SXSW 2010: 50 Bands To Watch
Boat Beam
SXSW is supposed to be a new music festival, but frankly, if you’ve savvy enough to be reading this blog post, you’ve been listening to the best “new” acts playing the Austin festival for the last year. I can say this definitively because I’ve just listened to every single one of the 1038 songs available on the free, legal SXSW 2010 torrent, a fascinating experience I recommend to everybody. It also proved that, despite the indie roar echoing through the blogosphere right now, SXSW isn’t an indie fest at all — not by half! At least not as genres are concerned. Judging by the torrent, the most prominent sounds in Austin this week, in declining order, will be hip-hop (yes, really!), Spanish-language world music, terrible ’90s-style pop-punk, terrible The Fray-style modern rock, would-be Neko Case alt-country, terrible heavy metal and then, finally, indie rock. That tiny chunk is then further splintered into terrible dance-y Hype Machine-ready remixes, terrible post-rock, terrible anthem-rock in the vein of the Arcade Fire, Bloc Party or both at the same time, and then — then! — a handful of interesting bands. Luckily for you, dear reader, I’ve picked out 50 songs/bands that struck me the most from the thousand available for your listening enjoyment — both at home on your iPod and this week in Austin, should you be in town. (Say hi!) Grab the .zip after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
I wonder if it ever dawned on Andy Warhol that someday, everyone would have their 15 minute of fame… simultaneously. Indie rock’s greatest problem at the moment, whether one’s in a band trying to signal through the noise or a listener trying to sort through the muck, is the sheer glut of material: in any given day, Pitchfork (just for instance) reviews five albums, three tracks and drops another half-dozen MP3s on Forkcast. And they’re supposed to be the filter! No wonder Best New Music bands become such lightning rods for sales and attention: it’s too much fucking work to listen to the rest. 
News: Rawkblog has a new 
Pals, if you’d like to follow/fan Rawkblog on Facebook, you can now do so 
He’s back! Ryan Adams has just announced Orion, his “most legit METAL record,” and his first full-length since 2008’s Cardinology. Vinyl starts pressing next week; more info on 
