VMP Magazine

Last week, the Vinyl Me, Please editorial staff decamped to the taco-and-pizza-strewn curbs of Austin, Texas, for SXSW Music. In addition to showing out for our amazing showcase, they spent their days finding secret shows and yeehaw showcases. Here’s the 10 best artists they saw last week.

We sent our associate editor, Amileah Sutliff, and our staff writer, Michael Penn II, to Pitchfork Festival this weekend. Here's the best of what they saw.

We went to Bon Iver's festival again this year. Read our review below.

Believe it or not, the Royal Wedding was not the most exciting thing to happen in the United Kingdom this weekend; it was Great Escape. For the uninitiated, the Great Escape is basically a British SXSW with fewer grackles and BBQ, more seagulls and “chips,” Ss where Zs should be, and the word “literally” pronounced with three syllables instead of four. Vinyl Me, Please trekked our American selves across the pond all the way to Brighton, a picturesque seaside town, for three days of showcases of the most up-and-coming artists on the scene right now.

‘Tis the season for summer restlessness, which can only be quelled by an impulsive alternative haircut or truckloads of good new music. To save you a bit of money and potential social ridicule because “it looked good on Cara Delevingne or whatever,” we watched carefully for the latest and greatest artists to turn your ears to next time they come through your neck of the woods.

Vinyl Me, Please Staff spent the last week at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Here are the best shows we saw.

The aughts’ penultimate years saw the trajectories of Fleet Foxes and Animal Collective steepen in their respective upward slopes. As the latter had taken a decade to eventually rise toward such a pinnacle in 2009, the former’s career was still nascent that year, their popularity contingent on the acclaim amongst Seattle locals of a self-released 2006 EP which led to Sub Pop releasing their second EP and debut full-length both in 2008. The disparity in success is stark, and boils down to gradations of accessibility: Animal Collective began as a band centralizing drone and musique concrete, while Fleet Foxes from the start had fireplace-tender harmonies, crisp acoustic guitars, along with every other motif on the folk troubadour’s grocery list.

On top of having arguably the year’s best lineup, FYF had plenty more going for it: the reputation for being the best from everyone I asked about it, rare performances from legends across genres, and backstage areas with half the game converging to watch said legends. With this being my first return to the City of Angels as a functional adult, I had to quickly learn to love the hellacious traffic and $10 scoops of ice cream upon entering the festival wasteland. Thankfully, the cauldron was lit on the Coliseum - something I thought they only did for the Olympics? - and the weather was a casual 83 the entire time, choosing not to bludgeon the thousands in attendance.

Here’s what I caught in the dehydrated madness.

Music festivals have a way of pulling you in every direction. Physically, of course. Even at a smaller festival like Pitchfork with just three stages, you find yourself running across an obstacle course of beer cans, blankets and bodies, listening to the second half of one immaculate set as you become muddy as you make your way to the first half of another. But there’s also mentally, emotionally. Experiencing back-to-back artists presenting and performing their work to you, it’s possible to experience an incomprehensibly wide range of human emotions in one day alone. It’s hard to process, file away, save for later. Amid the corporate sponsorship and the overwhelming idea that festivals are just a three-day-long party, it’s easy to get consumed, distracted, and leave everything you felt or learned amid the cigarette butts on the ground, wake up Monday morning, and go back to what you were doing before LCD Soundsystem was literally 40 feet in front of you.

But, in a way, to do that would be a disservice to the important work artists are doing. Because music is, in a way, a leisurely activity, it’s easy to forget that artists, in a huge variety of ways, are people doing work. It was Solange that reminded me of this. She spoke to the thousands of people before her, near the end of a gorgeous and jaw-dropping set: “There’s a lot of work to do, and I just feel so grateful you guys are allowing me to do the work.”

It takes a lot of work to move people in the capacity I saw from so many artists this weekend, and I’m grateful for them. While certainly not comprehensive, the following is a highlight reel of artists doing the kind of work I think we all want to take with us after the stages have come down. And whether you were at Union Park this weekend, or elsewhere, I hope you can carry a bit of it with you too.

The days that follow a major audio show visit are a very telling indicator as to how well you actually feel a show has gone. At the show itself, you busy yourself with getting around the thing, studiously making notes on new product, arranging possible reviews and generally acting in a way that at least partially resembles industry professionals being gathered together, albeit with the less regularly encountered phenomena like those professionals taking time out to play Kraftwerk at the sort of levels that makes your vision wobble.

For the first time in recent memory--with the exception of media Twitter’s annual complaints about brands or whatever--SXSW week started this year with bad “buzz.”