Right now we’re listening to Fighting With Wire, a metal band from Northern Ireland.  As those of you who follow me on Savvant Music know, I’m a big fan of Northern Ireland Rock. They’re in the states recording their 2nd album, so playing lots of new songs.

Posted by Anny right from Latitude 30 with some amazing Rocking British Metal Rock pounding in the background! We’ll post some video soon!

THEM TERRIBLES lead guitarist Marcus Vaughn Affeldt

CFO Bob Carnahan and I arrived here in Austin last Friday to catch SXSW interactive, so even though yesterday was “Day one” of SXSW music, we’ve been in Austin for five days already!

The best band we’ve stumbled into so far is “MTV Breakout” (I didn’t know MTV still played music) band “THEM TERRIBLES” who were playing at Speakeasy Monday night. Check out photos of these tasty looking lads (did I write that out loud?) in our blog library. We found these guys because we begged a tour of their Gibson Tour bus Anny wanted to see the guitars and the bus driver urged us to see them. Good choice!

Marcus Vaughn Affeldt of THEM TERRIBLES

Probably their best known song, “Dreamers” [find it on ] , is a lovely ballad with lead singer Matt Green behind the keyboard. With an energetic and exciting stage show, great crowd building transitions, lyrical melodies and smoky good looks, this band gave us a great time.  I’d love to see them again.

These young men from Santa Barbara are made up of Matt Green on vocals, Marcus Vaughn Affeldt on guitar, Jimmy Marvitch on bass and Joey Benenati on drums. You can also find them on facebook or buy their songs on iTunes.

SXSW ‘09 Panel Explains – How NPR became the place to discover new music

As a example 0f the opposite tactic, I covered a panel on “How NPR became the place to discover new music” on Tuesday as part of SXSW ‘09 “Platinum Track” for our local Fort Collins community radio station, krfc.

With large corporations soaking up the last of the smaller, independent radio stations (or putting them out of business) the panel tells us that many seekers of new and inspired music are turning more and more to public radio as curators of great new original music.

Bob Boilen, host of All Songs Considered, and Anya Grundmann, NPR Music Executive Producer, shared their excitement about recent and upcoming music projects. One such project, which premiered with the launch of NPR’s music site (http://npr.org/music) was “Project Song” where artists were videoed in their efforts to write, produce and record a song in just a couple of days. Challenges such as this give artists a unique situation where they can exercise their creativity in new ways, said Boilen.

The Decemberists

Certainly NPR’s music site (http://npr.org/music), which features over 45,000 artists pages, is a vast list of music to be discovered. Panel members say that 50-65% of the music they discover comes from public submissions (such as agents, publicists, and artists) and the remainder comes from friends recommendations.  Having reviewed some of  NPR music’s band recommendations, I would say that if you’re into the quirky “All Things Considered” type of folksy, music, you’ll love the NPR recommendations.  If you love rock and roll, metal, pop, jazz or most other types of music, you may want to look further.

When asked whether or not NPR should consider narrowing their focus, rather than trying to be of general appeal, Boilen said that inclusive, rather than exclusive was more what NPR was about. Grundmann added, “Narrow is not necessarily where we want to be.” She also indicated that NPR was planning to beef up their jazz content to a more meaningful level.  Looking at the bands that the panel and NPR in general recommended (Weird Weeds, The Decemberists, The Heartless Bastards), I would suggest that NPR does have a narrow focus quirky, folky bands with unusual instrumentation (pots and pans for percussion, guitars played cross legged on the floor with a bow and so on).

The audience requested (and got) the following recommendations for great music to check out at SXSW ‘09: Grizzly Bear, Sgt. Dunbar and the Hobo Banned, The Blind Pilots, The Weird Weeds, and The Decemberists. You can see more of their SXSW ‘09 recommendations on their “All Songs Considered” page.

The Avett Brothers

Other panelist joining in the conversation were Carrie Brownstein, NPR’s Monitor Mix blogger and former Sleater-Kinney bandmate and Jody Evan, Program Director at KUT radio, and NPR affiliate in Austin. The panel was moderated by Fast Company magazine Senior Writer Anya Kamenetz.

I did enjoy the band, The Avett Brothers, at the NPR sponsored concert at Stubbs. This band not
only had a much more exciting and engaging stage show, but also included a cello, which is the lead instrument in one of our favorite up and coming new bands, Post Paradise out of Fort Collins, Colorado. We’ll be writing up a review of Post Paradise very soon (promise).

Anyway, here’s the dealio… You can expect to see a few format changes today (Saturday, March 14th) and if I really screw up, you might notice the site actually down for a couple of minutes, but hopefully not — I’m pretty good and I believe in testing, but even I sometimes miss things… (more irony!)

So, look for (and share your thoughts about) our updated and more consistent format!

But, more importantly, look for a bunch of new posts and updates from SXSW, including a twitter feed!  Please follow us on Twitter for live updates from SXSW, because we’ll be telling it like it is!

Twitter – follow AnnySavvant for updates from Anny Randel, and follow CFO_Bob for updates from Bob Carnahan!

As a result, I’ve gone back and edited some of my earlier blogs about artist that had some notes about some improvements we’d like to see about bands, to just tell you what we liked.  So, how do you know which bands to see, and which to avoid?

Well, if you’re a music lover, then go see them all, because we won’t write up any really horrible bands.  If they aren’t worth seeing, we won’t waste our time or your time. 

If you’re very, very picky, and only want to see the best of the best, then we’ll give you a Savvant Music guarantee that any band on our recommendations page is amazing, awesome and worth the time and money to see — assuming that their genre and style is to your taste.  In other words, you may or may not like a given band’s style, but if we recommend them, you can count on seeing a great, professional show by amazing musicians.

In our reviews,  we’ve classified bands as potential, which means they’re still working on polishing their act and amazing which means they’re pretty much there but we either haven’t had time to put together a “Recommendations” page, or the artist(s) are more mainstream than we generally look for in our recommendations policies.  Sometimes we put them in both categories, because we think they’re pretty amazing, but they are still growing and changing.

I hope this better meets your needs and better aligns these blogs with our overall goals of supporting artists’ efforts and willingness to put it all out there!

If you’re wondering, “Who are you guys?” then follow the link or click on my photo to travel to the Savvant Music “About Us” page where you can find out more about us and what we’re all about!