SXSW Review: Dallas Austin at the Austin Music Hall

The Thursday evening Afro-punk showcase was a little underattended considering how good it was.

This was a quick review of a show that really should have been much better than it was. Dallas Austin is an amazing producer. But his talents as a performer…not so much. My original review appeared in the Austin American-Statesman here.

By V.M. Black

(Thursday, March 19, 2009 at 11:50 p.m.)

Pop-hip hop-R&B producer extraordinaire Dallas Austin used a whole lot of sound and fury during his Thursday evening set at the Afro-punk showcase, signifying that he is still finding his voice as a performer.

With five gi-normous-sized flatscreen plasma televisions covering the stage, it almost appeared that Austin was hiding behind the screens, as opposed to using them as an additional visual element. (They featured video footage of his new album’s many guest vocalists: George Clinton, Big Gipp from Goodie Mobb and several other Atlantans.) To further the appearance of identity concealment, he and his drummer emerged at the beginning of the set in Mexican wrestler masks.

Yet as Austin took off his mask, a few banging tunes started vibrating the speaker cones and motivating the audience (which had thinned a bit after Janelle Monáe’s starmaking 11 p.m. set). With a live band and an Apple laptop, Austin’s lyrical exploration of modern day societal ills was one of the more intriguing aspect of his show. Another highlight was his revisionist cover of T-Rex’s “Children of the Revolution.” The band’s original tunes were creative if not memorable, falling somewhere between the pop/hip hop glam of the Neptunes/N.E.R.D. and the rocking eletronica workouts of LCD Soundsystem.

Austin is definitely more of a producer than a frontman. He has a little bit to learn about engaging an audience and working a crowd of several hundred people (let alone several thousand). But he’s talented enough that he’ll probably figure it out eventually.