Before I start off I'm going to let you all know that I wasn't lucky enough to attend any of the concerts at SXSW but I did watch a taped performance of one band who played and it provided my fianceé and me with endless amusement.
My future wife, her little sister, and I decided to spend a weekend in rural Austin and go fishing on Lake Travis but cold temps and high winds hampered those plans. We kind of toyed with the idea of going down to sixth street to catch some of the free shows but given the weather and crowds we decided that would be a bad plan. On Friday night Rachael and I were sitting on the couch after her grandparents (whose house we were staying at, in Lakeway for those you familiar with Austin) went to bed and were watching some reruns of SXSW shows on the TV that had taken place earlier in the week.
The first band we watched made us laugh incessantly at their heavy-handed use of indie-rocker clichés like slightly discordant group harmony and thick framed glasses. The music they played was boring and self-indulgent stuff that I think I could have written in an hour if I really focused but from their behavior and how seriously they appeared to take themselves you'd think they were playing the Brandenburg Concerto. The band members faces were painted with affected grimaces of "ooh look I'm an artist!!!" and the lead vocalist's motions were jerky and twitchy giving the appearance of a long duration but low-intensity, grand mal seizure (if that image makes any sense to your brain). I don't mind erratic dancing during a performance and often times it can really add to the experience (e.g. the crazy but undeniably cool "dead fly dance" that Ian Curtis would engage during Joy Division performances). If the dancing is filled with pathos and feeling it doesn't matte how strange it is because the dancer is showing us that he's got soul and that's he's become a conduit for the music him and his band are playing (I'm not going to try to impress and libs with gender-neutral pronouns). However, the frontman of Freelance Whales did this sort of weird, unsettling, bouncy, bobbing movement that made me think he was trying way too hard. The singing didn't make me want to excuse his annoying behavior either; just like Owl City the lead vocals seemed to be modeled directly after Ben Gibbard's work in the Postal Service. I'm not knocking Gibbard. I love Deathcab and the Postal Service. I just am sick of hearing people rip him off and rip him off in such an unoriginal way. I mean imitation is flattery but it's not very flattering here.
The other thing Freelance Whales did to arouse my musical ire was how they went out of their way to play unconventional instruments for no reason whatsoever. My favorite instances of this was how the frontman had a banjo over his shoulder for a whole song and played all of four notes on the thing. That's a tactic invented to remove the panties of fawning, art-school, hipster girls who will fuck anything wearing horn-rimmed glasses. The technique was repeated with all sorts of instruments including a weird accordion thing (I'm ashamed, being a musician, for not knowing what it's called) where the person playing it used it to produce annoyingly long, superfluous, multi-measure, whole notes that had no place.
If you look up "trying too hard" in the dictionary you're sure to find "Freelance Whales" somewhere on the page. If you think I'm being too mean then I want you to see them live too and tell me they don't look like a bunch of stupid hipster pricks trying to make some money of off their stupid hipster fan base. They're an embodiment everything that's wrong with indie-rock music. I mean their music isn't terrible but I guess when you add in the starving artist, hipster aesthetic, uninspired vocals, and a bunch of stereotypes that's when I get turned off.
I'm going to share some interesting punk music with you courtesy of a reader who contacted me from Brazil. His band is called Zefirina Bomba and was started in the quiet town of Joao Pessoa. Ilsom said that the tranquility of the town inspired the band's sharply contrasting, loud and subversive sound.
