Entries Tagged With: Hydra Head Records

Last Bit of SXSW Wrap-Up (2/3): Black Keys, Torche, Ash Grunwald, Working For a Nuclear Free City, Dirty Novels, and more

By Arielle Castillo At 05:49am Mar 18, 2008

Day 3, Friday, March 14

I'll admit, by Friday, day 3 of SXSW, I was already starting to feel the exhaustion a bit, and I was starting to need some motivational cheerleading. Luckily, I got to start the day off easy with the daytime party thrown by the Miami and Broward-Palm Beach New Times' parent company, Village Voice Media, at the cavernous venue La Zona Rosa. The lineup: Health, the Cribs, the Black Keys, The Soundtrack of Our Lives, and ....And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead.

You can read a review of the Black Key's set, penned by Pete Freedman, music editor of New Times sister paper the Dallas Observer, here.

You can also stream a live track from the party, of a newly debuted Black Keys song, here.

Next up, it was out of the crush of the main SXSW drag around E. 6th Street, past downtown Austin, to catch up with hometown boys Torche, who were playing one of a couple of Vice magazine parties on the same block. I walked into a large, sun-bleached park that looked like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or whatever the Austin equivalent of it is, had puked all over it and distributed lots of free booze on the way -- of course, tall-boy cans of Miller High Life and Sparks. No free water, though, which is why it's so easy to remain, um, tipsy throughout the span of this whole thing.

Slurping on a high-octane Sparks plus, I was checking out some metally looking merch and a Motörhead-logo-painted Scion (nothing says metal like a Scion) when I realized that, 15 minutes past Torche's set time, nothing much was going on stage. Then I quickly realized, I was at the WRONG Vice-sponsored, metal-heavy show full of cool kids on the block. Torche was at the one across the street, at the Longbranch Inn, a really awesome barbecue joint/dive bar that looks ready to fall apart five minutes ago.



With a car like this parked inside, can you blame me for thinking Torche might have possibly been playing there?

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