Thursday Night SXSW Showcases
By Greg Beets, Fri., March 18, 2016
Dirtnap Records
8pm, ValhallaRun out of Green Noise Records in Portland, Ore., Dirtnap's roster culls the cream of modern high-energy punk. Denton/Austin trio Bad Sports combines relentless crunch and superlative songwriting skills to deliver sets that spool forth like a lost volume of Rhino's DIY series. Their "Teenage Girls" picks up where the Undertones' "Teenage Kicks" left off. Led by Mark Ryan from the Marked Men, Ft. Worth's Mind Spiders bang out frazzled post-punk girded by dystopian keyboard on their latest, Prosthesis. Houston trio Something Fierce conjures Clash-style conviction for the present-day miasma, while Toronto threepiece the Steve Adamyk Band salves wounded hearts and minds with souped-up beerlight poptones. Montreal quartet Sonic Avenues peppers apartment-bred pop-punk with excessive amounts of fuzz and whoa-oh backing vocals on 2014's Mistakes EP. Denton-bred Marked Men/Bad Sports hybrid Radioactivity finishes the night with tightly wound pop-punk salvation from 2015's trailblazing Silent Kill.
