1:30pm, Josh: Before I begin my journey into day three, I feel the need to pause and acknowledge how much fun—and how bizarre—this whole experience is. Yesterday I saw some amazing young indie bands in a small club, one of my youth's most important musical touchstones on a little soundstage, several great bands in a church, and then capped the night off with a Playboy-sponsored warehouse party featuring Moby and Justice. The amazing thing: I could've had five experiences like that, just with different puzzle pieces.
Anyway: I missed Los Campesinos in favor of R.E.M. yesterday, so I made up for it today at the Filter magazine day party. I think I love Los Campesinos, and not just because they're Welsh and sort of adorable, but because they have so much fun being smart and young. "International Tweexcore Underground" is so funny and so right, it's almost shocking. "I never cared about Henry Rollins!" New album out in late April, so beware the tweexcore invasion.
"We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives" by Los Campesinos
1:40pm, Kyle: The glory that is
1:55pm, Marc: I keep seeing Neely Jenkins (I think that's her name) from Tilly And The Wall walking around, which keeps reminding me that if she weren't dating that guy from Maria Taylor's band, I certainly wouldn't mind being her boyfriend.
2:10pm, Marc: At the Paste/Stereogum party at Volume Night Club, I'm reminded that if I were a lesbian, I certainly wouldn't mind being Kaki King's girlfriend. The pint-sized guitar goddess is doing her tapping thing with a backing band, which is allowing her to concentrate on songs from her excellent new album, Dreaming Of Revenge. John McEntire helped hip her up on her last record, and she's kept up the good work.
2:16pm, Kyle: A kinda fat, bald singer of a punk band stands on a second-story ledge overlooking Sixth Street. A crowd gathers below as he bellows what's admittedly a pretty good song. A guy standing next to me yells, "Turn up the vocals!" The song ends, and the singer says, "Keepin' it weird, Austin." He drops his pants for good measure.
2:21pm, Kyle: Beginning a day of celebrity doppelgangers, I spot Alia Shawkat—Maeby from Arrested Development—or someone who looks just like her eating a slice of pizza in front of Red 7 Seventh Street. Later, I see someone who is the genetic twin of Alyson Hannigan.
2:23pm, Kyle: No one looks like Keith Morris of Circle Jerks and Black Flag fame. The dude sitting on the patio of Beauty Bar is none other than the man himself.
2:31pm, Kyle: Dallas band The Future Cast plays to a small but enthusiastic crowd behind Beauty Bar. The group's sound is a sort of piano-laced post-hardcore, not the typical style you find on the streets of Austin during SXSW. They play with an intensity I haven't seen on this trip, and it's nice to see a band play like their lives hang in the balance during an otherwise uneventful day party.
2:55pm, Sean: Bradford Cox is a pretty funny guy—you'd never know that from his dour day job in Deerhunter. But Atlas Sound is all sighing, dreamy pop instead of slightly sinister narco-rock, so I guess it's okay to cut loose with a joke now and then. "Is everybody enjoying the Renaissance Faire?" he asks. "Did you get your turkey leg and candle-making kit?" Later he takes a phone call from his roommate: "I'm on stage right now and there's about 500 people waiting, so hurry up." He then announces that his roommate paid the rent on time and got a promotion; Cox holds up the phone so the crowd can give him a round of applause from over 1000 miles away. "That guy's a nut!" he exclaims after finally hanging up. Even with the Bob Newhart routine, Cox manages to get through a sizeable amount of cuts from his lovely (but unfortunately named) Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, including "Winter Vacation" and "Recent Bedroom," the songs bubbling about the room like we're soaking in a glass of Fizzy Lifting Drink. It's an excellent tonic to my still-lingering hangover from the Playboy party.
3:13pm, Kyle: The line to get into the Shirts For A Cure Show at Red 7—which culminates in a performance by the semi-reunited Hot Water Music—stretches down Seventh Street to Red River. At the front door, a perfectly succinct sign:
3:15pm, Kyle: Cattycorner from Red 7 is a parking lot-cum-music venue with a tented stage where Billy Bragg currently plays to a throng of onlookers, many of whom peer over the gate to see him. He prefaces a song by describing "Johnny Clash," his name for his new low, guttural singing style.
3:20pm, Sean: The Pitchfork party is always one of the most crowded of the week, and indeed the audience is packed to the neon gills on the Emo's outside stage watching Fleet Foxes. The band's pleasant psych-folk is a perfect soundtrack to this sunny afternoon, abetted even further by the free popsicles being handed out. I've only been able to spend a week or so with Ragged Wood, but "White Winter Hymnal" has one of those melodies you remember forever the first time you hear it, so I'm all smiles when it finally wafts in. They manage to pull out their four-part harmonies and crystalline finger-pickings and make them sound good even out here—no mean feat on one of the worst sound systems in town.
3:20pm, Kyle: The Spin party is always a hot ticket, the laminates a sort of status symbol among the festivalgoers, but the line-up this year—Switches, Ben Jelen, The Whigs, The Raveonettes, Vampire Weekend, and X—doesn't do much for me. I walk in to The Raveonettes on stage doing their best Jesus & Mary Chain impression. I generally like them as a band, but live they're about as exciting as paint drying. Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo stand virtually motionless and speak in a disaffected, too-cool-for-this monotone. Behind them is new drummer Leah Shapiro, who plays standing up and uses a floor tom as a bass drum. If I hadn't seen her playing, I would have sworn The Raveonettes programmed the beats using My First Drum Machine.
3:55pm, Josh: Spin always has a great day party, and almost always with the buzziest bands. I catch the end of The Raveonettes' set, and the beginning of Vampire Weekend. I know this goes against the prevailing critical winds, but I can't bring myself to muster an opinion on them. I think they're absolutely okay. Pretty fine. Not bad at all, but nothing to write home about. MySpace music editor and occasional A.V. Club contributor Trevor Kelley tells me that that's okay, and when he notices that I'm clapping like a half-enthused robot, I decide to move on.
3:55pm, Sean: Allow me to be the one-millionth person to shout out that the emperor has no clothes on Times New Viking. Instead, he's running his thin, naked ass down the street and hiding behind feedback and shrill attitude. The drummer/singer has an obvious need for attention, but what he really needs is to have his microphone taken away from him: He's way too into his own stage banter, introducing nearly every song with some longwinded generic quip. Except you can't understand him for all of the delay on his voice, so the banality just echoes around the room—kind of like the shared delusion that this band is awesome.
3:59pm, Kyle: Sixth Street and the surrounding area are littered with street buskers whose best efforts are mostly drowned out by the din of 10,000 bands playing at once. Most of them are dudes/ladies with guitars, but I see one guy who raps. His style's a little more aggressive: walking with passersby until they throw a buck at him to go away. Here, a couple walks as the dude spits lines like "Get your fuckin' mind right!" uncomfortably close to them. They're pained, but polite—and probably furiously digging through their pockets to make this guy leave them alone.
4:15pm, Marc: Perhaps the simultaneously hottest and most backlashed band at SXSW this year, Vampire Weekend is playing a great set at Stubb's as part of this party put on by Spin, which conveniently just put the band on its cover. The band is way more indie rock than the world-beat thing that people like to talk about, but the one thing that separates it from the herd is that it uses sparseness perfectly, in a way that makes one think that Vampire Weekend could very well become as good as Talking Heads. Okay, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, but as for right now, I wouldn't want to be seeing any other band right now.
4:25pm, Josh: I give up Vampire Weekend in favor of Dizzee Rascal, who's playing at one of the big TV sets in the convention center. It's the rare live hip-hop show that doesn't sound kinda muddy—probably because it's going to be on TV?—and I realize that grime kinda sounds like plain' ol' old-school hip-hop. Or maybe I just don't know anything, because I head upstairs to see The Lemonheads after a few songs. Turns out they've cancelled, with no reason given. Alas.
4:30pm, Kyle: Today's hot and sunny, so spending an hour inside the cool, dark confines of the Alamo Ritz theater sounds awesome. The occasion: the premiere of the first two episodes of NOFX Backstage Passport, a Fuse series documenting the long-running punk band's world tour of off-the-radar locales like Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Russia, and a whole bunch of others. The smart-alecky man-children in NOFX and their crew are perfect for a TV show like this, though I'm still surprised by how thoroughly entertaining the shows are. Frontman Fat Mike has the perfect personality for the show—funny, candid, sharp—and the footage of sketchy shows in Third World countries is pretty engrossing.
4:30pm, Sean: Kyle and Josh were a little hard on Yeasayer Wednesday, and now I can see why: Between the long and lustrous manes on both the guitar and bass player, and the former's patchouli/crystals vibe and the latter's wife-beater/mustache steez, there's a definite Kansas vibe going on. But I'm still a big fan of the music—which I personally liken to a hippie version of TV On The Radio—so I'm happy to hear favorites like "Wintertime," "2080," and "Sunrise" replicated with such precision. I have to admit, though, it goes down a lot smoother if you don't have to look at them.
4:55pm, Marc: It's horrendously hot here in Austin, which makes my beeline over to the convention center to see The Lemonheads—who, Josh tells me, are gearing up to play It's A Shame About Ray in its entirety—more than a little uncomfortable. Then comes the text from Josh that Evan Dando & Co. have canceled, so it's back to Stubb's.
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