Kevin Bronson on March 17th, 2013

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[And so the last of our five days at South by Southwest came to a close – getting wowed by baby bands, plowed by the crowds and, at the end, sipping a colored drink on a rooftop watching Smashing Pumpkins rage through a free show while Prince and Justin Timberlake played free shows only blocks away. Only in Austin.]

@KRBronson on Saturday at SXSW:

One of the great puzzles of South by Southwest is sorting out your first impressions of a band versus the chatter you’ve heard from everybody else. And so it was with Peace, a four-piece from Birmingham, England, who in the space of 30 minutes at the British Embassy showcase on Saturday night recalled a whole slew of British guitar bands young and old. With only an EP to their credit, the quartet of Harrison and Sam Koisser, Douglas Castle and Dominic Boyce are probably not even sure yet what they should sound like themselves – but a lot of what they’re throwing against the wall sticks. One moment they come off as a eyeliner-less Cure; the next they invoke to tumultuous layers of Ride; and at still others they recall the spry guitars and beats of Wu Lyf, the druggy bliss of Kasabian and the testosterone-added pop of newbies like the Vaccines and Bombay Bicycle Club. A pal even mentioned fellow Birmingham veterans Ocean Colour Scene. A lot to process, to be sure, especially with Harrison sporting thrift-store blue-striped bell bottoms and vintage Led Zep T-shirt beneath a fur-trimmed coat. We’ll be back for more.

Also notable …

Frightened Rabbit make music the way God and Bono intended – vein-popping exhortations on frailties both personal and communal, punctuated by crescendo after crescendo of choruses, adding up to catharsis on a stadium scale. The Scottish outfit’s new album “Pedestrian Verse” is not really stuff made for quick-hitting SXSW showcases, but their truncated late-afternoon set at the Onion AV Club’s party at Mohawk still lit up the outdoor theater. Frontman Scott Hutchison got typically red-faced, and the band’s faithful assumed a knowing glow when he sung “We’ll speak in our secret tongues” (from the single “The Woodpile”). He’s good at intimacy like that, and charismatic with his humor too. Clearly wrung out from the week’s activities (they gigged in L.A. before jetting Austin), Hutchison said, “This is our last show of SXSW. … And I’m here drinking water that looks like hand sanitizer.”

Rlly stpd bnd nm … (but)

As annoying as we find vowel-deficient band names, RDGLDGRN (Red Gold Green) brings a lot of life to the PRTY. The D.C. quintet crashed the British Embassy showcase earlier Saturday, bringing with them a healthy dose of dance-floor diplomacy. The principals in the band identify themselves only as Red, Gold and Green (groan) and dress accordingly (sharp), and once they launched into their hip-hop/garage-rock/disco funk hybrid, nobody cared about colors. If you like your hip-hop and dance music played like rock – i.e., no robot beats here – their EP “Red Gold Green” (out in Febuary) could be your thing. Put these guys on tour with the aforementioned Spirit Animal, and they’d bring some houses down.

Ace songs

We first discovered Chris Snyder via his ThreeSixFive project – as Ace Reporter, he recorded and released a song a day for the entirety of 2010. (And a startling number of them were very good.) The ex-frontman of the States followed that project with a series of EPs and, finally, the full-length “Yearling,” which came out on February on Ooh La La Records. The label’s day party at Bourbon Girl was interrupted by a between-set marriage proposal, before Ace Reporter, now loud and proud as a quartet, roared through songs with galloping rhythms, outsized power chords and densely harmonized guitars. The intimacy of Snyder’s DIY recordings is long gone in the new live presentation – the keen atmospherics and bombast in the fleshed-out songs at times suffocated their emotional subtleties (see “Guilttrip”), but there’s no mistaking their impact.

If our legs weren’t in lockdown, we might have danced

Some of the icy cool beats in Australian quartet’s Mitzi’s songs sound like pings on a submarine’s radar, which briefly made me wonder how they traversed the Pacific for this U.S. tour. The quartet’s electro is a bit reminiscent of folks like Poolside or Goldroom, but between the rigors of participating in the Aussie BBQ tour and the persistent sound problems in that room at Maggie Mae’s (which plagued Gliss’s set and others earlier in the week), the foursome seemed more interested in the afterparty than the party. Still, infectious.

Locals only …

We see L.A. bands all the time back home. While it’s nice to see how their music fares on foreign turf, I try to limit my SXSW visitations to one local band per day (outside of our own party, of course). Besides, this year’s massive Los Angeles presence at SXSW made Austin feel like Echo Park. Between 8:45 and 9:30 Saturday night, for instance, six L.A. bands were playing gigs at the festival. I opted for old pals the Little Ones (first covered in 2006), whose rhythmic, upbeat pop would normally seem out of place at a sticky-floor dive like the Dirty Dog. Thankfully, it wasn’t – crisp, optimistic, tuneful, the songs from their first album since 2008, “The Dawn Sang Along,” was just I needed after five days and 40-plus bands at SXSW.

Only in Austin

Jason & the Kruegers, playing a tattoo parlor near you.

Street scene

6th Street on Saturday night was actually less congested than last year (but last year St. Patrick’s Day fell on a Saturday).

Last but not least

You heard a lot of talk at SXSW this week about its ruination – once a seminar- and showcase-oriented festival, it’s now overrun with corporate sponsors who foot the bill to have major artists crash the party. Saturday night was an extreme: Within blocks of one another, Prince, Justin Timberlake and Smashing Pumpkins each played shows. Legs throbbing, ears ringing, brain unresponsive, I opted for a rooftop view of the shredfest that was the Smashing Pumpkins. It was Billy Corgan’s birthday after all, and the band raged for almost two hours. Included: an incredible cover of Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” and a perfect-for-the-occasion “Tonight, Tonight.” If only they could have arranged the cab ride home.