If there was a lesson to be taken home from this year's South by Southwest Music Conference, which took place March 15 through 19 in Austin, it's that less sometimes really is more when it comes to music. That's not to suggest that the conference was truly much smaller than it has been in recent years: there were still hundreds of bands playing dozens of venues from noon until the early hours of the morning, and thousands of laminated badge-wearing industry people from every strata of the music business crowding the city's hotels, clubs, bars, and rib joints. But this year's South by Southwest seemed less cluttered than 2000's, and even going back half a dozen more years.
Credit the current downturn in the Internet economy, which has put a lid on many of the music-oriented dot-coms who showered money, tchotchkes, and seemingly every other manner of audio-visual pollution on last year's conference. And then, the kind of underground alternative rock and roots music that's always been a mainstay of SxSW is no longer subject to the major-label feeding frenzies that infected past conferences by generating way too much hype for mediocre bands who might otherwise have had the opportunity to develop at their own pace.
So though there was still more going on than any one person could possibly get his or her head around - at midnight on Friday you had your pick of rock-and-roll legend Ike Turner, alterna-country heroine Lucinda Williams, Jon Spencer's sister Muffin Spencer's band Brassy, English Beat frontman Dave Wakeling, and the Black Crowes at Stubb's - the overall vibe was more pleasantly low-key than it's been in a while. In fact, when I arrived on the afternoon of the 16th, I could already detect what felt like a collective sigh of relief from the small crowd I ran into milling outside a little bar called Plush, where Capitol Records had invited a select number of journalists to listen to six cuts from the forthcoming Radiohead album Amnesiac (due in June).
The Radiohead listening party itself was instructive. I'm not quite sure what Capitol had in mind, but if the label was hoping to generate a positive buzz for Amnesiac, then it went about that all wrong. For starters, there's something less than dignified about being jammed into a dark little room to hear a few songs by a band who may be great but who aren't close to having the commercial clout of a Dave Matthews, a U2, or even an old fogy like Eric Clapton. And it's a little ironic that a group who began their career with a song in which Thom Yorke jokes self-depreciatingly about being " so fucking special " have reached the point where they're being presented as something so fucking special.
If there really were something groundbreaking about Amnesiac, then maybe the listening party wouldn't have been a bad idea. But the tracks I heard sounded like more of the same abstract sonic pop experiments that made up last year's Kid A (Capitol) - and in fact they were recorded during the same sessions. Nothing wrong with that. But anyone who was hoping for a more song- and guitar-oriented Radiohead in the vein of The Bends or OK Computer is going to be disappointed.
Another Capitol band from across the pond who made their presence felt in Austin was Idlewild, a Scottish foursome whose third album, 100 Broken Windows, was named one of 2000's " ten best records you didn't hear " by Spin magazine. The disc, which splits the difference between serrated Nirvana-style alterna-rock and the melancholy melodicism of Britpop à la the Smiths or Manic Street Preachers, is, almost a full year after it came out in England and Europe, being released in the US, thanks in no small part to the Spin accolade. And the band, who played an inspired 1 a.m. set Friday night at La Zona Rosa, also had the headlining slot at Spin's after-hours, invitation-only party Saturday night.
The benefits of having waited until demand in the US for 100 Broken Windows forced Capitol's hand aren't lost on Idlewild frontman Roddy Woomble. " It's strange but it's also quite good, " he admitted when we spoke on the eve of the La Zona Rosa show. " Over the period of a year it was available as an import, and it's created this great buzz around it. You know, we'd be getting lots of letters and e-mails from American fans, and we got reviewed in Spin. So people picked up on it anyway, and it kind of hyped itself without a record company doing anything.
" You know how bands always get hyped. And after all the hype you think you're going to see the best new band in the world. And no one can live up to those kind of expectations. But I think we can handle something like that much better now than we could a few years ago. Now at least we have a good collection of songs, and we know how to play them. "
Those songs sound like a blast from the not-too-distant past, when underground postpunk bands like Jawbox and Jawbreaker tried to meet the mainstream halfway by injecting angular guitars and alienation with a potent shot of accessible melodicism. Meanwhile, the refreshing lack of manufactured hype surrounding Idlewild recalls a time when it wasn't uncommon for bands like Jawbox and Jawbreaker to establish themselves organically, on a smaller scale, before making the major-label leap. It's probably no accident that most of Idlewild spent most of the alterna-rock '90s trying to figure out a way to bust out of remote Scottish towns, where America's overhyped alternative nation was more a fantastic rumor then an omnipresent reality.
" I grew up in a small little shit town on the northeast coast of Scotland, " Woomble explains. " We all moved from various small towns to go to the University of Edinburgh - to get out of where we were living and to go to a city where things were going on. We were 15 years old when Nevermind came out, and that was a huge influence on us. "
100 Broken Windows does owe an enormous debt to Kurt Cobain, both in its riffs and in the alienated teen spirit of its lyrics: " There's a Seventeen contest in my own home/Sick of Seventeen contests in my own home " ( " Little Discourage " ); " I bet you don't know how to spell contradiction/I bet you don't know how to sell conviction " ( " These Wooden Ideas " ). But it also finds Idlewild embracing a more British strain of layered melodies and literate lyricism - the bridge in " Roseability " features the line " Gertrude Stein said, 'That's enough.' "
" There are so many bands I love who just rock out with riffs, " says Woomble, " and there are so many singer-songwriters with great words. But it's very rare for a band to combine both really well. I read books as much as anyone, but I was a bit wary of coming across as 'Look at me: I've read a lot of books.' At the same time, I think we bridge the gap between being a rock band and having intelligent lyrics without being pretentious about it. And I hope that doesn't overshadow the fact that the songs are really quite simple and the music is quite direct. "
