, Quitter, and Et Al.
With his blazer and dress pants, Protomartyr lead singer Joe Casey may have been the only person at the festival who looked like he’d come to aptly named Beerland from an office job rather than another bar. But Casey’s stage presence was all roaring rock ‘n’ roll fury that would come forth like volcanic coughs as his deadpan Mark E. Smith vocals rose suddenly at the end of choruses like the punishing “Scum, Rise!” Their new album may be one of post-punk’s most exciting new releases, like a more intense version from The Fall that eschewed the keyboards.
Protomartyr will be at The Gold Bar in Baltimore on April 16th with Spray Paint and Big Christ.
There are two things to know about a band that’s playing a party curated by WFMU. The first is that they’ll almost certainly be very good. This was the case with Protomartyr, a band called Obnox and this one. The songs were wonderfully off-kilter with dissonant surf rock guitar and shout-y punk vocals. The second thing of note is that they were unable to swear since the set was being broadcast live on the air. The result was pretty hilarious as a chorus of one of their songs had to suddenly change to “Gosh Darn It!” Even censored, they were impressive.
Spray Paint will be at The Gold Bar in Baltimore on April 16th with Protomartyr and Big Christ.
Atlanta post-punks The Coathangers reliably come through D.C. about twice a year, but if anyone happened to catch their Comet Ping Pong set last summer, they may have noticed that the band was not in top form. After years of being a quartet, keyboardist Candice Jones left the band. This might not have been a noticeable problem but since they all shift instruments at the end of the set, the Comet show awkwardly highlighted that they’d not quite learned how to play as a trio. They seem to have figured it out, because not even a mic that was shocking bassist Meredith Franco and later guitarist Julia Kugel could throw them off their game. The new songs were tight and the instrument switches went off without a hitch.
The Coathangers will be at Comet Ping Pong on April 20th with Audacity.
A lot of the crowd out at the Sailor Jerry’s stage far east of the highway cleared out as soon as the Dum Dum Girls finished up and that was their loss. The soaring guitar chords are the closest thing to Oasis that has come across our radar that packs anywhere near the punch of the famed British brothers. However, they won’t hesitate to mix those wild notes with some fuzzy shredding drenched in feedback.
Cosmonauts will be at the Black Cat on March 31st.
Peelander-Z’s set always seemed like it was a few catchy melodies away from being geared toward juvenile audiences to begin with, so the fact that they had a family friendly party called the Mad Tiger Festival at the tail end of the festival was fitting. The music is clearly derivative of punk rock with abrasive guitar lines (when there are any) and shout-y choruses, but it was interesting to see a younger audience drink in the circus of wild costumes, human bowling, limbo ropes and shouts of “Mad Tiger! Mad Tiger!” orchestrated by three people claiming to be space oddities. It kind of makes one wonder why they bother to play bars at all.
Peelander-Z will be at the Ottobar in Baltimore on May 9th with Metalander-Z.
BONUS!
Here are some potentially unfamiliar acts that aren’t coming to D.C. that also merit some attention (in case they do.)
The Blind Shake: They have the intensity of Mission of Burma, but with guitar riffs that veer toward the psychedelic end of the spectrum.
Shockwave Riderz: The Pittsburgh trio takes harmonies, samplers and synthesizers and makes them sound inviting and seductive but unmistakably dark.
Tony Molina: The brutal guitar riffs during the instrumental breaks sound like they’re lifted from a Baroness or Mastodon album, but then he starts singing and the songs convert into early Weezer-esque power pop. Somehow, he’s on Slumberland Records, that beacon for fuzzy guitars and ’50s girl group vocals.
Sage the Gemini & The HBK Gang: Not every hip hop show benefits from having seven or eight rappers onstage, but all of these Bay Area emcees had serious chops.
Big Freedia: Two words: azz everywhere.
Kelley Stoltz: His was the album of mid-tempo guitar gems that got overlooked while Mikal Cronin’s got all the attention. Stoltz was also the consummate deadpan quip machine.
The Coachwhips: John Dwyer’s minimalist pre-Thee Oh Sees project was equally interested in playing pit-inducing sets in the middle of the crowd.
OBN IIIs: Come for one of the only garage rock bands with memorable songs and stay because the lead singer will get in the face of that person in the seventh row who has had their phone out the entire time. And then order a beer.
The Coup: Most bands that follow prolific songwriter and seasoned badass performer Ty Segall that aren’t named Thee Oh Sees might as well just give up and go home. However, this Oakland funk band got a crowd that was tired from the pummeling that occurred during Segall’s set to dance, jump around and ask for more. With incendiary lyrics and charisma to boot, they’re one of the best live bands in the country.
