Even when you’re in the thick of it, it can be hard to work out what SXSW is actually for: is it a festival, a music industry showcase for new bands or an opportunity for the local hipsters to demonstrate that their new outfits are on fleek? At the Fader Fort, a mini-festival within the festival, where, like Club Tropicana, the drinks are free (if you like Budweiser and Jack’n’Coke that is), posing seems to take priority over listening to the tunes, which themselves have to fight with corporate branding so heavy it’s at artillery levels.
Into this heady scenario on Wednesday night comes Chance the Rapper. Having wowed fans two years ago with his mixtape Acid Rap, he draws a crowd who stop checking each other out and fixating on their phones for a few minutes in order to focus on the stage. After an interminable pause, suddenly the 22-year-old Chicago rapper emerges in an explosion of blaring horns and crashing drums – he has a full band, and they are tight.
Dressed in a tight white T-shirt that gets soaked in sweat over the course of the gig, Chance shimmies to the side of the stage like James Brown (crashing into the speakers, but if this wasn’t intentional, he styles it out), raps with bulging-veined intensity and dexterity, and in Brain Cells, has a bona fide anthem. So it’s a bit of a mystery why half the crowd drifts away during the course of what is only about a 25-minute set. Undeterred, Chance completes his set in bravura style with Sunday Candy and quits while he’s ahead, leaving the audience to return to their Tinder profiles or whatever it is they’re finding more compelling.
Over at Stubbs, there’s another prodigy. Shamir has been signed by indie powerhouse XL and described as Sylvester fronting LCD Soundsystem. In fact, the 19-year-old is a much more poppy proposition – last year’s cowbell-dappled single On the Regular sounds like a lost chart-topper from a parallel universe. Dressed in a green Kermit T-shirt, Shamir has a stage presence that is the opposite of macho, and remarkably androgynous vocals – something he plays with in one song, which warps his female backing singer’s vocals down to Barry White levels.
Having treated the audience to an uncharacteristic, but nonetheless delightful ballad, he lets down his hair, plunges into the crowd and dances through them, swarmed with fans who want to dance with him. It’s a joyful and addictive performance – when it ends, you want more.
Later in the evening promises a set from Years and Years. Yet when the Guardian arrives at the appointed place Catfish and the Bottlemen is performing Bruce Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark to a sparse – and bemused – crowd. After that, indie Scousers Circa Waves clamber on to the stage. Tipped by Zane Lowe and the NME, and about to release their debut album, they’re purveyors of a vigorous but very traditional brand of indie that should seem refreshing in a scene now depleted of straightforward guitar bands, but doesn’t rise above the merely ordinary. One of them complains onstage about being filmed on people’s phones, asking: “Can’t we all just have a moment?” A fair point, but at the moment Circa Waves don’t deliver anything compelling enough to induce the audience to put away their devices.
The following day, however, contains a sighting of some bona fide stars. JEFF the Brotherhood are a duo from Nashville (siblings Jake and Jamin Orrall) who have seven albums to their name (an eighth is about to come out) and who have worked with Jack White. They’re augmented to a quartet live and deliver a masterclass in pure stoner rock on a steamy Thursday afternoon.
There’s more to them than swampy psychedelia, though – they actually have tunes, such good ones that it doesn’t seem crazy to imagine that they could follow Queens of the Stone Age’s old trajectory beyond the black T-shirted hardcore to a more casual audience. The final song, Black Cherry Pie, seems to suggest that when the world turns into a “ball of shit”, we still have music – and from a band as powerful as JEFF the Brotherhood, it seems far more than just a platitude.
