Songwriting can be viewed as a sort of alchemy, a process through which a musician creates something rare and valuable -- whether personally, artistically or commercially -- out of the base materials of everyday life.

Jakob Dylan’s forthcoming album, “Women and Country,” is a glittering example, something that began with only the slightest shred of raw material, in this case, one unrecorded song he’d written, not for himself, but with Glen Campbell in mind. After Dylan played it for producer and longtime family friend T Bone Burnett, Burnett challenged him to write more in the same vein, and what Dylan came back with immediately struck Burnett as something like gold ore.

“I do believe it’s absolutely the best batch of songs he’s ever brought to me to listen to,” Burnett said earlier this week. “I felt when he played me that first song that he had taken a giant step.… These aesthetic moments are undefinable, but  the song reached me... It just rang that bell.

“With Jakob, it’s been like the sculptor who knocks away everything that didn’t need to be there.  I think Jakob knocked away everything that was unnecessary and got to the core of what he does,” Burnett said. “It’s exciting, it was fast to work on, we did it all live, he was singing and playing, he wrote the songs in two to three weeks. That explosion of creativity, you can feel it.”

Burnett suggested  female harmonies were called for on several of the songs, and turned to Neko Case, who’d never worked with Dylan before, and Kelly Hogan, who ended up singing with Dylan on several of the tracks. They just appeared with him at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas,  and will be backing him on a tour that reaches the Wiltern on May 13.

“I was definitely a fan of Wallflowers,” Case said in a separate interview. “I always liked Jakob’s voice,  and he’s a very good songwriter without being showy. He wasn’t coming out the gate all crazy. He has such beautiful control over what he’s doing, and I enjoyed a lot of the sounds in Wallflowers music, because it had stuff in common with music I was doing at the time, which was super unpopular.

“T Bone asked me to do it and then he sent me the music. The first song I heard was ‘Down on Our Own Shield,’ and I was so drawn to it, I was so in love with that song. I was finally able to listen to the rest of them, but it took some time, because what I do when I hear something I like, I just repeat it and repeat and repeat it. Then I realized the rest were really awesome too."

The album features Burnett’s stable of players, including guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Dennis Crouch, steel guitarist Greg Leisz and  drummer Jay Bellerose. Many of them also played on the multiple Grammy-winning Robert Plant-Alison Krauss collaboration “Raising Sand,” with which Dylan’s album shares something of the same sense of mystery and deep spirituality drenched in rootsy rock-folk-country atmospherics. (Burnett recently said there won’t be a sequel to “Raising Sand”: “They just hit a wall somewhere, and that’s about it,” he said by way of explanation.)

“I think our band has really come into its own in the last two or three years,” Burnett said. “That’s not to say we haven’t done great work before. We’ve been working together for 25 years, but it feels like lately it’s just turned into the Stax band, the Motown band and some of those others in the '60s: You go in, they play and it sounds good, period. I think the ‘Raising Sand’ record was one of the first ones where we got into that deep world of sound that we’re looking for…. Right now, we’re hitting on all cylinders.”

And even with all that in the background, Burnett feels the Dylan album is something special.

“I don’t know why it’s taken him this much time to get to this place,” Burnett said, “because it’s where he’s been all along, really…. I think his dad will really dig this one.”

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Jakob Dylan outside a rehearsal studio in Hollywood. Credit: Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times

A list of upcoming shows across the Southland, with on-sale dates in parentheses.

Honda Center
Paramore, Sept. 19 (Sat.); Carole King & James Taylor, July 20 (Mon.)

Staples Center
Maxwell and Jill Scott, June 5 (Sat.)

Gibson Amphitheatre
Patti LaBelle, May 9; Pepe Aguilar, July 16-17; Viva La Salsa! with Gilberto Santa Rosa, May 7; Chayanne, May 14 (Fri.)

The Wiltern
The Psychedelic Furs, June 24 (Fri.)

Nokia Theatre
Diana Ross, June 9 (Fri.)

Club Nokia
Benise, Oct. 1 (now); Them Crooked Vultures, April 14; Kathleen Madigan, Sept. 18 (Fri.); Jordin Sparks, May 22; Miyavi, June 12 (Sat.)

The Orpheum
CocoRosie, July 2 (Sat.)

Music Box @ Fonda
The New Pornographers, July 19-20 (Sat.)

Grove of Anaheim
Miyavi, June 13; Jordin Sparks, May 23; the Psychedelic Furs, June 25 (Sat.)

San Diego Civic Center
Celtic Thunder, Nov. 5 (Sun.)

Troubadour
The Wedding Present, April 2; Paper Tongues, April 6; Murder by Death, April 9; Adam Green, April 10; Serena Ryder, April 13; the Daylights, April 15; Fair to Midland, April 17; Foxy Shazam, April 21; Two Door Cinema Club, May 5 (now)

Bootleg Theater
Here We Go Magic, April 17; Astronautalis, April 1 (now)

Photo by Mark Metcalfe / Getty Images

Brooklyn-via-Ohio rock band the National looks back on its new single, "Bloodbuzz Ohio," but it's not a sense of nostalgia that permeates the cut. "I never married, but Ohio don't remember me," sings Matt Berninger, laying down his now-trademark numb-from-despair baritone.

Leaked today in rough form, the cut is from the upcoming 4AD/Beggars release "High Violet," due May 10, and Stereogum soon thereafter secured a label-sanctioned finished version of the track available for download (listen below). The guitars come sleek and fast, picking up pace throughout the track, all the while the rhythm packs in a slight stutter, threatening to fall off the rails. 

Berninger is ready to surrender to a would-be lover in the song's opening verse, but there's more than romance the National are hinting at here. "I still owe money to the money to the money that I owe," Berninger sings with a shade of background harmonies. Flashes of horns arrive in the song's final moments, but they're brief and fleeting, like street lamp lighting as one is driving down the highway at night. 

The whole song taps a sense of running -- from the past, from commitments or perhaps from something even darker. "I'm on a blood ... buzz" are the last vocals before the the song builds to a guitar pile-up and abruptly dissolves. 

The National - Bloodbuzz Ohio

-- Todd Martens

The National will play the Wiltern on May 21 and May 22. Tickets are still available, $22.50-$27.50, sans service charges. Photo: Keith Klenowski

While no release tops the six-figure sales mark in the U.S. this week, country-pop trio Lady Antebellum's "Need You Now" is able to remain out front. The act leads the nation's pop chart for the fourth, non-consecutive week, racking up an additional 93,000 in sales, according to Nielsen SoundScan, bringing its total well above the 1.4 million mark.

Overall U.S. album sales are trending down about 8% from the comparable period last year, according to Billboard, and three new albums this week land in the top 20. Veteran gospel artist Marvin Sapp comes in at No. 2 with his latest, "Here I Am," a set that sold 76,000 copies. The album, reports Billboard, is the highest-charting gospel release ever in the 54-year history of the magazine's U.S. pop chart -- its surprise success fueled by the crossover hit "Never Would Have Made It." 

Next week's chart will get a major shakeup, courtesy of teeny-voiced teen sensation Justin Bieber, whose "My World 2.0" is expected to debut at No. 1. If that's the case, it will no doubt be helped by the nice price of $5.99 on iTunes, and $6.98 on Amazon. But look for a strong, albeit not top 10, showing from local electro-pop outfit the Bird and the Bee, whose "Interpreting the Masters, Vol. 1 (A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates)" is getting a major push on iTunes, and carrying a $7.99 price tag on Amazon. 

 

 

“This is a song…,” Patrick Stickles said Tuesday night at the Bootleg Theater, and then he stopped. The frontman of New Jersey’s Titus Andronicus appeared to be searching for a way to introduce “The Battle of Hampton Roads,” the closing track from his band’s ambitious, buzzed-about new album, “The Monitor,” but the words weren’t coming. So, instead, Stickles turned around and began strumming, content to let his half-finished exegesis become a simple statement of fact.

You can’t really blame the guy for coming up short: At nearly a quarter-hour in length on CD, “The Battle of Hampton Roads” isn’t easily condensed into the stuff of sound-bite stage banter. It’s a song (if I may give it a try) about coming to terms with where you come from and who you’re destined to be, and about how the distance between those two ideas seems to change with age.

Oh, and as its title suggests, it’s also about the Civil War.

“The things I used to love I have come to reject,” Stickles sings over the song’s roiling folk-punk groove. “The things I used to hate I have learned to accept.”

If that sounds like the basis of a zillion Bruce Springsteen tunes (minus the Civil War stuff), well, Stickles doesn’t disagree; he even gives the Boss a shout-out later in the song, right before he Jersey-fies a well-known line from Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”

 

Liars' "Scissor" from A Bruntel on Vimeo.

You've no doubt heard a lot about OK Go's elaborate video starring a paint-splattering Rube Goldberg machine that puts the treadmills from "Here It Goes Again" to shame. If you haven't watched it dozens of times on the Internet already, or if you want to watch it on the big screen, the Flux Screening Series gives you the chance to peep at it nice and large at the Hammer Museum.

But there are other offerings as well, including a moody video from the Liars, a little like something dreamed up by Joseph Conrad if he were an art rocker. Directed by local artist Andy Bruntel, who has many uniformly excellent videos on his website, the video is for the first single from the Liars' new album,  "Sisterworld." Part haunting chamber piece, part tense guitar attack, "Scissor" reflects the dualities constantly in battle throughout the Liars' fifth effort.

"Sisterworld" is heavily inspired by Los Angeles, where the band lived and recorded the record, and where Angus Andrew and Aaron Hemphill originally met as students at CalArts. One of the strongest tracks on the album is "The Overachievers," a teasing ode to the hipster set driving their bio-cars, abandoning their jobs to walk in the forest and settle down in a house with cats. It's a fiery but lithe beast of a song; you've never heard the phrase "we settled down -- with cats!" delivered with so much venom. And, in a beautiful bit of irreverence, Devendra Banhart and the Grogs cover it on "Sisterworld: Reinterpretations," a supplemental set of remixes and covers the Liars also released.

-- Margaret Wappler

Flux Screening Series at the Hammer Museum, Billy Wilder Theater, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. (310) 443-7000. Tonight, 7 to 11 p.m. Free.

This just in from U2 headquarters: The Irish band will release a DVD of last year's massive Rose Bowl concert sometime in 2010, according to U2's website. Details remain foggy, but apparently they want the info out immediately, before they finalize the decisions: "The band are still working on the content of the DVD," reads a note on their site, before asking fans to register to get the latest updates.

The news isn't a big surprise, considering the band partnered with YouTube to stream the concert live.

Do you need the DVD? Times pop critic Ann Powers, in her review of the show, suggests maybe yes:

[A]fter three decades as an important band, U2 is long past simple uplift. Its music is as much about emotional entanglement (as in "Ultraviolet" on Sunday) and disorientation ("Vertigo"). Ultimately, it is a meditation on space: the majestic natural landscapes that the Edge's guitar playing often describes; the crowded dance floors or train platforms Clayton and Mullen's rhythms evoke; the inches between a whispering mouth and a lover's ear, or the infinite journey of a prayer hurled into the air.

The Space Station allows U2 to make those musical and lyrical preoccupations physical in a new way. At the Rose Bowl, it created a new experience even for the most jaded concertgoer. U2 concerts have often included moments in which raised voices build goodwill, or shaking hips stimulate joy. But for the first time, perhaps, this band's noise resulted in a kind of silence and stillness -- not a literal one, but the rapture that comes when nearly 100,000 people relax together, as if held within a gentle, open hand.

Here's the set list of the show:

“I’m going to be so sick from this,” said one cringing fan at the L.A. debut of Animal Collective’s new film project, “Oddsac.” “All I’ve had to eat today is wine, beer and candy corn.”

That’s actually a perfectly apt pre-game diet to take in “Oddsac,” a new collaboration between the woozy art-pop band and director Danny Perez. If you’ve ever wished that David Lynch would re-make the videotape in “The Ring” that kills anyone who watches it, “Oddsac” will tide you over until that terrifying day.

Perez and the band produced “Oddsac” commensurately with the Collective’s album “Strawberry Jam” and its 2009 commercial breakthrough “Merriweather Post Pavilion,” but it’s born of completely different impulses than those hook-centric records. The swag for sale in the lobby, which depicts gruesome melting heads and the like, gave a better clue of what was in store. “Oddsac” is a gut-bucket horror flick filleted with Impressionist filters and sound collages that veer from the creepily gorgeous to the indulgently repellent.

“This is an accurate expression of what it felt like to make this,” Perez said before introducing the film. One can’t argue with reasoning like that. And there is a certain coherence to “Oddsac’s” Dario Argento-worthy  slasher sequences and brooding stills of rock fields and empty woods. It takes the chin-scratching logic of a high-camp fright flick like “Pieces” and wrings a kind of YouTube-era pastiche effect from it.

Somehow this happens every South by Southwest. Despite the fact that nearly every band in attendance at the annual festival plays somewhere between five and 10 times, shows are missed, commitments are broken, schedules run late and conflicts suddenly materialize. Such was the case every time I tried to catch Merge Records' Let's Westle, who had the misfortune of playing opposite the Besnard Lakes on Thursday night in Austin, Texas.  

Such a shame, as the jangly Brit-poppers, with their prep-school look and sing-along "ba-ba-ba" backing harmonies, would have been the perfect tonic to much of the noise and atmospheric music that permeates the Austin experience. Just check single "We Are the Men You'll Grow to Love Soon," which turns nice-guy bitterness into a three-minute slice of upbeat charm.

Willing to wait for all the pretty gals to outgrow their bad-boy phase, singer Wesley Patrick Gonzalez pleads, "We are the most reliable guys in the world," and throws in some hand claps before the girls with the bangs have time to roll their eyes. Much of the band's "In the Court of the Wrestling Let's," which was released today, is equally clever and fast. The act is playing tonight with Titus Andronicus, a Jersey punk-sprawl outfit that has gotten plenty of raves on this here blog, so now there are multiple reasons to stay out late on a school night.

-- Todd Martens

Let's Wrestle with Titus Andronicus at the Bootleg Theatre, 2220 Beverly Blvd. Tickets are $10. 

When the great earthquake of 2010 roared through Santiago last month, hip-hop artist Ana Tijoux was performing at a club. She had made it through three songs when the walls around her began to tremble.

Then the lights went out. Fortunately, no one inside was hurt, but "it was a little strange," Tijoux said, speaking by phone last week from Austin, Texas, where she was making her North American tour debut at the South by Southwest music festival.

As one of South America’s best-regarded young MCs, male or female, the prodigiously loquacious Tijoux is seldom at a loss for words. Formerly the frontwoman for the socially clued-in hip-hop outfit Makiza, she has developed a growing following with her jazz-inflected, unusually melodic rapping and witty, politically savvy lyrics.

But in the weeks since the devastating temblor, Tijoux hasn’t been moved to set down any of her thoughts about the traumatic event in song, especially while Chile continues to be rattled by seismic aftershocks.

"It has inspired fear more than inspiration," said the artist, who will perform in Los Angeles for the first time tonight at Little Temple. 

Salvaging inspiration from life’s strange rumblings is, of course, part of an MC’s job description. Tijoux fulfills that obligation impressively with her debut album, "1977," which has just been released by North Hollywood-based Nacional Records.

Jazz is historically a male-dominated field, and the list of famous female jazz drummers isn’t a terribly long one. But with the rowdily named “Boom Tic Boom,” Allison Miller stakes a claim to being one of the most promising drummers in the game, regardless of gender.

Perhaps better known for her rock-oriented work backing singer-songwriters Ani DiFranco and Brandi Carlile, Miller has made a name for herself accompanying New York City heavyweights such as Steven Bernstein, Erik Friedlander and Mike Stern. Joined by DiFranco bandmate Todd Sickafoose on bass and pianist Myra Melford, Miller's second album as a bandleader is a free-wheeling and often invigorating collection that should appeal to fans of post-bop and the cutting edge.

Rising out of a series of delicate cymbal explorations, “Fead” evolves into a beautifully rough-hewn swing, and "Big Lovely" features a rollicking turn from Melford over a swampy groove from Sickafoose and Miller. Stretching her band mates with a seemingly endless variety of bold improvisations, Melford also composes two of the album’s most atmospheric pieces, the off-kilter “Be Melting Snow” and “Night,” which simmers atop contemplative percussion textures from Miller. Jazz violinist Jenny Scheinman also joins the trio to lend a Western-leaning swerve to the joyful “CFS (Candy Flavored Sidewalk).”

Miller is a drummer who knows her history -- the album also features an intimate take on Hoagy Carmichael’s “Rockin’ Chair”  and a hip-shaking reworking of Mary Lou Williams’ “Intermission.” With more inspiring albums like this one, her standing as a relative rarity in her field could be history as well.

-- Chris Barton

Allison Miller

"Boom Tic Boom"

Three Stars

Foxhaven Records

It takes a real helping of celebrity chutzpah for Dakota Fanning to cover a tune like the Runaways' "California Paradise," a sarcastic ode to Hollywood street urchin life. For Fanning and film cohort Kristen Stewart, their night life equivalent probably involves dinner at the West Hollywood Urth Caffe followed by (non-alcoholic) cocktails at Drai's. But on the soundtrack to "The Runaways," their updated takes on the scruffy oeuvre of Curie, Jett and company feel tossed off in a way the original Runaways might appreciate.

Like her fellow platinum-tressed actress-turned-rocker Taylor Momsen, Fanning takes her vocal cues from Courtney Love's gnarled howl. But on record, Fanning sounds absolutely true to her motivation for making this soundtrack: She's a beautiful, well-paid actress playing the part of a beautiful, famous rock star playing the character of a broke L.A. punk vixen. But this town is built on pretty people dressing down, and the deep irony of her musical role as Curie is unexpectedly on target given myth-building source material such as  "Dead End Justice" and "Cherry Bomb."

Stewart takes a passenger-seat role here, but her deeper register is a worthy compliment in this very silly formula. The rest of the soundtrack is essential but obvious '70s sleaze-rock fare, including the Stooges and Bowie, and MC5.

-- August Brown

 Various Artists

' "The Runaways" Original Motion Picture Soundtrack'

(Atlantic Records)

Two stars

Sometime in our collective redefinition of the '80s as the ultimate punch line of the recent decades, the scrumptious pop work of Daryl Hall and John Oates was unfairly written off as kitsch, the soundtrack for getting on your leg warmers or trimming your heavy Oates-style mustache.

But the local duo of singer Inara George and multi-instrumentalist/producer Greg Kurstin, as the Bird and the Bee, have retooled Hall & Oates' classic FM jams, reflecting the summery ease of Los Angeles instead of the choppy, blue-eyed soul of Philly.

Although they polish these radio baubles to a mellow shine, the pair never lose their heads in fandom.

"I Can't Go for That" is the Santa Ana winds of disco cool, with George delivering the title line with a chanteuse's detachment, a hallmark of her vocal style. "Kiss on My List" opens with an organ line that could be echoing in the loneliest roller-skating rink.

One of the best takes on the album is the sole original, "Heard It on the Radio," which functions as a love letter to summer earworms with bubbly synths.

The one drawback to "Interpreting the Masters" is really a compliment to the Bird and Bee: George is such a nuanced interpreter of her own lyrics that, though she has fun with these clever but not particularly deep pop lines, she can't find all the nooks that makes her own work so special.

-- Margaret Wappler

The Bird and the Bee

"Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates"

(Blue Note)

Three stars

As far as the average listener's perception is concerned, Iraq and Iran may rank just below Greenland in terms of enjoying a rich jazz tradition. Yet this record's cross-cultural collaboration between Iraqi American trumpeter ElSaffar and Iranian American tenor saxophonist Modirzadeh could change all that.

Split between each composer in two multi-part suites, "Radif Suite" walks a meandering line between Middle Eastern tradition and shape-shifting, improvisation-heavy jazz. Anchored by a nimble rhythm section of drummer Alex Cline and bassist Mark Dresser (fixtures on the Culver City jazz label Cryptogramophone), the album's slowly unfurling yet strikingly accessible pieces at times recall the more exotic explorations of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry.

Working through 12 seamlessly transitional  movements, Modirzadeh's opening "Radif-E Kayhan" suite finds the two horn players occasionally embarking on breathless, entangled improvisations, but much of the suite's heart is more sparse and contemplative, underscored by Cline's colorful percussive rumbles and ringing cymbals. ElSaffar, who gained notice for his more overtly Arabic-influenced 2007 debut "Two Rivers," delivers what may be the more immediately approachable of the album's two halves with "Copper Suite."

A challenging but rewarding collection thick with ideas and inspiration, the record shows how small the world of music can be, even while jazz's world keeps growing.

-- Chris Barton

Amir ElSaffar and Hafez Modirzadeh

"Radif Suite"

(Pi Recordings)

Three stars

Actors nursing dreams of musical glory owe Zooey Deschanel gratitude: With "Volume One," Deschanel and M. Ward's lovable 2008 debut as She & Him, the quirky indie-film star handily refuted the widespread notion that success on the silver screen precludes success in the recording studio. Singing songs she wrote (plus a few smartly chosen covers) over crafty retro-pop arrangements by Ward, Deschanel revealed not only a voice worth hearing but a creative sensibility as complete as any non-moonlighter's.

That sensibility remains strong on "Volume Two," which offers 13 more tunes that sound like they could've come from a collection of forgotten '60s-era B-sides. In "Thieves" Deschanel gives her voice a melancholy country lilt as Ward pairs shimmering acoustic guitars with mournful oldies-radio strings.

"Home" is a pitch-perfect piece of Carole King-style piano pop, and a version of Skeeter Davis' "Gonna Get Along Without You Now" has a sweetly shuffling country-soul groove.

As impressively specific as those sonic ideas are, though, Deschanel's songwriting here is less distinctive than it was on "Volume One." Too many of the tracks bleed together in a well-appointed mush of major-minor melodies and hand-me-down lyrics about the inevitability of heartbreak. And when the songs do make an impression, as in "Don't Look Back" and "In the Sun," it's often because they're overloaded with the kind of kiddie-culture cutesiness that Deschanel the actress always cuts with a dose of grown-up sarcasm.

 -- Mikael Wood

She & Him 
"Volume Two" 
(Merge) 
Two stars

In 2007, the Silver Lake singer-songwriter Ariana Delawari traveled to her parents' home in Kabul to record parts of her debut album, "Lion of Panjshir," as Afghanistan was under fire from Taliban-sympathizing suicide bombers. Under the watch of armed guards, she played her brand of California folk-rock with local masters of Afghan instruments, and found an unlikely helping hand from director David Lynch in mixing the record, which came out in October on Lynch's label. Read the full story, today's Column One, at this link.

-- August Brown

Photo by Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

Memorable moments include discovering Seattle's feminist hip-hop duo Thee Satisfaction, and a gracious celebration of Alex Chilton.

A stranger wandering into the scene that overtakes downtown Austin, Texas,  every year during the music portion of the South by Southwest festival could be forgiven for thinking it was some kind of apocalypse. The din, the trash, the packs of stumblers forming strange clumps of humanity in the middle of each block and then dispersing across the intersections -- the total environment emanates disaster.

It's really a party, of course, a packed gathering of fans jumping from club to club in search of the perfect set from the thousand-plus artists playing dozens of showcases in dozens of venues around Austin's core. Young artists hope to be noticed, older ones renew their connections with fans and one another, and tipsy college kids shove up against music biz moguls in hopes of hearing something unforgettable.

The truth is that, though it can feel uncomfortable to the point of hazard,  SXSW is one of the few settings in which devoted rock and pop lovers can feel as if the music industry is not in a catastrophic state. The daytime panels, though often notably underattended given the stakes, address the problems facing an art form in transition, but once the music starts -- and it really never stops here -- all such concerns are forgotten. Nearly every club door offers the chance of a breakthrough, and each new conversation offers hints that the health of grass-roots music might be just fine.

Some artists, like Los Angeles band Local Natives, rode in on a pretty big wave of excitement and fulfilled that promise with tight, memorable sets. Others -- like one of my favorite finds, Seattle's rambunctiously adorable feminist hip-hop duo Thee Satisfaction -- gained word-of-mouth traction over the course of several performances.

South by Southwest is so big at this point, and so varied, that drawing any conclusions from it is a fool's game. This year had to deal with one terrible tragedy: the Wednesday death in New Orleans of Alex Chilton, who was scheduled to play at Antone's on Saturday with the reunited version of his crucial 1970s band Big Star, and who instead was honored by many of his peers and inheritors at a tribute concert.

But whole strata of festival participants had no idea of Chilton's importance. They were busy with their own concerns, like Perez Hilton's annual to-do, or sets by major artists such as Muse and Hole. They supported their own interests; the heavy metal offerings alone, ranging from the great Motörhead to such young stars as High on Fire and Priestess, could have satisfied a headbanger for a year.

If the Big Star show that became a tribute to the late Alex Chilton on Saturday in Austin had the weight and solemnity of church, the panel about the band and its lost leader offered the insight and revelation of the best kind of school. Neither setting might have been sought out by the iconoclastic artist they honored, but each added something to the necessary process of mourning and commemoration for Chilton, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack Wednesday, before he was to depart for Big Star’s showcase at South by Southwest.

If I’d had to choose one event to attend, it would have been the panel. As soothing as it was to hear Chilton’s best-known Big Star songs performed by musicians who’d worked to bring his hidden but crucial role in indie rock’s history to light, listening to stories from intimates that painted a larger picture of the man was more revealing and rewarding.

Chilton wasn’t just a genius writer of Beatles-inspired power pop songs. He was a lifelong epicurean and cultural adventurer who sought to brighten the corners of American popular music through his own work. With a father who played jazz and a mother who ran an art gallery out of the family manse, Chilton found his path early and never strayed from it.

"The house was a center of culture,” said John Fry*, the owner of Ardent Studios, and, as panel organizer and music journalist Bob Mehr put it, the “George Martin” to Chilton and Big Star partner Chris Bell’s Lennon and McCartney.  “From a very young man, he had a lot to draw on. And he kept that going; you would never see him without a book and a couple of newspapers.”

There isn't much that can slow the music industry's annual spring break party that is the South by Southwest conference. Despite continued declines in CD sales, concerns over a major industry merger and the recent passing of the beloved pop craftsman Alex Chilton, nearly 2,000 bands played over four days in Austin, Texas, some as many as three of four times per day, and all hoping to snare a bit of the spotlight -- or simply reclaim it. 

When the sponsors leave town and the last beer can is swept up, the industry that most of the artists at SXSW are still trying to penetrate won't always be a welcoming one. The fest played host to big acts trying to snare some critical love (Muse), artists on the comeback rant (Courtney Love), indie cult heroes in need of a larger audience (the Besnard Lakes, above) and hyped artists making the best of their first trips to Austin (the Dum Dum Girls, Sleigh Bells). 

It's easy to say there's something for everyone in Austin during SXSW. If one wants only to listen to live hip-hop or noise bands for nearly 96 hours, there's no place easier to do that than the Texas capital during mid-March. If one wants to forgo registering for the fest -- and clearly many do, as a SXSW spokeswoman said registration was expected to match last year's total of around 12,000, and yet the parties and crowds swell every year -- one can easily still see all the buzzed-about artists.

Yet once everyone has retreated back to his or her respective starting cities, the business that awaits them won't be offering the free flavored mix drinks as in Austin, to say the least. Many artists at SXSW tend to the artier side -- the sweepingly grand electronic soundscapes of Sweden's Björk-influenced jj come to mind -- yet Matador head Gerard Cosloy noted that for all the success the Internet has brought to the underground community, it isn't getting any easier to make a living. 

"We have to work twice as hard and spend twice as much money to sell half as much as we used to," Cosloy said, adding that the market for mid-level success for indie artists -- about 15,000 in sales -- has "completely disappeared." 

There are, of course, the media-hyped sources of revenue that are supposedly going to save the music industry -- we've all read countless stories with someone saying a cliche like "TV is the new radio." After all, even the XX, a band that experiments with song structures at their most tense and minimal, can shoot up the charts after having a cut in an Olympics-themed advertisement.  

But such things are luck, not a business model, said SXSW participants. "They're quite amazing windfalls," said Domino head Kris Gillespie, before quickly adding that purses are getting tighter. "The money has dropped off the edge of a cliff, in terms of advertising money."

It's now an industry of niches, and nowhere is that more evident than SXSW. Whether taking in the off-kilter, blues-spiked rock of Holly Miranda, or the devastating crush of guitars and harmonies that is Australia's Beaches, much of what was heard at SXSW has a targeted audience. Although the distinctions between cult and mainstream are getting blurred.

"The majors are looking at us, the indies," said Portia Sabin, who oversees Kill Rock Stars. "The business model of the majors, where you need to sell 250,000 just to recoup your investment in a new band, that's not practical anymore. So how you can make money if you only sell 5,000 copies? That's what we know."

In other words, they know how to survive. That's a trait that's going to come in handy as the industry further consolidates. For those who opted to stick close to the convention center rather than consume free cupcakes and watered down beer all day, the recent merger of Ticketmaster and Live Nation became a contentious subject. 

The Department of Justice's assistant attorney general for antitrust, Christine Varney, was on hand to defend the government's approval of the merger, although the industry's skepticism and concerns weren't really answered. Varney stayed on point, telling SXSW that the Justice Department had attempted to create more competition in the ticketing space, and not dismantle Live Nation Entertainment's massive vertical integration, which puts ticket sales, promotion, concert venues and artist management under one roof.  

Domino's Gillespie slammed the green light as "immoral," and Varney urged angry SXSW guests to write the Justice Department. Comments on the merger are being accepted until early May, and will be reviewed to see whether further court action is necessary, she said. 

"I know it's not a satisfying answer," Varney said when pressed as to why the Justice Department didn't force Live Nation Entertainment to A) sell its management firm, B) sell its venues or C) allow competing promoters to leave their contracts with Ticketmaster. "We are constrained by the law. The overlap that we found was in ticketing. That's why the remedy rests in ticketing."

There is a so-called consent decree, which will allow competitors of Live Nation Entertainment to report anti-competitive practices. And if you have a problem with that? "The only thing I can tell you to do is to continue to try and work your deals and let us know if you think the consent decree is being violated," Varney said.

As the big guys get bigger, SXSW was a fitting reminder that while the music industry may still like to party and channel its reckless past, endurance is rarely sustained by indulging in excess. 

"There's a lot less money being advanced for tour support," Matador's Cosloy said. "That's due to not just shrinking record sales, but what's happening in the live music business. When someone says to me, 'What do you do for tour support?' I say, 'We'll be very supportive. If you need to call someone in the middle of the night, we'll be supportive.' "

And now for the music: After the jump, some of the acts that made the biggest lasting impression on me: 

The likes of Perez Hilton and Rachael Ray threw in-demand parties on the fourth and -- for all intents and purposes -- final day of the South by Southwest music conference and festival in Austin, Texas. With just under 2,000 bands, many of them on the hunt for next-big-thing status, plotting a show-going schedule can be an arduous task, and it's easy to see why designer quesadillas and flavored drinks can be a welcome distraction.  

Yet after the guest lists have been tossed and the music industry has retreated from the Texas capital, it won't be the VIP parties that made a lasting impression. It will be the artists. 

Los Angeles has a worthy contender in the Dum Dum Girls, the '60s-tinged fuzzed-out rockers who take old-fashioned melodies and make them streetwise tough. All sporting different variations of black, the Dum Dum Girls have a look that could be ripped from a vintage film noir poster, and a sound that mirrors that femme fatale image. 

Though based in L.A., the Dum Dum Girls have felt a bit like outsiders. The band's rapid ascent began last fall in New York at the CMJ Music Marathon, and their hometown shows have been few and far between. The band's first SXSW comes near the eve of the March 30 release of the act's Sub Pop debut, "I Will Be," and in Austin, the band was more assured, confident and simply downright cool than it had been at its smattering of L.A. gigs.  

Opening with a slowed down and droned-out version of the Rolling Stones' "Play With Fire," the Dum Dum Girls offered the song as if it was a dare. The band stood largely in place, with a glare affixed out above the audience, lending a detached, effortless and old-fashioned rebellious rock 'n' roll attitude to its songs. Girl group harmonies grace the racing "Bhang, Bhang, I'm a Burnout," and drummer Frankie Rose, ex-Vivian Girls (a more 21st century reference point for the group), brought a defiant kick to the more moderately paced "Rest of Our Lives." 

Time will tell if such vintage trappings have a life outside of SXSW. Yet even if the Dum Dum Girls tap a rock 'n' roll sound that may live outside the mainstream, it's one that never really goes out of style. And speaking of style, it probably won't have hurt that the Dum Dum Girls have it in spades. 

Other notes from Day 4 of SXSW: