Day two of SXSW saw the sun continue to shine and at last some day parties treating us delegates to a free drink or two. Started off at Radio Room with The Donkeys, a two piece electro band that sang in the style of Flight of the Conchords and had what looked like a sock over the end of the guitar. Had actually popped in here to see the following act The Pains of Being Pure at Heart but turned out to be another schedule change and nothing happened. So it was straight over the road to The Clash magazine day party in Dirty Dog bar, which did have a pretty good line up of bands mostly from back home. With acts like Gallows, Juliette Lewis with her new band New Romantiques, Fighting With Wire, Dananananaykroyd, Micachu and the Shapes and opening with Turbo Wolf, it was surprising that the venue was not full all day. All of them played great sets getting the crowd going early in the day.
Dananananaykroyd playing their usual fun brand of Fight Pop including chalking around the “dead” band members on the floor. Gallows on the other hand have a slightly different fighting style to them and which included Frank Carter punching the stage floor and his hand not looking too good after, will try to find out how bad it is later this week.
Few doors down 6th Street to the Clash party was the Kerrang day party. Here we got to see Yorkshires mathcore band Rolo Tomassi actually impressing me live despite my reservations listening to them on cd. Frank Turner performing an acoustic set with his angry lyrics and The Bronx performing what turned out to be a six song request set. The Bronx made the observation that virtually all the crowd there bar two, were only there to hang out as it was Kerrang and not be there for the music!
With time to quickly pop into Latitude 30, which once again has become the home for the British Music Federation, to see Fighting With Wire close the Northern Ireland party, well after missing them yesterday thought it was only right to catch them twice today. The Derry trio played a good set to a mixed bag of a crowd but still went down well, even saw front man Cahir O’Doherty replace a broken string in pretty much record time, not bad as he claimed it was his first ever live.
First up in the evening was the highly impressive The Airborne Toxic Event. This band is getting plenty of hype both here and back home and once seeing them live it is not hard to see why as the Californian five piece indie rockers had the Bat Bar going crazy. The Bat Bar is actually inside the Convention Centre here in Austin and is used by Direct TV to show live bands across the nation.
Straight after it was over to BD Riley’s, an Irish pub converted to a venue for SXSW to catch what I had hoped was going to be two contrasting bands from Europe but ended up being only one. French rockers, Olympus Mons (not to be confused with a band from the UK with the same name) were the ones to have mysteriously disappear from the bill but at least Choo Choo from Switzerland were still there with their blend of retro indie pop which had plenty of people dancing away. Sounds like this band will finally be getting over to the UK later in the summer.