As part of their 20th anniversary celebrations, Mexican rock band Café Tacvba is touring 20 cities. Austin is one of them. I got last minute tickets to see them perform at La Zona Rosa. As usual, great concert. And even though I have seen them play live many times (Feria Monterrey, La Huasteca, ACL TV Show, ACL Festival, Stubbs twice, La Zona Rosa just to name a few) it’s always a great show, plus this time I had to bring a newbie.
YouTube clip may follow… I’m a little scared.
On Wednesday, a few friends and I went to see U2 at the Reliant Stadium in Houston. In order to be allowed to buy tickets early to what I thought would be a quick sellout, I became a member of the U2 Fan Club ($!). The concert didn’t sell out, but the General Admission tickets did, so the plan paid off.
More after the break…
Here it is: The lineup for the 2009 Austin City Limits Music Festival:
I went to San Antonio a few weeks ago to see Billy Joel and Elton John, missing the last day of SXSW. Great 3.5+ hour long concert: the sound, the performance, the stage… all except for how far away we were sitting.
The t-shirts were great too. I bought seven, one for each day of the week. They’re expensive because they were knit by the artists’ mothers, Mrs. Joel and Mrs. John themselves. And at $40 a pop, they must be good.
The big takeaway is: for my next mega-concert, I’m going to be close to the stage.
For day 3 (Friday, March 20th), the original plan was to see The Proclaimers or Tricky and Devo. This is where not having a badge really hurt. So I ended up at Dirty Dog Bar to see some more Latin American bands.
Read more to check out more photos and some videos.
Superlasciva: Cool Argentinian rock band. I had never heard about them but based on the number of views on the YouTube video I posted of them, they are pretty popular. I like that they use an accordeon. Too bad none of their CDs can be found on iTunes nor Amazon.
Day 2 (Thursday the 19th) of SXSW Music was spent at Momo’s. The theme was “All Music is World Music“.
Kingman and Jonah: Reggae. Read their story here… interesting stuff. Sadly Jonah was sick and couldn’t sing much but they still put on quite the show. For some reason the bass player was wearing an IDF shirt. I only caught the end of the show because the SXSW organizers, those sons of a mother-less goat, made us stand in line outside for a while even though the bar was far from full.
Videos, photos and the rest of the reviews below.
On the first night (Wednesday) of the SXSW Music festival I landed at Speakeasy. They had seven Colombian bands playing that night. I didn’t know much about any of them, other than one song by Bomba Estéreo that came with a free sampler I got at the last Plastilina Mosh concert.
I forgot my camera this day, so pardon the crappy iPhone photos. On the plus side, there is a post (in Spanish) over at Chichipanguanorrea about it with better pictures.
Read more to check out photos, the bands, videos, reviews, etc. from that night.
The folks of Hillel held their yearly Israel Block Party last Wednesday. they somehow managed to match last year’s concert with another big act: they brought Israeli rock star Berry Sakharof. I have no clue how they do that.
The freak freezing and raining weather forced them to move the event from UT’s South Mall (cool link) into their building. This affected attendance. The concert itself was held in a tent at the parking lot; so while it protected us from the rain, it didn’t help that much with the cold.
Thankfully Berry put up an awesome concert, totally worth the hypothermia. And it’s always cool to see a good act in a small venue in which you can force your way so close to the stage, especially an artist that I don’t get many chances to see in concert. Hit Read more to see more photos and three of my shaky YouTube videos.
Christian Bale loses it on set one day and the next thing you know, we have a techno remix.
This one has the potential of reaching the heights of the infamous All Your Base Are Belong to Us music video (a personal favorite). Not safe for work, people: Profanity galore. Do not mess with Batman.
The list of bands for this year’s South by Southwest festival has been published. I haven’t spent any time researching it yet but would love to hear (through the comments) any recommendations. A few of these bands I’ve seen before. This is the list, current as of today:
