Austin City Limits: Day 2

Sorry, I just loved that picture too much to not share it with the world. That's the NSC Historian hard at work doing something. I had to stop off at the NSC new member retreat before heading to ACL. We took a more scenic route this time around across Town Lake.



And here's our blurry 4:30 PM entrance into day 2 of ACL Fest:


We started out with Los Lobos (at AMD) since my friend's mom really wanted to see them, and I was only mildly interested in The Shins anyway (playing at the same time, but at AT&T). They were pretty good and were one of the few bands where you could actually dance to them! Preferably with a girl though since it was the kind of music that you could easily dance in pairs to, and it was very light and matching their afternoon time slot. I hadn't heard much about them before, but I was impressed by the performance. I didn't get a shot of them, but this is just as good:


We decided to head over to The Shins towards the end, and we noticed dark clouds on one part of the sky and blue skies on the other:


It didn't rain though, and we couldn't get in a good spot for The Shins, so we decided to head over to Heineken instead to set up camp for Aimee Mann.


I definitely enjoyed her performance, and she sounded like a really melo mix of Sheryl Crow and Fiona Apple. It was so melo that I actually ended up napping for a few minutes until people rudely started trying to squeeze between my chair and some people on the ground next to us and knocked me awake. I hate it when people get in the way of the crowd at the front or middle, who obviously actually care about seeing the artist. I did manage to get a good shot of her on the big screen though.


Her music started to sound the same after a while though (she played a few tracks from Magnolia, by the way), and she was super melo, so we decided to see Guy Clark for a bit towards the end (her mom wanted to go, and we stayed for like 5 minutes) and take a bathroom break. Before heading out though, I noticed how pretty the sun looked when trying to peek out of the clouds.


Our next stop was the Austin Ventures stage for half of What Made Milwaukee Famous (a local band) since they were competing with The Raconteurs and we wanted to see both groups. I hadn't heard much of them at all before, but I definitely got a good vibe from their music and really enjoyed what I was hearing. I especially liked "Sweet Lady," which I recognized as having downloaded for free off of iTunes and liking it (hence my driving force to want to see them).


They were quite loud though (that soundstage seemed to have the volume too high in general), and so it wasn't too reluctantly that we ran off to the AT&T stage for The Raconteurs, which I was excited for because I wanted to see Jack White!


We came in as they were playing "Store Bought Bones," which I love simply for the lead guitar. I don't know how you can't love that rhythm. Afterwards, he played a cover of Nancy Sinatra's "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)," which was made famous by Kill Bill, and I love that song so I was very happy to hear that. Then, after some strange instrumental song, he went into "Broken Boy Soldier," another great song from the album. His last song was a little slow and he ended up closing up the set early, which is sad because I wanted to see them play "Steady As She Goes"! They probably played another song or two in between there, but I just didn't recognize them as readily. Anyway, I liked their backdrop.


That was all I really cared about seeing, but we checked out Explosions in the Sky, which had some nice ambiance music (all instrumental). I think it's great music for doing work in the background or for a really chill gathering I guess. We didn't have much of a view of them either since it was dark by then, so I won't show my shoddy picture of them. Afterwards, we grabbed some sausage wraps from Stubbs and headed to Willie Nelson, who was already but I wasn't compelled to listen to him so I did my Physics pre-lab instead. Plus, there was a ton of people out there to see him so we were in the back where it was tough to see the screen. We stopped by Massive Attack afterwards, but the only cool thing about them was the screen behind them with diodes that would display liberal political messages, and they were just more ambiance music (though a little more electronica).

Tomorrow we plan on seeing KT Tunstall (she actually has a great album), Jack Ingram (just to fill time), Matisyahu (I'm intrigued to see Jewish guys playing reggae), The New Pornographers (one of the earlier acts to sign on for ACL), The Flaming Lips, Ben Harper (competing with the Lips, and my friend will spend half her time there, whereas I'm just heading there after the Lips), G Love & Special Sauce, and, of course, Tom Petty. I'm not a big Tom Petty fan, but this guy has been around forever, it'll be interesting to see him live.