A lot of us at Panic Manual are no stranger to Austin, TX, justifiably the “live music capital of the world”. But it always adds a layer of scintillating mystery when you visit musicians and artists at their home base. I usually jump up and down at the opportunity: lyrics and conspicuous name-dropping aside, can one divine some source of spatiotemporally compartmentalized inspiration, be it cultural, historical, or geopolitical that the artists draw on? Well, if you try to parse that out using the Internets, the band that I’m about to introduce will itself introduce a brick wall of googleplex proportions. Looking for “Speak” in “Austin during SxSW” is likely second only to “Sing/song” in same and gives way to some convoluted contextual meta analysis that will delight only academics and self-identified intellectuals. In the past 10 minutes, I have had more instances of “does not compute” than I would from debugging a badly commented Fortran code.
If you haven’t figured out what I’m trying to say yet, here’s a layman’s summary: SPEAK is a band formed in Austin Texas with an unfortunate choice of name, but incidentally very fortunate choices in melody. Synthesized, remixed and sampled pieces typically form the backdrop to which the lead vocalist Troupe Gammage unleashes his talented howls. The synthpop component is never overly long-lasting and the aftertaste is strictly indie rock in a very pleasant manner. And now that I must think about it, there is hardly a detectable trace of Austin in the music. But that would be the difference between locals and tourists, or perhaps regular people and snobs, for all I know.
SPEAK put out a new album called Pedals last year – I particularly like “Congo,” “Gates” (below) and “Nightlight” from that effort. While it seems in all likelihood true, due to the aforementioned, significantly sturdy brick wall, I haven’t figured out whether they are confirmed at SxSW this year. But hopefully we will see them with hometown advantage this spring.