AUSTIN, Texas -- South By Southwest offers up plenty of rising new acts every year, and I caught plenty of those at Friday afternoon's shindig put on by Spin magazine: Vaccines, DOM, The Kills, Youth the Giant, and all of them were at least decent. But the SXSW recurrents are a very fine reason to keep coming back, too. One such golden oldie is Jon Langford, venerable U.K. punk godfather as leader of the Mekons. Nowadays Langford lived in Chicago and plays country music, kinda.

Every year, Langford brings his band the Waco Brothers down to SXSW, although that suggests more of a fixed lineup than actually exists. The Waco Brothers are basically Langford and whoever else he rounds up, which means it's basically a different band every time. This year's model had an absolute monster rhythm section, which gave the Waco Brothers' set an R&B-revue feel. The drummer was amazing, playing grooves solid enough to build a freeway on. 'Twas fantastic.

Still, when it comes SXSW regulars, the grand master is Alejandro Escovedo, who pretty much owns Austin this time of year. As always, he's playing multiple shows in various configurations, and Friday night was the orchestral version. Take the set Escovedo played at the Cradle back in January, add horns, strings, backup vocals, a perfect spring evening lit up by a full moon and an adoring throng of locals, and it was a pretty great thing to witness. The capper was the encore version of "Miss You," the Rolling Stones classic -- a song Escovedo was born to sing; with help from that adoring throng, of course.

AUSTIN, Texas -- South By Southwest is enormous, drawing tens of thousands of people to town, and it puts quite a strain on the city's infracstructure. The roads just weren't designed to handle this many vehicles trying to get into downtown all at once, and it doesn't help that there always seems to be some downtown road repair going on here every March. So Thursday commenced with a traffic jam. A big, big traffic jam, big enough to cause delays and missing things. All thoughts I had of catching any of Bob Geldof's keynote speech and press conference vanished in a miles-long column of red taillights. Oh well.

So I wasn't in the best of moods to start out, but I know what to do about that: the time-honored pop-in drill, where you just wander about going into clubs for a couple of songs to see if anything surprising jumps out. No next-big- thing discoveries, but it's always a fun exercise.

It was about lunchtime and I was walking down Fifth Street when I saw the magic sign -- FREE MUSIC FREE FOOD -- so I went on in and availed myself of their spread, downing a quite-passable pork burrito while listening to this mook-metal band with a tattooed woman in fishnets writhing about onstage as she sang. The cilantro was delicious.

At another club around the corner, I learned anew a truism: The band always sounds better from outside. An energetic thrashing was emanating from inside, and it turned out to be coming from a group of kids who all looked to be about 16. Didn't understand a word they sang (er, screamed), but I'm pretty sure they meant it. And like I said, from outside they could've passed for Nirvana. Two doors down from that, I walked in just in time to hear a group concluding their set by putting down their instruments to gather around the microphones in the old-school style, singing acoustic gospel. It was cool.

There was similar mojo later in the evening with our local boys Megafaun, who just flat killed it. They had a tough act to follow, a Minneapolis band called Leisure Birds, who had maybe the oddest-looking frontman I've ever seen. Dude had a thick beard, gimmie cap, denim vest -- and, despite the biker appearance, he sang in a high voice and did this little pixie-ish stomping dance at his keyboard while shaking tambourines and maracas. He even changed tambourines mid-song at one point, which cracked me up; guess he was after a particular tambourine sound. Meanwhile, the guitar-bass-drums underpinning was rock solid as they played sprawling interstellar grooves. It definitely got you to moving.

Megafaun's set was more stripped-down from the last few times I've seen the group, when they had the keyboard-and-laptop array for sound effects, which meant this was more acoustic and straightforward and less improvisational than usual. But it didn't lack a thing, building up an overpowering momentum over as perfect a 35 minutes of music as I've ever seen. There was heartbreakingly beautiful songcraft, a just-right amount of audience-sing-along on "Lazy Suicide," exuberant goofball antics (Brad and Phil Cook were rushing about head-butting each other) and a rousing gospel number led by drummer Joe Westerlund. Even giving a tambourine to the most rhythmically challenged audience member on earth (seriously, even I could've kept the better time than this guy) couldn't slow down their momentum. And "The Fade" was so drop-dead gorgeous and aching, I thought I was gonna cry.

Wish you could've seen it...

ADDENDUM (3/20/11): DeYarmond Edison reunion at SXSW.

AUSTIN, Texas – There can definitely be a fiddling-while-Rome-burns feeling to being a part of the entertainment-media complex. That especially goes for this year at South By Southwest. It takes a lot to knock SXSW off the front page of the Austin American-Statesman, but it happened with Thursday’s edition. I guess you could say we’re rocking while Japan melts down.

Nevertheless, SXSW looks to be just as big a madhouse as ever. Travel logistics of getting into town took up most of Wednesday (a furlough day from the paper for me, anyway), which began with my alarm clock ringing at an inhumanly early hour so I could catch a pre-dawn flight. But I did see a few things before fatigue overtook me and I called it an early night.

PS I Love You was pretty fantastic, an unlikely-looking duo from Ontario, Canada – mountain-sized guitarist with a flair for bombs-bursting-in-air fusillades along the lines of Jimi Hendrix, skinny drummer with a flat-top who motored along at a breakneck pace – and they sure did fill up a lot of sonic space for a two-piece. First time I think I’ve ever heard garage-rock in waltz time, too. Also quite fine was John Fullbright, a young singer/songwriter from Oklahoma who shows an incredible sense of wisdom in his writing (he’s in Raleigh at the Berkeley Café on March 27; just sayin’). And Austin old-timer Jon Dee Graham had a band backing him up; that’s a nice bonus of SXSW, you get to see a lot of people who can’t afford to take bands on the road in a group setting. He was excellent, earthy and raw, although by then accumulated weariness was dragging me down from behind.

I’ll be back -- if the world doesn't end first...

South By Southwest draws nigh, one of my favorite times of the year, which can only mean that it's time once again for a favorite annual ritual of mine: going through the band list looking for amusing, entertaining and/or tasteless band names. Here are some of this year's more notable entries, based on a quick skim. Maybe I'll catch some of these next week...

Alcoholic Faith Mission (Copenhagen, Denmark)
Amusement Parks on Fire (Los Angeles)
Awesome Tapes From Africa (Brooklyn)
Cambodian Space Project (Taroona, Australia)
Childish Gambino (Los Angeles)
Dale Earnhardt Jr Jr (Detroit)
Death on Two Wheels (Atlanta)
Destroy Rebuild Until God Shows (Detroit)
Differing Opinions of Good (D.O.O.G.) (Eau Claire, Wisc.)
Dinosaur Pile-Up (Leeds, England)
Diplomats of Solid Sound (Iowa City)
Dirty Karma (Mexico City)
Drop the Lime (New York)
Erk Tha Jerk (Oakland, Calif.)
Fake Problems (Naples, Fla.)
Family of the Year (Los Angeles)
Fared Shafinury & Tehranosaurus (Austin)
Funeral Suits (Dublin, Ireland)
Gay for Johnny Depp (Brooklyn)
Go Back to the Zoo (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
A Great Big Pile of Leaves (Brooklyn)
Head for the Hills (Fort Collins, Co.)
Hungry Kids of Hungary (Brisbane, Australia)
I Got You on Tape (Copenhagen, Denmark)
In-Flight Safety (Halifax, Canada)
The Inspector Cluzo (Mont de Marsan, France)
Letting Up Despite Great Faults (Los Angeles)
Marijuana Deathsquads (Minneapolis)
Mexicans With Guns (San Antonio)
Middle Class Rut (Sacramento, Calif.)
Mose Giganticus (Philadelphia)
Mustard Pimp (Melun, France)
My Awesome Mixtape (Bologna, Italy)
The Naked and Famous (Auckland, New Zealand)
Nerdkween (Atlanta)
Nid and Sancy (Gent, Belgium)
Peanut Butter Wolf (San Jose, Calif.)
Pinata Protest (San Antonio)
The Plastics Revolution (Mexico City)
Poetry 'n Lotion (Tampa, Fla.)
Pop Up Animal Kids (The Hague, The Netherlands)
Porcelain Raft (London, England)
Prison Garde (Vancouver)
Pulled Apart by Horses (Leeds, England)
Random Recipe (Montreal)
Ringo Deathstarr (Austin)
Said The Whale (Vancouver)
Say "No!" To Architecture (Brooklyn)
Sgt Dunbar and the Hobo Banned (Albany, NY)
Simon Says No! (Oslo, Norway)
Sissy-Eared Mollycoddles (Chicago)
Slang Chickens (Los Angeles)
Slim Cessna's Auto Club (Denver)
Talking To Turtles (Hamburg Sant Pauli, Germany)
These Wonderful Evils (Chicago)
Tokyo Sex Destruction (Madrid, Spain)
Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (Oxford, England)
The Tumbledryer Babies (Southend-on-Sea, England)
Vulture Whale (Birmingham, Al.)
We Are Enfant Terrible (Lille, France)
We Were The States (Murfreesboro, Tenn.)
Wheelchair Sports Camp (Denver)
The Wonderful Sound Of Induce! (Miami)
Yearbook Committee (Terre Haute, Ind.)
Youth Pictures of Florence Henderson (Trondheim, Norway)

Any number of times over the past decade, I've heard people wonder aloud why there's never been a South By Southwest-type music festival here in the Triangle. Come this fall, there will be no reason to wonder that anymore. The Independent is putting on a massively ambitious little shindig called Hopscotch, with 120 local and national acts (including fabled Canadian collective Broken Social Scene and iconic rap group Public Enemy) playing in 10 downtown Raleigh venues over three nights in September.

For more details, see the story in Wednesday's paper. Tickets should go on sale this week.

Carolina Chocolate Drops have always been a multi-media bunch. So they don't just have a new album out, but also a book -- a beautiful self-titled songbook subtitled "Twelve Songs to Sing and to Play." Rhiannon Giddens says the book was "my baby," something she put a great deal of work into. And if she has her way, it won't be the last book to emerge from the far-flung CCD empire.

"Next I want to do a cookbook," Giddens said in Austin last week during South By Southwest. "I make Irish soda bread, biscuits, a lot of things."

"My thing is fried okra," added her bandmate Justin Robinson. "Mac and cheese, too. It's a problem, actually, because my recipes would all be so simple: 'Take a pound of beans plus bacon, cook' for pinto beans, say. Or, cheese crisp: 'Take a tortilla and cheese, heat, eat.'"

"We're pretty fierce on food," Giddens said with a laugh. "It sounds like we're already working on that cookbook right now."

For more, see the story in Sunday's paper. The package also includes a South By Southwest wrapup; and there's also some CCD/SXSW content here.

South By Southwest once again draws nigh, one of my favorite times of the year. And one of my favorite annual rituals is to peruse the band list for shows to see while taking note of funny, unusual, clever or horrifying names. So here is this year's list of band monikers that caught my eye. If the best thing a name can do is get your attention, all these groups are ahead of the game.

Romance on a Rocketship (Lebanon, Mo.)
And So I Watch You From Afar (Belfast, Ireland)
Banjo or Freakout (London)
The Megaphonic Thrift (Bergen, Norway)
Everybody Was in the French Resistance...Now! (London)
Hunx and His Punx (San Francisco)
Plastic Crimewave Sound (Chicago)
Homeboy Sandman (New York)
Mittens on Strings (Chicago)
LudaChrist (Los Angeles)
Smash Gordon (Baltimore)
Yourself and the Air (Chicago)
Drive Like Maria (Hasselt, Belgium)
King Dude (Seattle)
Binary Audio Misfits (Toulouse, France)
Birthday Suits (Minneapolis)
Morning Teleportation (Portland, Ore.)
We Are Wolves (Montreal)
The Click Clack Boom (New York)
The So So Glos (New York)
Chiddy Bang (Philadelphia)
Epileptinomicon (Denver)
Phil and the Osophers (Brooklyn)
Teeth Mountain (Baltimore)
Scars on 45 (Leeds, England)
Demolished Thoughts (New York)
Trampled by Turtles (Duluth, Minn.)
Gay Witch Abortion (Minneapolis)
Dances With White Girls (New York)
Teenage Bottlerocket (Laramie, Wyo.)
This Will Destroy You (Austin, Texas)
Uninhabitable Mansions (Brooklyn)

AUSTIN, Texas -- A few weeks ago, my teenage son was in the throes of apocalyptic heartbreak. His girlfriend had broken up with him, and they were having frequent and painful electronic exchanges about it. After a particularly difficult instant-message conversation, he sat in our darkened living room with an anguished look on his face. I was sitting with him, doing what I do -- trying to make him feel better with, you know, words -- and failing miserably.

So I finally asked: "Want to hear a song that's about exactly how you feel right now?" Sure, he said, and I pulled out Big Star's "Thirteen." For my green, "Thirteen" is the best expression of teenage heartbreak there is. And yet I was hesitant about trotting it out because "Thirteen" is a quiet acoustic ballad and my son's tastes trend toward nasty, aggressive metal. Still...it just melted him (and me, too). He must've played it a dozen times that night, and he sent it to a bunch of friends. The girl, too. Didn't solve anything, of course, and they're still broken up. But it made both of us feel better. One takes redemption where one finds it.

So why am I telling you this now? Because Jody Stephens, Big Star's drummer, was in Austin for South By Southwest this week, I was able to share this story with him -- and he was visibly moved. I could tell it made his day, and it kind of made mine, too. And it's exactly this sort of connection, with music and the people who make it and love it, that keeps me coming back down here after 22 years.

For all the snide complaints you hear about SXSW, there's still no better place to get back in touch with one's inner fan of music and passion and life -- for me, anyway. It's a big, sprawling, confusing mess of bands and panel discussions and people on the move and on the make, a bewildering mob scene that's impossible to make sense of. Yet it's still the most fun I have year after year, whether stumbling across something new, flying the hometown flag or reconnecting with old favorites.

It is, of course, beyond exhausting. So I cope by adopting the rhythms of a shark -- I must keep moving -- and Saturday's final day began early. Well before noon, I was at Austin's venerable Continental Club for Mojo Nixon's annual pancake breakfast roots-rock extravaganza. Listening to The Twang play strangely Germanic honky-tonk versions of songs by Amy Winehouse, Beastie Boys, Motorhead and even the Village People over coffee and pancakes was a perfect way to start the day (although I passed on the pancakes with jalapenos).

Over the course of the afternoon and evening, I saw resurgent British rock band Blue Aeroplanes (definitely had their moments) and Oklahoma folksinger/songwriter Samantha Crain (solid, although I was such a zombie by then that I was having trouble focusing). But the day belonged to Jon Langford's Pine Valley Cosmonauts. Langford's crazed punked-out country-rock can be a bit schticky, and there was lots of between-song chit-chat about Aboriginal country-western music and obscure one-hit wonders. But Langford can also bear down and rock hard enough to blow you away, which he and his band did at the end of the set. A spectacular moment in a week full of them.

So it's been a grand time, as usual. Thanks for coming along. I'll see you back in the 9-1-9 soon.

ADDENDUM (1/29/10): Props from the other DM.

AUSTIN, Texas — It's always interesting to see how our home folks do at South by Southwest, and whether or not their charms translate away from the Triangle. And Raleigh's The Love Language were pretty great down here on Friday night. The group makes sadness sound almost happy, with peppy, exuberant arrangements rendered at metallic volumes; if you're not otherwise occupied next Saturday, March 28, you really should catch their homecoming show at Chapel Hill's Local 506 (see next Friday's paper for more on that).

Other Friday highlights included O+S, a lovely and seductively ambient group that played moody electronic pop with an overpowering rhythmic pulse; and a revved-up Austin power trio called White Denim, who were one-dimensional in an ADD kind of way but fun nevertheless. On the down side, I still cannot figure out what anybody sees in Glasvegas, who have been touted as some kind of biggest-band-in-the-world savior but left almost no impression on me. The hipsters seemed to dig 'em, though.

The night concluded with an old favorite, Right or Happy, formerly known as the Reivers, and a band I've loved with obsessive devotion since the first time I saw them during college days a quarter-century or so ago (for more on the back-story, check this). The main difference between the two incarnations is that the current model includes a keyboardist. Really, though, the group is still all about Kim Longacre and John Croslin's voices and the way they blend. It's still about the prettiest thing I've ever heard, although I'll cop to being such a rabid fan that I'm probably not to be trusted. But even singing new songs I'd never heard before, they melted my cold, cold heart. And when they dusted off the old Reivers chestnut "Ragamuffin Man," it was mist-up time.

I sure do love this town this time of year.

AUSTIN, Texas — Discovering new favorites is a big part of the South By Southwest experience, and it keeps attendees scurrying all over town in search of that next-big-thing buzz. But it can be just as much fun to reconnect with old favorites, and be reminded all over again why you love 'em. Day two's highlights fell in the latter category.

The day began at the live-performance room of cool Austin radio station KGSR, which brings in SXSW acts for live-performance broadcasts during the festival. First up were Gary Louris & Mark Olson, former co-leaders of the Jayhawks -- and there is probably not a more mournful sound on this earth than those two voices locked in high, keening harmonies in a song of yearning: Saturday morning on Sunday Street/How I long to be there...

Sad and subdued, yet beautiful.

Then came Gomez, an English rock band I've probably not listened to in years. But that's gonna change because they were fantastic (even though the group's best singer, the raspy-voiced Ben Ottewell, remains an under-utilized resource who just doesn't sing lead often enough). "Airstream Driver" opened the set, with a pulverizing groove that seemed to spiral outward like a giant rope uncoiling; by the end of the song, it felt like it was covering up most of Central Texas. "Girlshapedlovedrug" and "How We Operate" were also both just huge, and marvelous; much head-bobbing glee.

After that came a mad dash to the convention center downtown for the keynote address from legendary producer/band-leader Quincy Jones -- a man who has never been shy about touting his own legacy. But heck, if you've got it flaunt it; and Jones definitely has it, having produced everything from Frank Sinatra to the top-selling album of all time. Of course, he namedropped just shamelessly. Felt like it should've been a drinking game, so I started keeping track of names that came up. A partial list:

Willie Nelson, Christopher Cross, Ray Charles, Lyle Lovett, Michael Jackson, Julia Roberts, Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, George Burns, Sinatra, Jennifer Hudson, Astor Piazzolla, Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, Yo-Yo Ma, Leo Fender, Prince, Madonna, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Stevie Wonder, 50 Cent, Kool Moe Dee, Usher, Mary J.  Blige, Bo Diddley, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Aretha Franklin, Confucious, Plato, Socrates, Kirkegaard, Diana Ross, Rick James, Paul McCartney, Gloria Vanderbilt, Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, Benny Goodman, Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Ted Turner, Alex Haley, Catherine  Zeta-Jones, Richard Burton, Condoleezza Rice, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Flatt & Scruggs, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley...

That was fun, as were some of the 76-year-old Jones' words of philosophy ("The good news is, when you get over the hill, that's when you pick up speed."). And so was an afternoon and evening spent wandering hither and yon to drop in on performances, for anywhere from a song or two up to a full set.

South by Southwest turns all of central Austin into one big live-music venue, and having that much music around can be rejuvenating. Late in the afternoon, I was hoofing it to a restaurant east of downtown because I couldn't find a cab, and dragging a bit -- until I heard this great little band, Lovely Sparrows, playing in a tent in a parking lot; bounciest flute-accompanied rock you've ever heard. I drank it up like an energy drink, picking up a spring in my step that even a massive plate of enchiladas didn't slow down.

I also saw a bit of Raleigh's Annuals, whose cut-to-the-crashing-waves-of-chorus dynamic was great as ever (even when played for a mob of chatty and hard-to-impress hipsters); The Rural Alberta Advantage, a spooky folk-pop band with a knack for strange electronic flourishes; and Chapel Hill expatriate Alina Simone, whose new songs from her upcoming album sounded mighty fine.

Then there was Grizzly Bear, a Brooklyn band that is absolutely peerless at the use of echo and empty sonic spaces. Grizzly Bear makes you aware of shape as a sonic characteristic, the way sounds can fit together, blend or bounce off each other. The group is sort of like Talking Heads, but with texture rather than rhythm as focal point -- and principle singer Daniel Rossen is a brilliant vocalist whose spectral wail seems to pierce right through you. The master stroke was a haunting cover of the Crystals' "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)" that had to be heard to be believed.

Rossen's voice was the one echoing in my head as I walked to the car at the end of the night.