March 19--Some highlights from a busy Friday of music around town at the South by Southwest Music Conference:
Anderson Paak: The singer/rapper played a starring support role on Dr. Dre's 2015 comeback album, "Compton," and his latest album, "Mailbu," is justly acclaimed. The pocket-sized dynamo lived up to the promise in a warehouse-sized club packed with fans and curiosity seekers. He roamed across the stage and into the audience, then hopped on the drums with his band, expanding and contracting the arrangements as the spirit moved him. "Can we take our time with it?" "Can we get funky with it?" "Just the bass." Paak sang as he pushed the tempos or dropped them to a low simmer. In "The Season/Carry Me," he described a life of hardship and yearning, "Am I Wrong" brought '70s romantic smoothness with a hip-hop groove, and the psychedelic anguish-with-a-dance-beat "Put Me Thru" morphed ecstatically into David Bowie's "Let's Dance."
Bombino: With their flowing robes and trance-like rhythms, Bombino and his band evoked their nomadic life in west Africa from which they emerged two decades ago. But Omara "Bombino" Moctar has recorded with the Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, and his style owes nearly as much to Western psychedelic rock as it does to the Tuareg culture in which he grew up. Though musicians in this realm typically play in a loping, camel-walk rhythm, Bombino and his band dove eagerly into more urgent tempos, giving the music a thrilling momentum. Methyl Ethel: From the same remote part of Australia that produced Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, Methyl Ethel's Jake Webb is a one-man studio band with a gift for psychedelic melodies. The cavernous acoustics at an 8th Street church enhanced his trio's spacy mix, with reverberating guitar and programmed textures undergirding the rhythm section's drive. Webb's high-pitched vocals added to the sense of airiness, with a melancholy undertow.
