Better Than: Sitting at home, curled up on the couch reading Proust and listening to NPR.
The Decemberists have asked a lot of their fans on this tour. Anyone who doesn't like its new album, The Hazards of Love, is out of luck: The first part of the show is a front-to-back performance of the sprawling song-cycle, whose plot is too convoluted to spell out here. Let's just say it involves an omniscient narrator (The Rake) who's killed three of his children; a man named William who was turned into
Imagine, if you will, the worst possible way to spend a day at SXSW, one that doesn't involve an emergency colonoscopy or a Marnie Stern showcase, and then imagine something even more tedious and despairing, a day of utter humiliation and loathing. And then it really starts to go downhill.I should have spent the afternoon at Flatstock and the night shooting kamikazes in one of Austin's 43 slut bars.
Anyone with doubts about the '90s resurgence had them laid to rest at SXSW this year, where a long list of the decade's biggest acts tried out new material or trotted out old hits for kicks. The list of these performers makes me nostalgic for the simpler days of 120 Minutes and Doc Martens with dresses: Metallica, Marcy Playground, Dinosaur Jr, Crystal Method, Primal Scream and Tori Amos, with Peter Murphy and Echo & the Bunnymen on the margins of the decade's influence.
The latter half of t
Where to begin? I should start with the ornamental comb, like three white gleaming stakes from some Gnostic purification ritual, holding a jet-black stack of hair atop the fiery head of Polly Jean Harvey. She's never wanted for making an impression. Wrapped in white, backed by a hard avant-garde blues band (the warm up music was a Howlin Wolf mix) that looked like they'd just gotten away clean from an S & L hold up circa 1945, PJ approached her "showcase" (a ridiculous concept in her case) l
