Stumbling around Austin in SXSW week can create some startling musical juxtapositions, and as the music industry juggernaut roars into life on Tuesday night, fans, liggers and locals stumble from bar to bar in search of the next big thing.
Unlocking the Truth have already debuted a film about them, Breaking a Monster, at SXSW. A black, metal trio from Brooklyn, only just into their teens, they are the veterans of guerrilla shows in New York’s Times Square that have gone viral on the web, and were recently signed to Sony for $1.8m – although at the weekend divulged that they’re now trying to get out of that contract.
Hopefully this difficulty is no more than a bump in the road (though the gig is less rammed than one might have expected) as Unlocking the Truth are remarkable live. They deliver songs like their anthem Monster and the excellently named Brutal Breakdown with crunch, power and a fidgety energy. Though they’ve played with Metallica, the jury is out on whether they’ve got enough horsepower to please metal fans, but despite their tender years, Unlocking the Truth certainly manage to deliver a convincing sonic smackdown to the Dirty Dog bar.
Natalie Prass could not be a more different proposition. She’s a 28-year-old country soul singer whose debut album has been praised to the heavens; the product of both Nashville and Matthew E White’s Spacebomb studio. Yet crammed with her band at one end of a packed and steamy pub, wearing a Kiss T-shirt, she seems off her game, skipping over songs and announcing that one won’t be played because of the lack of a Wurlitzer organ.
Though the gig is free, it seems a bit churlish to deny the audience the full works, especially when Prass is a purveyor of the kind of traditional soul songwriting that always boasts that it can stand naked with no more than an acoustic guitar. At least her most immediately accessible song Why Don’t You Believe in Me closes the gig in convincing style, but elsewhere, rather than an heir to Dusty Springfield, Prass calls to mind Minnie Mouse singing Amy Winehouse.
