keyes sxsw: day 1

The end goal of South By Southwest is, essentially, to generate significant sound and fury. So it’s fitting that the batch of bands I saw on my first day in Austin seemed dedicated to making as big a racket as possible.

Sometimes, that noise came from unexpected places: on their studio records, the Fresh & Onlys are contained — even a little morose — but at a barnstorming set at Red 7 yesterday afternoon they barreled with all the power and ferocity of a garage band. The songs beefed up, grew beards and biceps and brawled, a welcome shock to the system that cast their grim compositions in a startling new light. It was as if Ian Curtis had gotten hold of the Nuggets box set.

Also plugging in and toughening up were A Sunny Day in Glasgow, who transformed from shrinking violets to full-on tomboy toughs. Their songs were stripped of the keyboard haze in which they’re typically steeped. Instead, they thrust guitars to the fore, and egged the songs on with giddy handclaps and vocal yelps. It was a startling — and welcome — transformation.

Brooklyn’s Suckers like power, too, but their songs take a while to generate it. Adorably shambling and ragtag, they seem to strike out in several directions at once until a melody finally coheres somewhere near the song’s end. There’s an ecstasy underpinning their songs — perhaps owing to the vocalist’s high-pitched, happy yipping, and no matter how chaotic a song began, it was safe to assume it would end somewhere bright and beguiling.

Ironically, Roky Erikson, an artist who built a career on the virtue of volume, struggled through his mid-afternoon set at the Galaxy Hut. Backed by Okkervil River, Erikson and his collaborators fought a bad vocal mix that buried his voice and rendered the tender compositions off their forthcoming album strangely inert. These are the first batch of shows for Erikson and Okkervil, so some rust is to be expected, and it’s likely by the end of the week, at a better venue, they’ll be a completely different band.

Strange Boys, who probably owe much of their career to Roky Ericson, opened the evening’s Rough Trade showcase with impish panache. Their songs are falling apart at the seams and they know it, but something about the vocalist’s bratty delivery and the weird, insistent saxophone lines (that instantly recall the best of late 70s post-punk) make the whole thing work, and work spectacularly. Theirs is kindergarten garage rock, a bunch of snotty toddlers throwing blocks at each other during playtime.

It was during the evening’s docket of metal bands where that force and power became — perhaps ironically — more controlled. Gates of Slumber, whose 2009 album Hymns of Blood & Thunder was severely underrated, turned out a grim, grinding, post-Sabbath stoner stomp. For a trio, the sound they produce is astonishing: big, tarry riffs that splatter and ooze while their vocalist — perfectly strained and desperate — issues dire proclamations over top. High on Fire take the same approach, only faster — it’s the moment when stoner metal discovers cocaine — and their late-night set was a showpiece for their stunning riffery.

But the best set of the day — by miles and miles and miles — was by Dillinger Escape Plan. Not so much a band as a force of nature, they exploded on to the outdoor stage at Emo’s Jr and proceed to unleash 45 minutes of perfectly controlled chaos. The band is a modern miracle: the players never stop moving for a second, and yet, as they’re hurling their bodies across the stage, they’re picking out astonishingly complex guitar patterns — I spent half the show watching fingers fly across fretboards, mouth agape. Their show, unsurprisingly, also boasted the most audience participation: within seconds o their first song, a member of the crowd had climbed the venue’s iron scaffolding and suspended himself upside down by his legs. The band made repeated trips into, and above, the crowd, and every song felt like a hail of bullets: tiny, compact clusters of sound fired with marksman’s precision, specifically designed to inflict maximum damage. It was, quite simply, a masterpiece of chaos, the work of an exceptional band operating at their peak. It was clear from the outset that nothing else could possibly compete.