The one thing that mini SXSW otherwise known as Free Week in Austin reminded me was that during these festivals where there are shows at every venue downtown; you have to sift through a lot trash (both literally and figuratively) to find the goodness. And don’t be fooled by the shiny wrapper either! The perfect example of this was Les Rav. They are a 5 piece local band who apparently have a prerequisite of owning a minimum $5,000.00 instrument to get in the band. The lead singer who looked like Asia Argento had a keyboard that took up the entire stage, two dudes had violins, and another guy in the background was rocking a $15k harp. You don’t just one day get into playing the harp, that means this kid grew up with this in his house. As a matter of fact all of these clowns looked like Westlake brats who were bored and decided to form a band. They were cracking bad jokes about raves, wearing watches on the wrong wrist, and were dressed like they had just left the glee club; it was so wack it had to be fresh right? Wrong!
Asia could kind of sing, and the two violins dudes got so excited during the performance that they touched bows and made some kind of weird clock out of their homo erotic bonding. Musically they were just boring because with the instruments they had you would think the songs would eventually build to some awesome climax but they never did. Just slow and brooding whining about…well who knows really. You were so distracted by the wackiness that you couldn’t really focus on anything else. Avoid them but try and get Asia’s phone number for me. They are definitely WACK!
The point of all of that was to get you mentally ready for SXSW and the 2000 bands and over 200,000 hipsters you have to sift through to find the next big thing. I can hopefully save you some time by introducing you to a few; and one of these diamonds I truly believe will be The Neighbourhood. They are 5 white kids from California who purposely spell neighborhood like their British and somehow mix indie rock with RnB undertones. The lead has always made hip hop and RnB music and decided to bring that skill to this project. If you have read any of my stuff in the past then you know that I believe that RnB is already dead or at least on its death bed and that’s mainly because no one is trying anything new with it. Well this is step in the right direction. Check out their songs Female Robbery, Leaving Tonight, and Baby Come Home. All of heir songs are bit loungy and make you feel like you should be wearing a tux and sipping on a martini while listening to it. I am always reluctant to rate a band before seeing them live but I am going to rate them as slightly FRESH in hopes that a year from now I don’t look back and feel like I gave the next Jon B a good rating.
Both of these bands are playing SXSW. Enjoy.
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