News in Brief: Georgia Theatre, Shunda K, Throw Me the Statue, Street Scene

Photo by Alyssa De Hayes

-- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Athens' Georgia Theatre, a longtime center for the Athens music scene, suffered extensive damage in a fire this morning. There were no injuries, but the entire building was destroyed except for the exterior. The cause of the fire isn't yet known. The venue was set to play host to a number of bands during next week's Athfest.

-- Shunda K, a member of the Tampa-based dance-rap crew Yo Majesty, has parted ways with Domino Records, Yo Majesty's label. She's also released two new mixtapes for free download. One of them, The Best Eva Written: OutKast, features Shunda spitting over OutKast instrumentals. The other, Kollaborations, consists of team-ups with artists like Peaches and Tha Pumpsta.

-- On August 4, Secretly Canadian will release Creaturesque, the sophomore album from Seattle indie-poppers Throw Me the Statue. West Coast indie go-to guy Phil Ek produces.

-- August 28-29, the 25th incarnation of the Street Scene festival will take over San Diego's East Village. This year's lineup includes M.I.A., Modest Mouse, the Dead Weather, Devendra Banhart, Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, Band of Horses, Girl Talk, Mastodon, No Age, Deerhunter, and, um, the Black Eyed Peas.

Posted by Tom Breihan on June 19, 2009 at 12:25 p.m.

Tags: Album, Festival, Georgia Theatre, mixtape, Shunda K, Street Scene, Throw Me the Statue

Email Link

Monday, March 17

SXSW: Saturday [Paul Thompson]

Throw Me the Statue [Palm Door; 12 p.m.]

"Did you all get a chance to have breakfast?", Throw Me the Statue's goofily kinetic bell player asked the crusty-eyed few at the capacious Palm Door just as I walked in the room, a few minutes after noon. Breakfast? Who has time down here? I was tripping over myself to get to Throw Me the Statue's brief set at some Seattle-centric day party I found out about mere minutes before they were scheduled to go on and picked the last bit of bagel from the corner of my mouth just as I walked up the stairs and into the hall. I hustled, 'cuz I very much wanted to hear "Lolita" from the Emerald City band's recently-reissued Moonbeams , one of my favorite songs of 2008 (so what if it's a couple years old at this point?), and my hustle paid off: After the breakfast inquisition, I was granted my bouncy "Lolita" and a mess of other good ones besides.

TMTS main man Scott Reitherman piles hook after hook onto each song, any one of which a lesser band might try to squeeze a whole tune out of. Which isn't to say they're all great, but they do stick in your head at a fairly good rate, and I found myself singing along to Moonbeams tracks I didn't know I remembered so well. "About to Walk" cuts GBV's late-period riffy pop with a little Death Cab serenity, and Reitherman shares both Mr. Pollard's and Mr. Gibbard's fixation on the meaningfully random. "This is the earliest we've ever played a show before," one of them remarked, a little amused. Not a bad way to kick off an afternoon, though, eh?

Saviours [Waterloo Records; 2 p.m.]

Man, in-stores are the worst. You can never see anything, you're always standing in front of somebody and too riddled with guilt about it to enjoy yourself, you always get distracted by King Tubby box sets or what-have-you, and it always ends too soon. Still, Waterloo Records is a beautiful, well-stocked record store (seriously, Austin, heed this unsolicited advertisement and shop there often), and kudos to them for actually having a stage-- or a drum riser, anyway-- to help alleviate at least some of the usual crap that goes along with rocking out amidst the record racks. And Saviours, for a metal band, were a pretty good fit for the scenario: They're spirited without being overbearing, possessed with an astute sense of rhythm, and just the right kind of metal to nod your head in agreement with while your eyes wander towards the rows of used CDs. Their recent Into Abaddon 's one of the better metal records I've heard thus far this year, and they played it out with patience, precision, and zeal; plus, frontman Austin Barber looks a hell of a lot like ill-fated Metallica bassist Cliff Burton, which makes him hard to take your eyes off. I mean, it was a fairly technical metal band doing an in-store in the early afternoon, and they seemed just about as hungover as the crowd, so it was a far from ideal context for appreciating these guys. Still, they delivered more than expected under the circumstances, and I caught a glimpse of Eugene Mirman flipping through Chuck Berry CDs.

Ice Cube [Auditorium Shores Stage; 8 p.m.]

I got to Ice Cube's set at the gargantuan Auditorium Shores outdoor shack a few minutes before he was scheduled to go on, because, well, honestly, I had no idea Auditorium Shores was the kind of place, on a normal night, Travis Tritt might play. I'd spent the last several days catching indie rock shows in sweltering basements and fenced-in backyards, and I guess Ice Cube's recent history as the silliest actor in Hollywood led me to believe his draw as a rapper had waned a bit, so arriving to a crowd several thousand strong was both a shock and a delight. Ice Cube made three of the best rap albums ever after the demise of N.W.A., each building on the Bomb Squad's squalid sonic innovations with Public Enemy and Cube's ferocious, sometimes shockingly blunt rhyme style. Not a whole lot past his uneven fourth LP, Lethal Injection , has really been worth hearing, but Cube's a preternaturally gifted entertainer (confession: I love each and every one of his silly movies) with a new LP to plug, and if a few thousand folks want to lay out blankets on a balmy Austin evening and catch the man plugging his new album, well, I was glad to be far from the basement shows and out among 'em, if only for an hour or so.

Blasting off with his trademark "yay-YAY," Cube tore into the set like he'd never made Are We There Yet? , let alone a sequel. Accompanied by his longtime associate WC, he threw out the hits quick'n'easy, from "Natural Born Killaz" to "Bow Down" (before which a pair of hilariously gigantic "westside" hands were inflated onstage) to a parade of N.W.A. classics. Cube worked the crowd like the pro he's always been, cracking wise, crip-walking all over the huge stage, and betting Dub-C a cool grand as to which side of the audience was the livest. It was a draw, if you must know. "I feel good tonight, man," Cube brought to our attention. "Know why? 'Cuz we're live on uvntv.com, with that Microsoft Silverlight technology." Man, who would've thought a medium of data conveyance could lighten up such an intense dude? "And," he said, "because we're at South by South motherfucking West."

Cube's set was a whole lot different than all the stuff going on a few blocks northeast of Auditorium Shores, but it did give a lot of people-- including a lot of small children who I hope don't hear this much cursing on a normal day-- the chance to see some fine live music without having to wade through the downtown madness to bear witness. I had planned to duck out on Cube to check out London's fantastically obtrusive $hit & $hine at the Scoot Inn, but how could I leave something so unexpectedly great? Near the end of his set, Cube launched into a brilliant rant about the dismal state of the music business, saving some choice words for the major labels and making note of the role of the internet in the future of music, which did my heart good. But not as good as "It Was a Good Day"-- still the world's most powerful legal mood-enhancer-- or the fact that Ice Cube the movie star just reminded a lot of people that, hey, he's still a fine rapper with some not too awful sounding new material. Musical material, anyway: IMDB reports that Cube will soon appear in Comeback , directed by one Fred Durst.

Constantines [The Parish; 10 p.m.]

I don't carry the same baggage my buddy Dave Maher does with regard to the Constantines, which may explain my more favorable impression of the Canadian crew's set at the showcase put on by their new label Arts & Crafts. I've never seen 'em live before, and though I do enjoy their records a good deal-- particularly Shine a Light -- I figured a tightly wound set featuring some husky, well-timed vocals from Bryan Webb would do. I got that, all right, but Constantines did more to impress.

It's a little hard to put one's finger on just why I thought they were so so good: They hold back, hinting at a blow-out that only occasionally comes made all the more satisfying by its infrequency, riling up the crowd by rolling through their terse tunes with only a little added live muscle, and letting Webb do his thing all over them. When they go for it, it's astonishing: "Nighttime Anytime (It's Alright)" is one of the more well-crafted songs of the decade, and live, they really peal out the back end with those prickly guitars and that still-remarkable hook.

The rest of the set found them playing with this loud-soft dynamic to tremendous effect, and by the time it was over, I was simultaneously all riled up and all smiles. I overheard Dave and Bryan talking a little later in the evening, and Webb called it the worst set they'd played in Austin, too jazzy, full of blue notes. But it's those occasional rough patches that give the otherwise musically straightforward Constantines their palpable grit, and if this is, as Dave wrote the other day, "grown man" music, well sir, these guys make being a grown man sound like a pretty rocky thing.

Jason Collett [The Parish; 11 p.m.]

If the Constantines borrow a trick or two from Springsteen (fair use, I'd say), labelmate Jason Collett's more of a Mellencamp. Like Johnny Cougar, his tidy tunes have a little genial country edge to 'em, but he's a better singer than songwriter, and his spare arrangements and occasionally unremarkable melodies are really more pleasant than great. Live, Collett's easygoing tunes don't inspire a whole lot of passion, though they're no chore to stand through, unless, of course, you're the permadancing bassist in his totally underused backing band just looking for something to do.

Collett's tunes are simple and direct-- both good things-- but there's just not a whole lot to 'em, and though you want to root for the guy, you realize after Jason and company meander through yet another one just why Jason's fellow Broken Social Scenester Kevin Drew gets more love. There are chops here, for sure, but Collett probably ought to spend a little more time on honing them: 2006's Idols of Exile and the recent Here's to Being Here aren't a heck of a lot different from one another in many ways, with each tune trying desperately to out-mellow the next. Collett seems like a kindly fellow and I certainly don't dislike his music one bit: I'm just far from blown away, and I'm not sure just how long I can hold out for him to pen his "Cherry Bomb".

Los Campesinos! [The Parish; 12 a.m.]

I've seen one or all of Los Campesinos! out at a good many of the shows I've caught at SXSW, unassumedly taking their places among the crowds and always looking like they were just damn glad to be there. They are, it would appear, music fans first and a top-notch indie pop band second: Gareth Campesino even berated the capacity crowd at the Parish for choosing his band over Times New Viking, who were playing somewhere else in town at the same time. I love TNV more than the next guy-- I saw them three times this week, after all-- but I was still awfully glad about the choice I had made this evening.

So how were they? Just amazing. Bounding onto the stage with "Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats", they were twice as much raucous, exuberant fun onstage as they are on record. At one point, Aleksandra danced her way across the stage, dodging a madly pogoing Gareth and all the rest to tell the soundman to turn up her monitor, when most bands would've just, you know, made the request into the microphone at a quiet time. There's just no quiet time with these kids: They tear through their songs, bopping up and down and making a glorious clatter with every move. You do catch a little bit of a "how did we get here?" expression on their faces and inflection in Gareth's stage banter from time to time, which is perfectly understandable: A year ago, it would've been inconceivable that this lot would be going on after seasoned vets like the Constantines and a guy from BSS (of whom I can only imagine they're fans), but there they were, and deservedly so.

Untangling the cables and setting the levels of the the seven Campesinos! proved more of a chore than the showcase organizers must've thought it'd be, so Gareth-- to a chorus of disappointed groans-- told us that he'd been told they've have to cut things a bit short. That in mind, he noted "this is the motherfucking megamix" before launching into a cover of The Wedding Present's Pavement's 1989 "Box Elder" and, seamlessly, "You! Me! Dancing!". You're right, man: That is a motherfucking megamix. They closed things out, probably to the chagrin of some official sort looking at their watch, with "Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks", which, at some point, found Gareth hopping into the crowd and singing along. He was hard to recognize among the likeminded sorts watching on.

I had a real good time at SXSW this year, but you know who I suspect had an even better one? This bunch.