SouthXCityPaper 2014: Day 2
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
St. Vincent, Damon Albarn, Kelela, Kelis, London Grammar, and lots more.
FIVE PICKS FROM WEDNESDAY
Kelela (2:15 p.m. @ Mohawk Outdoor)
So hip electro-R&B singer from LA. She’s got a great look (long ropy dreads, snazzy matching shirt/pants situation, big puppydog eyes and hugely expressive eyebrows), a great stage presence (charming, friendly, kinetic, almost exceedingly polite), great beats (futuristic, funky, made by hotshot producers like Kingdom, Bok Bok and Girl Unit), a great voice (she introduced the title cut from her free-download showcase mixtape, Cut4Me, as “this is me doing Mariah,” because… well yeah.) She’s clearly comfortable (and fully capable of) owning a live set, but I haven’t really managed to cotton on to that mixtape for some reason. With a couple exceptions (like “Floor Show,” which she rocked), I’m just not sure the hooks are there. Still, I’ll be rooting for her.
Until the Ribbon Breaks (3 p.m. @ Mohawk Indoor)
Intriguing Welsh (!) operation with ties to Run the Jewels, but it’s not hip-hop, or at least not mostly. More like trip-hop, only re-imagined and updated, maybe a little rockier. About half sample-based, half live. They had a great, atypically engaging live setup for an electronic act, with one kit drummer, one guy on toms and keys and sample trigger pad, and a sober-looking (presumably the main) guy on more keys and sample triggers and also some particularly soulful trumpet (!), and vocals (about half the time), which were sort of half-spoken, half blankly crooned, sometimes doubled with vocoderish effects. Overall really groovy, intricate, moody but not overly dark or bleak. Interesting!
Thumpers (3:30 p.m. @ North Door)
Really fun, young, thumpy, bouncy indie pop gang from London. I’d say guitar pop but really it’s all about the drums and the rhythms — quirky syncopated driving beats from the drummer, plus a guy with a bunch of pedals and boxes who makes more percussive loopy things happen, plus a smiley gal who plays keyboard but is more importantly in charge of getting the handclaps happening. And their vocals that are just as layered and energetic as the beats. I liked them already (their debut came out on Sub Pop a few weeks ago) and I like ’em even more now. So thumpy! So thumpy that the drummer needs floor toms on both sides of his kit, just to make sure. So thumpy it made me want to jump around a bunch (which was easy because there weren’t many people at North Door to see them, which is the only possible sad part), which in turn inspired this lady to decide to focus her “annual sxsw photoessay” on dancers (sample past topics: mustaches, dogs, cleavage), starting with me.
YG (6:45 p.m. @ Fader Fort)
Went in knowing basically nothing about this LA (Compton, apparently) rapper except that I will forever be grateful to him for bestowing upon us the utterly delightful (musically), utterly reprehensible (morally) 2010 post-hyphy earworm “Toot It and Boot It.” What I learned: he’s all grown up and hard now (though the Y still stands for “Young”), so he prefers to deliver his mean-spirited misogyny in blunter and less whimsically euphonious terms (a key track of the set was “Beat the Pussy Up.”) His new material (debut album drops this week) is decidedly more generic and less enjoyably loopy, though it serves its purpose. He’s a smart — almost preppy — dresser, and a pretty impressive dancer. He is friends with fellow LA rapper Ty Dolla $ign (who actually raps on “Toot It” — which was sadly not performed), and brought him out partway through the set. He is also friends with fellow LA rapper Snoop Dogg, who also came out partway through the set. Yup, that happened. Crowd lost its shit on cue; Snoop graced us with a tight little run of hits (“Next Episode,” “Nuthin But a G Thang,” “Drop It Like It’s Hot,” YG dancing gleefully beside him); bestowed his avuncular blessing on the good YG, and peaced. Amen. I got a bunch of pretty decent pictures, though one potentially brilliant shot I just barely missed was Snoop’s dramatic, parting passing of his blunt, Sistine Chapel-style, to an outstretched arm from the crowd.
Kelis (10 p.m. @ Stubbs)
Wow. This was — Kelis is — stunning. I’d seen her play before (at the Troc with Robyn), and it was great and fun, but she was embodying an entirely different level of soul diva prowess tonight. First of all she looked incredible, with waist-length cascade of hair and a long, flowing tiered skirt and robe, somehow looking regal and down-home and earth mother-ish and dead sexy all at once. She had a twelve-piece band including full horn section, cloak-sporting trumpet-playing bandleader and animated back-up singers. The material was rich, nuanced, soulful, mostly drawn from her upcoming album, but also including a percussion-heavy rework of “Milkshake” (naturally) and her 2010 single “Acappella” — originally a full-on house/electro dance track — reimagined as a tremendously funky, makossa-like groove. Apparently this was her first live performance since 2010!
HONORABLE MENTIONS
The Twizzler slide (@ the IFC Fairground) Happened across this free, spacious, centrally located, pleasantly grassy pop-up venue/funplex (where we got to hear the very nice Mr. Jeremy Messersmith try his best not to rip off “No Surprises”) which was bizarrely almost empty, despite the fact that it features a super fun, long bumpy three-person slide that you slide down riding on a burlap sack. Great view of downtown from the top, too.
London Grammar (@ Fader Fort) Lovely pretty music, of course, but more notably they win the award for most shruggingly informal stagewear, sunglasses on forehead and everything.
St. Vincent (@ Stubbs) This wasn’t a SXSW set, it was a full 75-minute concert set. Actually no, it was a performance art piece. Annie Clark (a) has been spending lots of quality time with David Byrne — obviously — and (b) has by now fully transformed into a kewpie kabuki goth cyborg alien doll. Meanwhile her music continues to grow increasingly extreme and weird and awesome. Plus she shreds, terrifyingly. But you knew all that already.
Damon Albarn (@ Stubbs)
A minor Southby misfire, a slightly pear-shaped capper to an absolute corker of a day — in that the set started almost an hour late and was cut brutally short (under 40 minutes from what should have been 90). (Unclear why setup/soundcheck took so long; it was a big elaborate band including a mostly inaudible string quartet, one unreasonably dapper guitarist and another who numerous people thought was Johnny Marr — but then Kelis had no time issues with even more people.) Also kind of an odd set, though ultimately he just can’t go wrong with a catalog like that; interspersing the great-sounding, generally downbeat new material with two Gorillaz cuts (“Tomorrow Comes Today” and a weirdly perked-up “Melancholy Hill”), The Good The Bad and the Queen’s “Kingdom of Doom” (rad!) and, strangely, a fairly obscure Blur B-side (“All Your Life.”) He brought out six gospel singers for the rushed finale, and there was a glimmer of possibility that it might be “Tender,” but instead it was some goofy ukulele song about an elephant. Weird.
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