Err, I mean welcome to my rants and raves about this year's South By Southwest music festival. As usual, I performed what my friends call a "Death March" through festival, bouncing from set to set, giving some bands 4 notes, and some 40 minutes (the normal length of the SXSW sets).
Now, I will state up front that this did not seem like an especially good year, so the pace was even more frantic than the last couple. My old standby, the Three Song Rule was invoked very regularly, and a number of bands didn't even get that much of a chance. An awful lot of the fest was just plain not nearly as interesting as advertised, and not nearly as compelling live as the polished MP3s on the SXSW site. As a result, I stuck around to see the entirety of damn few sets, which is why I managed to see 85, yes, eighty-five, bands between Wednesday and Sunday.
Or maybe I'm just manifesting some sort of late-onset ADD.
Not all was glum, though. Some showcases were outstanding, and there were still a good number of bands worth checking out later on. Anyway, without further ado, out of the over 1000 bands who played official SXSW gigs, and a couple other gigs from hangers-on, here's a description of the enjoyable insanity I made of this year's SXSW.