Late start this Friday, first struggling through another 13 band write-ups, then a shower and a long wait for the bus into town. South Congress is crawling with cars and people when I get there, almost as crowded as the main 6th street area… though a little older and with more real people mixed in. SXSJ (South by San Jose) is going on in a parking lot next to Jo’s Coffee, with crafts, a big solar panel display (which may or may not be powering the stage), food and, naturally, a bunch of bands. I see Wild Beasts setting up and pull out my camera. The batteries are dead. I have not brought any extras. 

You can buy lots of things on South Congress, cowboy boots and lattes, primitive art and gourmet sandwiches… but it is very hard to buy batteries there. I walk up towards the Yard Dog and see nothing but boutiques, not a drug store or hardware store in sight.  Which is why there are no photos of the Bloodshot party at the Yard Dog, where the Meat Purveyors are playing. Or of Wild Beasts, who are improbably baroque and decadent in the brilliant sunlight of a tie-dyed block party… think Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie in the parking lot of a Grateful Dead concert and you’re about halfway there.  Wild Beasts’ Limbo Panto, out late last year on Domino, is a flowery, theatrical, falsetto’d indulgence, all exaggerated gestures and swooning flourishes. The band is in the midst of the stylized excess of “Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants” when I pull in from the Yard Dog, Hayden Thorpe’s high tenor swooping clear out onto the street, irresistibly elaborate, over-the-top and English eccentric. Strange world, where you can buy Limbo Panto at one stand, hippie patchouli and batik at the one next to it, and where music as arch and ironic and urbanely over-the-top can be played in a parking lot with the sun beating down. 

My camera batteries are still dead, but I am recharged.