Austin Sound

An unfortunate corollary to Austin being a city with more bars than parking spots is that it also festers with an equal number of bar bands; friendly, safe blues rock that does little more than give frat boys an opportunity to lean over to a nearby girl and confidently declare, “I can play that on my acoustic guitar. You should hear me sometime.” Into this convenient slot slides Ryan Young, with his second full-length album, White Citrus. While perhaps at the top of the local niche, the artist’s uptempo songs rarely seem more than pleasant – something to throw on before cracking that first beer as the sun comes down – and are true to the genre to a fault.

Anyone who has been involved in a focus group knows the look in the eye of the moderator – trying desperately to weave together useful information spit forth by rednecks, faux-intellectuals, and single mothers, he sweats and stirs. If he is good, he succeeds, boiling a pile of opinion into a useful whole. Austin’s Focus Group are good moderators. Knowing that it is the process and not the individual pieces of content, Focus Group reaches across genres and wrenches out of it compelling, unique tracks. If nothing else, their latest release, Unicornography, will make the listener reconsider whether Jazz piano really can go with industrial synth drums.

For centuries, man has been looking to the stars for guidance and inspiration. While Austin’s Balmorhea may not need to cross the Atlantic with astrolabe in hand, the five-piece, in their fourth LP release Constellations, uses the heavens and the sea for a muse, crafting out of it a sparse and vast album far different than their previous musical outings. At once bare and beautiful, the band eschews the high-tech cosmos stereotypes of ‘space music,’ and opts instead for a more human, analog sound, capturing the essence of the cold void with the warm sounds of wood and sinew.

Dusting off the telescope lens, the first offering, “To the Order of Night,” is a slow and empty start. Gentle piano keys are left to ring out, alone, as ambient wood scratching noises of Travis Chapman’s upright bass creak and flutter like a film reel left spinning too long.

Hard rock duos have always had it rough – filling up a room with sound can be damn difficult with only two men. Nonetheless, Austin angerfiends Damage Pants manage to do more than fill a garage with their rough-at-the-edges thrash rock. Combining post-hardcore vocals with more upbeat garage rock rhythms, this group’s self-titled vinyl debut release is abrasive enough to wear down senses and styluses alike.

There has always been something exciting and dangerous about the bull-in-the-glass-house style of spazz rock espoused by groups like Austin’s White Denim. While there is something to be said for order and structure, journeying to new rhythmic grounds is far more fun, especially in a live setting. The trick is to remember the way back home, and with the local trio’s new full-length and first album to receive a proper US release, Fits, it becomes patently obvious that the group didn’t bring a compass.

Austin’s Context Clues seems to have honed their skills at describing themselves; their own website bio states only, “Hello, we’re a pop band from Austin.” While intentionally ambiguous, anyone who picks up a copy of their debut release, Improve Your Diction, will quickly see that the band’s description is apt. Romping through multiple genres and decades of music in a surprisingly short time, the album is 11 tracks of solid music united by little more than their constant optimism and pop sensibility. One may actually be forced to improve his diction merely to come up with enough words to describe the changing sounds of each song.

Minimalism is certainly an Austin standard, whether it be the simple song structures of indie bands or the one-key drone of post-rock. Austin’s Jude/Ross embrace the idea, but go minimal on the orchestration rather than on refinement or talent. With their eponymous full length, the band jogs through 10 pop tunes at record pace, dipping their toes into puddles of rock and folk/country along the way. While never breaking out of its reticent shell into anything starkly memorable, these tracks are solid enough to lend an innocuous soundtrack to a gentle summer night near the edge of the city limits.

Anyone who has attended their high school prom knows that a certain amount of that special night’s charm comes only after looking back through a rather forgiving nostalgic lens. One can be sure that a certain circle of Hell is set aside for playing live footage of prom on a loop; we may remember it as perfect, but the real thing was far from. Dressed for Success, the latest EP release from Austin punk quintet Prom Nite, is no exception. While they do a good job of bringing back a classic snotty punk sound with a twist, the album is hampered by poor stylistic choices and a feeling of monotony that overshadows the group’s prouder moments.

Austin isn’t known for its discrete seasons; sure, at some point in April the dry crackle of leaves is replaced by the blast of an angry, long-hungover sun, but patterns change so quickly day-to-day that it often seems as if winter and summer co-occur. Until the Autumn, the fourth full-length album by Austin’s The Story Of, exists in this gap between Summer and death, where nostalgia and hope seem at once lost and omnipresent. Cathartic and powerful, this album has the capacity to wear the listener out almost as fast as it lifts him up.

Opener “Berkeley” immediately bursts into a thick fog of harmonized voices with vocoded accompaniments. One may immediately notice the increase in (post-)pop sensibility on this album, but as vocalist Christman Hersha utters “don’t back off/ we got ‘em all/just where we want”; the change in style is deliberate, and one can detect this intent behind every note, even if their reasoning for doing so isn’t solidified until later in the album.

This year’s second annual Psych Fest put on by the Black Angels expanded to three full days, which needless to say is more droning and distortion than just about anyone can take. We pushed ourselves to limit and took in as much as we could at the not-really-opened for business Radio Room. Friday’s opening night offered an appropriate dose, with Low Heaven delivering a moody and melodic tone that was just as likely to crash into a wall of sound. It bookended well with the Black Angels closing set, which was one of the best and most energetic sets they’ve served up, with new material that promises to jump beyond Directions to See a Ghost. Most interesting for Friday night’s lineup was the Golden Dawn performing Power Plant in its entirety. While George Kinney and company couldn’t be accused of delivering the best performance of the weekend, they did remind that psychedelia is supposed to be fun, and Kinney’s dancing and crooning was a blast. For the rest of the weekend, we sent Evan St. John into the madness to cover the afternoons, and pics from the evening shows.