We spent a week zigzagging Austin subsisting on free tacos and sugary drinks alone for SXSW Music this year. ICYMI, these are the best things we saw.
SOAK
The host of a "British Embassy" showcase near 6th street introduced 18-year-old Irish singer-songwriter Bridie Monds-Watson with an unusually vehement plea for silence. "If we can just refrain from talking during the next 30 minutes, we might just have one of the best music experiences of our lives," he said. It was an absurdly high bar to set for a young artist at the beginning of her career, but even if the performance that followed was not necessarily life-changing, it was certainly among the very best we saw all week. SOAK played alone on a stool with only a guitar and her own wonderfully vulnerable and expressive voice as accompaniment. Her songs are powerful and perceptive ruminations on idealism and young love, and by the end of the first song she had brought herself nearly to tears. The audience — rapt and, yes, unusually quiet — was no doubt equally moved.
Tove Lo
Returning to the stage after a few months sidelined with a vocal injury, breakout Swedish pop star Tove Lo was brimming with a mischievous energy that quickly spread among the crowd during her headlining performance at Rolling Stone's showcase Tuesday. She bounded through a string of hedonistic hits including "Stay High" and "Not On Drugs," and briefly flashed the audience during "Talkin' Body," leaving the already overheated crowd panting. Lo's advances didn't go unreciprocated — by the end of the show, she had convinced several front-row fans to strip off their own shirts in a fit of synchronized ecstasy. Book her at your next bachelorette party.
Say what you will about Kitty — and after the New York Times article about authenticity in rap that put her on the map, plenty have — but there is something completely charming about her on stage. She's a nervous ball of hyper self-consciousness, yet she finds the courage to work through it and say what she needs to say, and do what she needs to do. She also performs barefoot, which, on Saturday night at Main II, was a particularly bold choice — the former Emos indoor stage is caked with decades' worth of sweat and god knows what else.
Kitty has left a lot of the rapping behind. She's singing now, and the new batch of songs she performed are ethereal and poppy, and seems to be an attempt to finally free herself from the "Tumblr-core" albatross that weighs her down. It's working.
A.G. Cook
PC Music, the London-based electronic label and collective known for warped, sped-up takes on millennial pop music, took SXSW by storm this year, with many of its artists, including founder A.G. Cook, playing their first shows in America at the conference. Cook, who is press shy, shined during a late-week set at the Hype Machine's Hype Hotel on Saturday, challenging any notions that his meteoric rise has been primarily hype driven. Alone on stage with inscrutable equipment that included neither a laptop nor turntables, he played a set that embraced both the avant-garde and the accessible, with a heavy, but not exclusive, focus on bright, dance-friendly tones and bubbly female vocals. Cook's stage rig gave him fine control over every beat and vocal effect, which he manipulated with dizzying dexterity. Much of PC Music's success is owed to its compelling expression of fresh and specific ideas, and, watching Cook, one gets the distinct impression that its revolution has only just begun.