Josh Haner/The New York Times My Education performing at South by Southwest.AUSTIN, Tex. â€" Day 1 is the first plunge into the South by Southwest miscellany, and it’s the warmup; the program book has only 3-1/2 pages of listings instead of the 8-1/2 or more from Wednesday through Saturday. One thing it offered me was a chance to hear performers that Austin can hear regularly, but the rest of us can’t.
Austin continues to support the kind of Americana singer-songwriters who have stranger, more personal things to say than they could get away with most of the time in Nashville. One is Jess Klein, who has country roots, but who pushes her songs toward philosophical thoughtsâ€" particularly one she introduced as the probable title track of her next album, “Learning Faith,†a metaphorical journey along an endless, perilous bridge: “If I had known what it would take,†she sang in her wiry, determined mezzo-soprano, “I would have turned and run away.â€
Dana Falconberry, another Austin songwriter, builds rich parables around glimpses of nature: trees, rivers, the night sky. “How could I be lonely with so many winking lights,†she sang. Her music is gentle yet intricate: a rusticated chamber music using banjo, cello, and staggered, contrapuntal vocal harmonies with the other women in her band, in songs full of wordless interludes that unfurled a skein of possibilities.
At the other end of the dynamic spectrum was My Education, an instrumental band that has made a sacrament of the measured crescendo. The group introduces stately melodies, often! topped by violin, and then cycles through them, building variations by small increments from within â€" an additional cymbal crash here, a tremolo there, some slowly dawning feedback, some thickening keyboard chords â€" until the music looms as monumental, even overwhelming. Patience becomes a detonator.
