Kevin Bronson on March 14th, 2014

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[The snack chip saleslady played a show Thursday night, and a bunch of other attention-whoring A-listers were seen crashing SXSW as well. I missed them all and have no regrets, although the tearful fans left standing on Red River Street outside the snack chip saleslady’s show probably had some. Heard something about vomit. At least it wasn’t mine.]

(@krbronson) on Wednesday at SXSW:

The Strypes answered an ages-old question at the 1100 Warehouse on Thursday evening: You can play blues and chew gum at the same time. The four lads from Cavan, Ireland – seemingly still a few years away from their first shave – are a hot item right now, especially among people who really really really want guitar rock to make a comeback.  Y’know, so Arctic Monkeys won’t feel so lonely at the top of all those festival bills. The Strypes play dirty blues, they play punk blues and they play British blues, and they do it with all the requisite mic-swinging, guitar-slinging moxie of their forebears, many of which probably have toe jam older than frontman Ross Farrelly and guitarist Josh McClorey. The quartet’s debut album “Snapshot” came out last fall in the U.K., and finally this week in the U.S.; the fact that it bears the strong odor of homage is less about these teenaged would-be phenoms than it is about how hard it is, six-plus decades later, to sound terribly original doing the blues. Their raucous set, interrupted briefly when an amp went south, induced a lot of head-bobbing. And a lot of those heads had gray hair. Here’s to a great future and chewing-gum sponsorships – carry on, my un-wayward sons.

And then …

The pride of Bowling Green, Ky., Sleeper Agent, took over after the Strypes and delivered a winning set of pop-punk-cum-indie-rock replete with all the mandatory hooks and gang choruses. The sextet’s new album “About Last Night” comes out next week,and singer Alex Kandel has a charisma similar to Hayley Williams of Paramore, so you’ll be hearing plenty more from them. Or, if not Sleeper Agent, then the band that followed them at the 1100 Warehouse, L.A.’s Echosmith, who have an eerily similar sound and vibe.

Remember ‘Intelligent Dance Music?’

You feel as if your IQ went up a couple of points after witnessing the unique stylings of the London duo Public Service Broadcasting. They go by the names J. Willgoose, Esq., and Wrigglesworth, and at the British Music Embassy the bow-tied duo came off as the Bill Nye The Science Guys of electro-pop. Theirs is an audio-visual show – dance music synched to archival films, with sampled, tweaked vocals over live instrumentation such as guitar, banjo, keys and drums. Damned if it isn’t fun. Even without their visual bag of tricks, though, their melodic, rhythmically agile music has a special craft. Nerds win, again.

From Brazil, with love

You didn’t need to speak a single word of Portugese to fall for Boogarins, the young quartet from central Brazil built around singer-guitarist Fernando Almeida and multi-instrumentalist Benke Ferraz. “It’s amazing to be in the U.S. for the first time,” Almeida said in halting English, with a smile so wide you could see it from the southern hemisphere. Boogarins’ psychedelic pop ranges from concise and hooky to sprawling, ’70s-styled jams played as if the band were leading a seance. Fans of Tame Impala and the American psych-rock revivalists will love it; even their vinyl looks straight out of 1970. It’s a great thing when language is no barrier.

Solids, solid

Alas, the only disappointment of the night was being shut out of the British Music Embassy in an attempt to see hot U.K. duo Royal Blood. Thankfully, just down the block were Canadian duo Solids at the M for Montreal showcase, making a delicious racket that fans of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Japandroids and Metz would feast on. Xavier Germain-Poitras and Louis Guillemette deal in dense, overdriven guitar and intense, overwhelming shout-singing, and there’s a musical quality that elevates all of it above mere noise. If only we could have found those earplugs.

Local beat …

Could hardly have asked for a better afternoon breather that to hit the Radio Day Stage in the Austin Convention Center, which on Thursday was hosted by our own KCSN (88.5 FM). On this afternoon, it meant a brief refresher course on PAPA, NO, Real Estate and Dum Dum Girls.

Postcript, in photos

And, below, a random gallery from around Austin: