South by Southwest Music Festival: 17 Acts That Stood Out Including Soccer Mommy, Tank and The Bangas, The Weather Station

[New York Times]

By Jon Pareles

TANK AND THE BANGAS In New Orleans, music is forged in live performance, savoring the immediate effect on a club crowd and sprawling beyond the confines of radio-ready pop. Tank and the Bangas string together grooves from funk, hip-hop, rock and gospel; serious storytelling, self-empowerment exhortations and dance instructions share the band’s exuberant stream of consciousness.

THE WEATHER STATION Both serenity and storminess infuse the songs that Tamara Lindeman, from Toronto, writes as the Weather Station. Her band’s folk-rock is steeped in Joni Mitchell and Fairport Convention, weighing the textures of interwoven guitars; her lyrics reveal her interior monologues with a literary, lived-in sense of detail, often pondering the ways a couple’s lives can grow together and apart: “An ambulance passed on the street, and you took my arm reflexively,” she sang in “Thirty.”

SOCCER MOMMY Sophie Allison’s first recordings as Soccer Mommy were homemade, seemingly tentative songs about yearning and deep insecurity. But with her 2018 album, “Clean,” she found new self-assertion and assembled a working band, which provided some musical and emotional armor in a mini-set concentrating on her rockers.

Read full article here.