Sound on Sound Fest 2016: Speed Analysis of Sunday Lineup (7:00 to end)

Man, now is where the schedule gets meaty and awesome, but I'm going to be hard pressed to get my crew to stay for the late night stuff on a Sunday night in Bastrop.  Wish me luck, folks.  I'm going to need it.

7:10

• Baio.  Dance-y indie pop grooves, by the guy who plays bass guitar for Vampire Weekend.  "Sunburn Modern" is a pretty tight groove instrumental, and the most popular track is more of a Vampire Weekend-style tune, "Sister of Pearl" with 7.3 million streams.  I'd go watch this guy.
• The Monkey Wrench.  So, I bought an album by this band when I was in high school, based solely on the fact that it was from the Sub Pop label and I was jonesing for more Nirvana.  Clean as a Broke Dick Dog.  Never did understand that album name.  The band is a couple of dudes from Mudhoney along with a few other guys from the Seattle music scene of the 90's, although it looks like they haven't done any music in a long time.  Nothing available on Spotify, all I have are my fuzzy memories of skuzzy grunge-ish tunes that sound like Mudhoney.  I'd go see them do it again.

7:55

• Young Thug.  More rap from the AutoTune generation of rappers talkin' loud but ain't sayin' nothin'.  Atlanta guy, and he has some good trap beats on some of his tracks, but much of his lyrical output is just a waste of time.  His most popular track, which somehow has an RIAA platinum designation, is "Best Friend."  I present to you, the hook from this song, per Genius: "That's my best friend, that's my best friend, flexin', Big ol' booty bitch missus from Texas, what's next is, I'm gon' skeet off, lil nigga come catch me, catch me, And that's my bestie, my bestie, my best friend, go best friend, Nigga livin' TTG and everything is still on fleek, Bad bitch rollin' wit' me, she gon' smile 'cause she on fleek, Hundred thousand dollars inside my pants, my shit on fleek, Hey-yeah! Yeah."  Yeah.  The music that once allowed Chuck D to raise issues with 911 and Hollywood, or Eazy E and Ice Cube to blast on corrupt cops, is now the nonsensical brand of idiocy being used for nothing.

8:15

• Bob Mould.  Bob Mould is awesome.  I dug him as a kid and have enjoyed his most recent album as well.  I'd love to go see Bob Mould do his thing.
• White Lung.  Lady singer over lite punk tunes.  Their bio calls them an indie rock group, but I wouldn't call these tunes indie.  Meh.

9:15/9:20

• Courtney Barnett.  I love Courtney Barnett so very much.  I want to see her play so bad.  I doubt I'll get to do it, but she is so great.
• STRFKR.  When pulling up this band name (add some vowels to figure out how to pronounce that name) I figured this was going to be some EDM garbage.  Its actually pretty good indie pop/rock electro type stuff.  Pretty cool.  Another band with no new music.  Weird how that appears to be the thing with bands playing this Fest.  I wonder how much a band costs if they have new music versus if their last album is 5 years old?
• Protomartyr.  With this being on the death metal stage, I thought for sure that this was going to be some scary scream-core satan-swabbing stuff, instead, its actually pretty chilled and pleasant indie and lite punk.  "Maidenhead" makes me think of Real Estate with a few quick forays into noise.  This is good, but if I were still at the grounds at this time I'd be watching Barnett.

10:25

• Big Freedia.  This kind of music is apparently called "bounce," which sounds like rap that is faster and more dance focused.  Wikipedia says "Bounce is characterized by call-and-response-style party and Mardi Gras Indian chants and dance call-outs that are frequently hypersexual." Mmmmkay.  Don't hear that, but whatever.  Freedia was born Freddy, but while he says he is not transgender, he wears women's clothes and prefers being called "she."  Just one album, 2014's Just Be Free, is available on Spotify, and it is pretty fun, but it is hyped up.  She actually sounds a little bit like KRS-One.  You are not going to chill at any point in this show, you are going to be bouncing your ass off the entire time.
• Baroness.  These guys are freaking bad ass.  I did a Quick Hit about their most recent album, Purple, a while back.  Brawny metal tunes, and kind of a medieval theme about their cover art, so maybe they'll be the ones who are playing the castle-top and slaying dragons with their mighty riffage.

10:45

• Explosions in the Sky.  Yo no comprende how this band would be a headliner for this Fest. These dudes make the blandly lovely instrumental music that you hear in your mind when you think of Friday Night Lights.  I listened to their most recent album a few months ago and was unimpressed.  Its fine background music to just make a mood with, but a festival band?  Just seems weird.

11:40

• A-Trak.  Big EDM guy.  Don't care for it, but I get the appeal of dropping acid for a midnight bout of freaking out in a huge crowd in a forest surrounded by the trappings of medieval life.  This is one of those guys where, if you aren't paying attention on Spotify, you'll have to listen to the same damn song for 9 hours straight.
• Carcass.  God.  I mean, what kind of life have you lived when this is what you want to do at 11:40 on a Sunday night?  This is the kind of music I imagine the Marines play after they duct tape headphones onto an Iraqi prisoner when they want to torture information out of the guy. "Oh, yeah, you won't tell me about where you've got Bin Laden holed up?  Have some "Heartwork" at volume level 11."

I think it would be perfectly reasonable to make my kids stay up until midnight so that we can all watch Baroness together and then drive back to Austin.  Their elementary school teachers will fully understand the need to rock versus their need to pay attention to grammar lessons.

This is all going to be MUCH further afield than my normal music tastes, and absolutely outside the norm for the wife and kids, but I'm looking forward to it anyway.

Sound of Sound Fest 2016: Speed Analysis of Sunday Lineup (4:00 to 7:00-ish)

I get to go see the Sunday lineup for Sound on Sound Fest, the new festival from the folks who did Fun Fun Fun Fest, so I'm checking out the bands this week to see what I'll get to hear this weekend. You can see my thoughts about the first three hours here.

Before I get to the next few hours, a thought about the venue.  I think this sounds like it is going to be amazing.  About 30 miles east of Austin, in the pine forest of Bastrop, the Sherwood Forest Faire is a full-on medieval village nerd-fest with a castle and jousting stadium and the whole 9 yards.  So freaking weird.  For the sake of convenience, I would much prefer that this was held downtown at the Auditorium Shores or Waterloo Park, where FFFF was held.  But since this is what we have, I gotta say this place looks kinda rad.  I don't know if the bands will play from the top of the castle, but in my opinion, they should set up and jam out on the parapets. All of the hip kids Snapchats would be so cool and full of quips about Shrek or whatever castle-centric movie would resonate with a 20 year old these days.  For my old man generation, we'll be quoting the Knights Who Say Ni! the entire time.

On to the bands in the middle of the day on Sunday:

4:00

• Recover.  Never heard of these dudes before, but their music is actually really good.  I just kept listening to it for about an hour longer than I intended.  Austin band, doing an emo rock thing like Taking Back Sunday and Dashboard Confessionals.  No new music on Spotify since 2011, so maybe this is a big reunion show or something?  Their most popular tracks are from a 2002 EP called Leci n'est pas recover, which translates to Recover Kinda Kicks Ass, in French.  I think.  My French is a little rusty from high school.

 4:25

• The Frights.  Sweet!  Started daydreaming during the first track and thought this was FIDLAR after a little while.  This is awesomely fun pop punk lo-fi-ness.  I definitely want to see them play live.
• Youth Code.  I think I've figured out at least one aspect of this lineup poster.  While it is not as simple as the old FFFF poster that had a black stage where all the metal and scary shit lived, now I understand that the band playing The Keep stage is going to be the scary shit and death metal.  This stuff is some Front 242-sounding industrial music and yelling.  I do not want to hear this music any more.

5:00

• Open Mike Eagle.  Some smart sounding rap music.  When I first pulled up his music, it almost looks like this was going to be spoken word stuff or something, because the song titles are things like "Dark Comedy Late Show" and "Admitting the Endorphin Addiction."  His 2016 album is called Hella Personal Film Festival.  He says "ghost fart" in a song.  I like this stuff.
• Old Man Gloom.  Yikes.  Black stage action right here - heavy hardcore screaming.

5:30

• Wale.  This guy is an odd one to me.  In my mind, I like his a lot, because he is name-checked and part of the wonderfully tacky and amazing "No Hands."  But really, I'm not much for his actual songs.  They are fine, but when I tried his Seinfeld-influenced and -assisted The Album About Nothing, I was mildly into it and never listened to the album again.  His two most popular tracks are "MY PYT" (36 million streams) and "Ride Out" (60.7 million streams).  The fact that he co-opts the King of Pop's "PYT" just hacks me off, especially when the song bites the rhythm to "Sexual Healing" and just sounds stupid.  Pretty weak R&B flavored rap junk.  Maybe I'll go check this, or take the kids to find a taco during this time or something.  Don't care to see him.

6:05

• Kero Kero Bonito.  WTF, dude.  Her most popular track ("Flamingo") starts with a chant asking how many shrimps you'd have to eat before your skin turns pink, then devolves into a sweet Zamfir pipe tune, then the lyrics are in Japanese.  The music in this song is simple, weird, synth stuff.  According to Wikipedia, they are a band of three people from England. Freaking weird, man.
• Cherubs.  Oh man, I am so grateful for that "s" at the end of this band name.  At first, I thought this was going to be Cherub, who came to ACL a year ago, are kind of disco-frat-boy-pop, and are so very terrible.  Instead, this is Cherubs, who are more of an angry punk crush.  They are apparently local, and their top song on Spotify ("Stag Party") includes the sound of a phone left off the hook in the background, which is an awful sound.  The band had a few mid 90's albums (1992, 1994, and 1996) before they quit, but apparently got back together recently to release 2015's 2 Ynfynyty and 2016's Fist in the Air,  a 3 song EP.  This is good stuff, heavy, sludgy rock ("Donkey Suite" or "Red Carpet Blues") and brighter, drum-machine, Strokes-ian punk ("Fist in the Air").  The 2015 album is good too, kind of a Queens of the Stone Age cock rock vibe.  Maybe I can get the kids to jam out to this for 30 minutes.

6:40

• Thursday.  Emo rock.  Their top song sounds familiar ("Understanding in a Car Crash") but I don't know that I knew these guys before just now.  No recent albums, and according to their bio, they were a "significant player in the early 21st century's post-hardcore scene."  That phrase makes them sound significantly more important than they probably are, as though the early oughts post-hardcore scene was some sort of key moment in the history of human existence.  The band broke up in 2013, but has apparently pulled an LCD Soundsystem and reunited for a cash grab tour with no new music. These tunes are fine, but if there was anything else going on at the same time, I might go do that.

I'm a little worried about the bands in this 6 o'clock zone.  If the wife and kids aren't having an exciting time right about here, the wife is going to start dropping hints about bedtime and school in the morning and how long it is to drive back home, and we are going to lose momentum on this thing. Hopefully there will be some jousting or sword fights or dragons that we can watch for a bit to psych them back up to stick around.  More to come.

Sound on Sound Fest 2016: Speed Analysis of Sunday Lineup (1:30 to 3:30)

Alrighty then!  Happy November, chumps!
ACL may be over for another year (long live ACL!) but the music just keeps on rolling around here.  Because I am a big time player in the music industry, I managed to score two passes to the Sunday chunk of Sound on Sound Fest.  Before I show up, the exceedingly anal slice of my brain just absolutely needs to go listen to everything that I might get to hear, so that I can categorize and analyze every last second of a potential moment before it might occur unscripted.  Not really, I just want to check out some new tunes!  Right?  Right?!?

So, what is SOS, you ask?  If you remember Fun Fun Fun Fest, this is the phoenix rising up from the ashes of that fest.  For reasons that I've never seen made clear, Stratus Properties owned a portion of local promoter Transmission Entertainment, and earlier this year they bought out the rest.  This led to the creation of a new booking/music company, excellently named in homage to Fugazi, called Margin Walker.  I guess the real estate nerds at Stratus still own the FFFF name, so Margin Walker fired up a new fest named Sound on Sound, that sticks to the same general ethos as the FFFF did - medium level stars, leaning more alternative and off the beaten path, with some cool reunions or strange mashups.  The big headliners for this year are Phantogram, Run the Jewels, Big Boi, Beach House, and Courtney Barnett.  Then some old school stuff is tucked into the lineup as well, like the Dead Milkmen, Guided by Voices, and Monkeywrench.

Anyway, I only get Sunday, which I was pumped about because of Courtney Barnett, but sadly she doesn't go on until 9:15, and I'm taking the kids, so my guess is that I'll miss my time with the greatest new songwriter on the block.  But the kids are free, and I selfishly left them out of ACL, so let's make it up to them by showing them something called Sailor Poon, right?  Let's see who I might be able to see:

1:30:  I'm probably going with Wolfe, although Poon would be fun, but I'm scared about the questions my daughters will ask after that show.

• Emily Wolfe.  Great bluesy rock woman.  "Swoon" is her biggest hit and its poppy enough but still great fuzzy rock song.  I like it.
• Psychic Twin.  "Strangers" starts like the theme from Stranger Things, and then a lady starts singing.  Its not bad, but Wolfe wins my vote.
• Sailor Poon.  Easily wins the award for best band name,  I mean, no contest here. However, no music available on Spotify, so loses major points from the German judge. BUT THEN, HOLY CRAP, THEIR SONG "Leather Daddy" IS AMAZING. https://vimeo.com/160481575. Sample Lyrics from the chorus: "Eat me OUT!  Buy me SHOES!  Make me CUM!  And then please leave!"  I need more of this band.

2:20: Leopold wins the hour.

• Leopold & his Fiction.  Loved these guys when they came to ACL in 2015.  Would enjoy checking them out again.  No new music available on Spotify, which is too bad, but I still like the old stuff.
• BoomBaptist.  I can't take the name, man.  Makes me imagine a Baylor student rapper who is trying really hard to keep it real while still living his life for Jesus.  "Art Briles loves Jesus! Now I'mma followin' Leviticus!  Got that Baylor Line spirit, cause I'm just a BoomBaptist! Yo!"  Instead, this is electronic stuff with zero listens on Spotify except for "Happy to Be Sad," which has about 205k for some sort of chilled dance post-club jam that slides into a simple disco beat dance.  Doubt I'd do this one.
• Die Young.  There are three bands called "Die Young" on Spotify, but the photo on the one called "Die Young [TX]" looks like the photo on the SoS website, so I'm going with that one. Only two of their songs have more than 1k listens, so we're not killing it on the popularity front.  Oh lord, now I know why.  "The Last Good Age" is some growl/scream metal hardcore that holds no punches.  I should make my kids go listen to this for a song.

3:10/ 3:20: Well, toss up here but I suspect we'll go give Night Drive a shot.

• Bully.  I listened to their most recent album (Feels Like from 2015) and reviewed it at the end of last year, and really enjoyed a few tracks, especially "Trying."  Although if I think she's screamy, the wife might leave me if I took her to this one.  I remember all too clearly the time I took the wife to FFFF and thought she might enjoy the Riverboat Gamblers.  She hated the Riverboat Gamblers.
• Night Drive.  These guys came to ACL a few years ago, and while this brand of 80's nostalgia electro is fine, I avoided seeing them back then and would almost definitely do the same here. I'd still like to see a short film of the first time these guys met each other and figured out their connection to one another.
• Illustrations.  Cookie monster-type scream metal death sadness.  I couldn't even finish a single song.

Now that I've realized just how long this is going to get, I'm going to split this up into a few chunks. More to come!