FRIDAY, 14 MARCH

And so, after the Lord Mayor’s Show that was Thursday… Today dawns stiflingly hot with temperatures pushing past 90 degrees. It’s also, initially, taken up with a succession of meetings. I record a quick interview with BBC’s The Culture Show, and fatigue is evidently setting in, since I make even less sense than usual. And also, attractively, sweat a lot.

Thereafter, there’s a steady succession of sit-downs with varied folk from assorted US record companies, details of which need not detain us here. In between appointments, I wander into a bar on Sixth Street to find a band on stage, and a woman of striking appearance lurching around the largely empty dance floor, flaying her dark hair around.

They, it quickly transpires, are Papercranes, last seen being anonymous on the R.E.M. show bill, and on she is their singer, Rain Phoenix, younger sister of the late River Phoenix and the Joaquin Phoenix, he of Walk The Line fame, and she is the band’s singer. In this environment they do more to hold the attention in 30 seconds than they did in an entire set the other night. And then they’re gone.

“You should come back tomorrow y’all,” announces a bar woman to the ensuing silence. “Lucas Hass (who played the young Amish lad in the movie Witness) and his band are playing.” How very odd.

Come the evening I scoot down to the intriguingly named Bat Bar at the Austin Convention Centre to see super-producer Daniel Lanois (U2, Bob Dylan), expecting to walk into something resembling a belfry. Sadly, the Bat Bar is, in fact, merely an exhibition hall that’s been turned into a makeshift TV studio and dressed to look like a honky tonk bar (minus any sense of atmosphere or indeed reality) by the makers of DirectTV.

When I arrive Nashville siren Deana Carter and her band are on stage, playing to a chorus of enthusiastic whooping from a crowd mostly composed of preppily dressed suburban couples. Daughter of Fred Carter Jr, one of Nashville’s great guitars-for-hire, Carter’s staple setting is the slick, sanitised country-pop the city has been churning out ever since Garth Brooks emerged beneath a pristine Stetson. It’s inoffensive and deathly dull.

Brilliantly, when Carter finishes obviously telling us she hopes God blesses us all as she goes – the officious DirectTV troops move into play. “Clear the studio! Clear the studio!” they bark as one, shepherding the bemused audience out of the hall. Apparently, no one can be on hand to witness the set being dressed for Daniel Lanois. And we will all have to queue and pay to see the man from New Orleans go out about his esoteric business. Since it’s fearsomely hot and a man called Bud is attempting to engage me on conversation, I decide this prospect is as appealing as boiling one’s own head and leave. So where is God when you need him?

The ‘buzz’ show of the night is Vampire Weekend’s turn at Antone’s, the city’s famed blues club where the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughan and his brother Jimmy cut their teeth. Playing fourth on a six band bill, the degree of interest in the preppy New Yorkers is highlighted by the speed with which the jam-packed bar clears once they’ve finished.

Before then, I see LA foursome Foreign Born, whose frontman Matt Popieluch looks like a cross between Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Frasier Crane’s brother Niles, and whose earnest indie rock makes one think of a more rural Talking Heads (minus the lingering sense of greatness, that is).

Far more impressive is Canadian singer-songwriter Basia Bulat. Indeed, from the moment she steps onto the stage solo to sing an accapella spiritual, she has the place entranced. Backed by a four-piece band, and with a voice that recalls peak power Emmylou Harris, Bulat’s mesmerising alt-country hymns are steeped in longing and loss. For me, she steals much of Vampire’s Weekend’s thunder in 30 minutes or less.

Not that Vampire Weekend are bad or even disappointing, It’s just that there’s nothing transcendental or different about their set. They get up, they run through most of the songs from that wonderful debut album in thoroughly proficient fashion, and then they’re gone. True, they get the most ecstatic response I’ve seen yet from a crowd at SXSW (and this should be qualified by saying that most SXSW crowds seem to be dosed on tranquilisers), but the earth didn’t shift off its axis. Instead we see a young and promising band in the process of really finding their feet, which of course is precisely what they are.

Paul Rees, Editor, Q