Win, lose, and draw: 2010 in Austin music (so far)
For the rest of 2010, Speak is going to work on perfecting anti-gravity technology.
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Every December, the world's music commentators and critics take time to reflect on the year that's passed, reductively breaking down 365 days of songs, albums, concerts, business deals and trends into convenient bullet points that can be easily discerned through a New Year's Day hangover. But The A.V. Club lacks the patience necessary to wait that long to register our opinion; instead, we're looking back at the happenings that have shaped Austin music over the first six months of 2010 and deciding whether they've had a positive, negative, or neutral effect on the city's scene. Will the coming months prove us wrong? Maybe. But until then, here are the major blips on our local musical radars for 2010 so far.
Win: The kids are all right
Nothing gold can stay, but in Austin, a little bit of patina and a residency at the Saxon Pub or Continental Club go just as far toward paying the bills. Given the way that the city's music fans hang on to their favorite acts (it's pretty much assumed that octogenarian bluesman Pinetop Perkins is going to play his own funeral, right?), an infusion of young blood is often necessary. A number of local acts have exhausted the term "fresh-faced" while garnering attention in recent years ("young folks playing old folks' music" The Daze and Blues Mafia; prematurely world-weary Rough Trade signees The Strange Boys) but few have been stamped with approval the way Sarah Jarosz and Speak have in 2010. The dusky-voiced Jarosz earned a Grammy nod for the instrumental chops displayed in her track "Mansinneedof," while Speak's contributions to the lineage of nervy, brainy funk was acknowledged by a visit from former Talking Heads Chris Frantz, Jerry Harrison, and Tina Weymouth, who bestowed the title of Best New Band upon the quartet at the Austin Music Awards. The overachieving undergrads received a leg up from Austin City Limits as well, with Speak booked to play ACL Fest in October, and Jarosz recording a set at the show's KLRU studio, currently set to air as part of an all-bluegrass episode featuring the ACL debut of another relative musical newcomer: Steve Martin.
Loss: WOXY tunes out
WOXY, we hardly knew ye: After giving up its Cincinnati home for a spot in ME Television's South Congress studios, the Internet radio station ceased broadcasting March 23. (Its final song, eternally preserved on a static home page: The Soft Pack's "Answer To Yourself.") The shutdown was not only a blow to WOXY's small staff and freeform radio in general, but one for Austin as well: The station had become one of the city's major concert sponsors, and as one of the last trusted gatekeepers in an ever-expanding global music scene, provided a rare chance for up-and-coming locals to have their songs heard 'round the world. Turns out that service is incredibly difficult to monetize—at least former WOXY-backer Future Sounds didn't pull the plug on its Rumble concert series.
Draw: SXSWorth it?
One of the most heartbreaking aspects of WOXY's closure was how active the station was throughout SXSW Music this year. According to figures released after the festival and conference, they weren't the only ones working overtime: Upwards of 13,000 representatives of the various music industries came to Austin to see new bands and discuss how to get back into the money-making business. As The A.V. Club noted at the time, that figure speaks more the fact that anyone with a WordPress blog and a MediaFire account is an "industry professional" in 2010; as the New York Times pointed out, as those numbers increase, they're competing for "small slices of a shrinking pie." Even more hurtful: At the end of the week, the buzz at the gates of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport wasn't about breaking bands like Sleigh Bells or Surfer Blood, but hot interactive commodities like Austin-based Gowalla.
Win: Throw 'em on the Casual Victim Pile
With hometown heroes Spoon and Shearwater delivering good-not-great records in 2010, cue a spotlight for bands who haven't been around long enough to get lulled into a rut: Matador's Casual Victim Pile compilation. The venerable label's first regional sampler since 1991's New York Eye And Ear Control, Casual Victim Pile isn't the comprehensive snapshot its "Austin 2010" subtitle implies, but even as a loosely assembled collection arbitrarily ruled by the tastes of Matador co-founder Gerard Cosloy, there's still some winners among the victims, like Follow That Bird's barreling opener "The Ghosts That Wake You" and Flesh Lights' hooky punk mash note "Crush On You." In the era of the iTunes playlist, it doesn't matter that Cosloy didn't sit down to assign a throughline to the record—underlying theme or no, tracks by Woven Bones and Harlem hang together better on the comp than the songs on either of the snot-nosed upstarts' recent full-lengths.
Draw: Cactus Café stays open
Threatened with closure due to budget constraints at the University Of Texas, the Cactus Café was saved at the 11th hour thanks to a partnership between the Texas Union and public radio outpost KUT. But while the pair of volunteer outfits devoted to keeping the Cactus open—Friends Of The Cactus Café and Student Friends Of The Cactus Café—succeeded in preserving the venue, they're unsure if the "spirit" of the venue has been preserved as well. That concern won't be fully addressed until KUT and the Union announce who they've chosen to manage the venue come August, and according to a Daily Texan report, if it's not longtime Cactus manager Griff Luneberg, some of the funds pledged by the Friends might not come through. Do friends let friends go back on promises like that?
Win: Oh, hey: hip-hop!
Austin's musical image is so often associated with guitar-plucking, it's a highly welcome sight to see many of the artists receiving positive notice in 2010 clutching mics instead. Chalk that up in part to the frequently entertaining efforts of freestyle-champion-turned-party-starting-MC Zeale, who followed up the neon glow of his Robot Radio EP by headlining a Memorial Day bill that attempted to gather a Guinness World Record-setting number of robot dancers. The city's rising hip-hop culture is just as involved in the physical as the digital, however, as evidenced by its full-bootied embrace of New Orleans bounce. And while most Texans are wise to stay wary of interlopers from the north, that shouldn't apply to the fiery rhymes of Riders Against The Storm. The recently relocated Rhode Island husband-and-wife duo marked its first few months as full-time Austinites supporting seemingly every high-profile hip-hop act that stopped through the city, opening for Kid Sister and Raekwon and playing the aftershow for Nas And Damian "Junior Gong" Marley's date at Stubb's. Will their time in Austin prove more fruitful than WOXY's? We'll see at the end of the year.
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