It’s crazy out here. Crazy, I tell you.

Throw Me the Statue at the SxSeattle party

I started the day at the SxSeattle day party with a set by Throw Me the Statue. I’ve been loving their song “About to Walk” and I wanted to check out more of their stuff. They put on a fun set. It started out well, waned in the middle and then came back strong again at the end. Also, more keyboardists should Elvis-style karate jump kick the crash cymbals.

Noah and the Whale at the Press Here Garden Party

From there, we rushed over to the tranquil setting of the Press Here Garden Party. I’d heard a bit of Noah and the Whale (pronounced, “Noer and the whale”) and wanted to check them out while I had the chance. They put on a good set. Nice songs and between the setting and their upbeat tunes, it was a lot of fun.

Our main party for the afternoon was the Filter Showdown day party. Castledoor was on when we got there. There were a lot of good elements to their band, but as a whole it didn’t work for me.[1]

DeVotchKa at the Filter Showdown

The crowd swelled to fire-marshal-distressing levels as DeVotchKa came on. This is one professional band–they’re tight and the front man is a class act. They seemed to have the audience in the palm of their hand. Even having listened to some of their stuff, I haven’t been won over by DeVotchKa. This set didn’t either. I thought there were some beautiful songs and, like I said, they played well, but overall, I just thought it was in the pretty good range.

Grand Archives at the Filter Showdown

Grand Archives is another one of those bands that comes out of the now-defunct (and excellent) Carissa’s Wierd. (Band of Horses is the other one). The Grand Archives set was mostly slow jams with lots of nice harmonies. There were definitely some nice songs in there, but I felt like it was too much of one thing.

Sea Wolf at the Filter Showdown

I’ve liked Sea Wolf for a while, but I’d never seen them. Given that their recordings are sometimes quite sparse, the stage was pretty full: air organ, a few other keyboards, drums, cello, glockenspiel, and a few guitars. The set was hit or miss for me, though with more hits than misses. Some great songs, some good songs and a few that I didn’t particularly care for. “Middle Distance Runner” was probably a highlight, though I really liked a few of the songs off their EP that they played as well.

After being turned away with a low chance of getting tickets at the Jim James/ M Ward performance at St. David’s Church, there were some decisions to be made. The Barsuk showcase was tempting, but I’d seen David Bazan on Thursday and I’d seen Nada Surf a month ago, so I decided to give it a skip.

Boubacar Diebate at the Global Rhythm showcase

I decided to catch Senegal’s Boubacar Diebate at the Global Rhythm showcase at Copa’s. He’s a master kora player and singer. His band included a Malian guitarist that Diebate said he’d met yesterday; he’d heard someone speaking one of the African languages that he understood and he started talking to him. It also included two Americans (I think), one on upright bass and one on alto sax. Despite the group being sort of slapped together, they played really well together. The communication on stage was spot on. There was a lot of smiles and laughs on stage. The band was really enjoying themselves. The show was something else. It really blew my socks off.

Here’s an mp3 if you want to check him out. While it’s good–I have to warn you–the live performance was quite a bit better.
Boubacar Diebate - Badima (mp3)

After that, I ran over to Buffalo Billiards to see Oh No Oh My!. I’d seen them before but I was looking forward to seeing them again, since I sort of figure out in the last few months that there stuff is something I can go back to time and time again and pretty much always enjoy. They put on a tight set. I think they even practice all the instrument changes as they played a lot of musical chairs, so to speak, and they were exceedingly efficient about them. The set was fun and solid. It made me pretty happy. I think I may add Oh No Oh My! to my list of bands to see every time they tour.

I contemplated calling it an end to this year’s SxSW after that but ultimately decided to go to the Park the Van/ Daytrotter showcase at Emo’s Annex. The Teeth were on when I got there. They were indie rawk, sort of the old school variety. One of the singers was gravelly voiced, which seemed like a bit of an affectation. Their set was decent.

Spinto Band was up next. This is another band that I feel like had good elements but the whole was not as good as I felt it should be. I should say, though, that “Mandy” was great–it was a very catchy song.

Dr. Dog ended the evening. They put on a fun set. I liked some of their songs a lot and other were just okay. The crowd had a lot of hardcore fans, singing along to every word. That was pretty cool. With just a couple songs left in their set, I felt the last few days catch up to me and decided I needed to get back to the hotel while I was still awake.

Wooo! SxSW! Good times!

Sun setting on a sign on 6th St.

You can view more of my photos at the day’s photo album.

[1] I’ll say that bands like this “should be better than they are.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 9:18 am Posted by adrian in blogs, live, photos. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.