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The Current Live at SXSW - 2008
Thanks to everyone who helped make this year's live broadcast from SXSW a huge success! Be sure to check out video, photos, and the archived performances from all the bands who performed for us at the Free Yr Radio Broadcast Cornder in Austin, TX
Highlights from SXSW 2008
March 13
With The Raveonettes' fourth CD Lust Lust Lust landing on the Billboard Top 200 chart, the band has secured their position as Denmark's most popular musical export ever. Sune Rose Wagner began writing the album at a rehearsal space in London, where he churned out seven songs in the first day. The result is 14 songs that his cohort Sahrin Foo describes as "direct and in your face."
It is likely that every story you ever read about Jesca Hoop will mention this -- she got her big break while she worked as a nanny for Tom Waits' kids. He passed her demo on to some influential people in the business. While it might be hard for Hoop to escape that biographical bullet point, her music certainly stands on its own. Her SXSW appearance is her second on The Current.
In the summer of 2006, Sons And Daughters holed up in a house in the village of Adfern on the west coast of Scotland. They had no television, no telephones, and worked on new songs in a converted barn for eight hours every day.
Singer Nick Urata founded DeVotchKa nine years ago with the idea of mixing together the music of east and west. He did not found it with the hopes of selling music to McDonald's. The band turned down a request to use one of their songs in the fast-food giant's commercials.
Were you one of many people with the "Eanie Meany" earworm? With a repetitious chorus of "eeeeennnneeeee meeeeaaannniieee," maybe you were watching the 2006 World Cup where encountering Jim Noir's catchy soccer anthem "Eanie Meany" was next to impossible.
Armed with a multitude of instruments, laptops, video, paint and canvases, the environmentally-friendly local band Cloud Cult are making their second trip to SXSW this year.
Most people who turn 21 are excited about their new legal ability to consume alcohol. The three 21 year olds from Liverpool, Miles Kane (guitar), Joe Edwards (bass), and Greg Mighall (drums), who make up The Rascals are thinking bigger. As former members of The Little Flames, they opened for bands like The Coral, The Zutons, and their new best friends, The Arctic Monkeys.
March 14
One critic wrote that the music of White Williams ties pop eclecticism to peripateticism. We figure that's exactly what 23-year old Cleveland native Joe Williams was hoping for while he was recording Smoke (because nothing is more rock and roll than peripateticism).
Dizzee Rascal grew up in the East End of London, and honed his MC skills as a teenager at raves and on pirate radio.
The Duke Spirit is coming to America again, despite a 2006 tour that saw all their gear stolen in Portland and a broken elbow for bassist Toby Butler in Las Vegas.
Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward first met when they were recording a Richard Thompson song for a movie soundtrack. The actress and the singer-songwriter hit it off and soon after that, Deschanel shared with Ward some of the songs she had written. Volume One is their first CD together.
With a music career spanning over two decades, the sometimes folk and sometimes punk singer/songwriter Billy Bragg has teamed up with legendary artists like Wilco and Johnny Marr (The Smiths) as well as new artists like Kate Nash in addition to his abundant solo work.
Here's the short story: being compared to Al Green, he recorded three soul singles in the early 1970s, disappeared for 25 years until BBC Radio 1 host Gilles Peterson brought Darondo, also known as Double D or Dynamite D, out of hiding in 2005 on his "Gilles Peterson Digs America" compilation. That's also the long story.
No, Carbon/Silicon isn't a chemistry lesson about the periodic table of elements. It's a collaboration between The Clash's Mick Jones and Tony James of the Billy Idol-fronted Generation X, which sounds more like dance rock rather than their punk roots.
March 15
Devonte Hynes used to draw a comic strip called Lightspeed Champion to kill time while he was in math class. When his indie-buzz band Test Icicles broke up in 2006, Hynes resurrected the name for his new project.
Baltimore duo Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack chose the name Wye Oak after they realized Monarch, their first choice for a name had already been claimed by 7 other bands. Their recorded sound is layered and lush. They try to capture that same sound when the two of them perform live, but they also feel that if a song is good enough, it should be able to stand on its own.
The Heavy hail from Noid, a small town in southwest of England. The band will be lumped in with the retro-soul revival, but The Heavy add cool lo-fi samples and facemelting guitar solos to create a one of a kind groove that's heavy, dirty, and funky.
Tokyo Police Club is a group of four friends from Newmarket Ontario who picked up instruments and formed a band in their senior year of high school. Their debut EP A Lesson In Crime was written up everywhere from indie blogs to Rolling Stone who gushed it had, "seven first-rate mod-punk party starters." Elephant Shell, the debut full-length, is due at the end of April.
Born and raised in Neptune City, NJ, singer-songwriter Nicole Atkins lived up and down the east coast before settling in New York to write her debut album about her hometown. Atkins was approached by friend and now band-mate Dan Chen in 2005 to start a new band, The Sea, based on the songs Atkins had on her MySpace page.
As one of the founding members of the Los Angeles punk band X, John Doe was one of the most influential figures in American alternative rock during the early '80s, but when he launched a solo career in the early '90s, he decided to pursue a rootsy, country-rock direction instead of continuing with punk. X's latter-day albums exhibited a rockabilly and country influence, but it wasn't until Doe's 1990 debut, Meet John Doe, that he recorded a pure country album.
The Portland, Oregon sextet that have been together since 2000, Blitzen Trapper are lo-fi folky garage rockers. Those adjectives weren't just picked out of a hat. Blitzen Trapper grab influences from The Grateful Dead, Olivia Tremor Control, and Frank Zappa while playing in a scene that spawned The Decemberists, The Shins, and Elliott Smith. Their third self-released album, "Wild Mountain Nation" was released in 2007.
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