SXSW Music: Hardly Art Showcase

There’s no way around it, y’all: If you missed Hardly Art’s showcase at Cheer Up Charlies Thursday night, you really messed up.

Tacocat (photo by Jana Birchum)

First things first: At the end of every rainbow is a Tacocat performance.

Animated, buoyant, drenched in color, the feminist punks from Seattle threw lit-up balloons into the audience and fit two songs about periods into their stage time. Their sunny rock & roll took tunes from 2014’s NVM and the forthcoming Lost Time, and covered subject matter including The X-Files, catcalling, teenage horse girls, and Internet trolls. Ideal brew of cutesy aesthetic with smart, sharp teeth, the quartet stole the night.

Also hailing from Seattle, La Luz skewed atmospheric with their gloomy psych, vocals drowned out by guitars and cacophonous keyboard breakdowns. A more subdued set overall, their weird, surfy, noir served as a respite between two cheery sets despite a few technical difficulties.

Shannon & the Clams (photo by Jana Birchum)

Clad in theatrical Fifties garb that included matching yellow blazers, Oakland’s Shannon & the Clams ripped through doo-wop garage rock, including a cover of Linda Ronstadt’s “Dark End of the Street.” Shannon Shaw’s girl-group howl and command of her bass highlighted the set.

Inexplicably the closer on an otherwise light bill, Detroit post-punks Protomartyr plied heavy, dystopian doom and gloom. Through a crooked mouth, founder Joe Casey delivered his lyrics like an accusation at the audience. While the band pummeled behind him, he stood at the mic like an unraveling uncle who drinks too much at a family gathering and sits you down afterward to reveal all their deepest, darkest secrets.