Despite rain in the early evening, the weather was just fine, if a little muggy, for local arts and music collective Raw Paw’s epic send off to summer at Scoot Inn on Friday night. Although a slew of other great shows happened in town simultaneously, I’m all-in on the opinion that this was the place to be. Raw Paw always makes an event special, going all out with decoration and visual spectacle, not to mention a killer lineup of bands. Further, the group’s positivity and enthusiasm make for a communal feeling of euphoria that most live music experiences lack.
Above the crowded outdoor Scoot Inn space hung a net of pool floaty noodles cut into discs. Warm, incandescents illuminated the splashes of bright blue, green, yellow, and orange. Onstage, dancers covered in paint provided interpretive movements to a set of electronic music from Courdroi. Projections washed over the stage and the bodies of the dancers as Scoot Inn’s stage lighting erupted in brilliant bursts of purple and red. In one corner of the outdoor venue, oversized PBR cans served as pegs for a giant game of ring toss using pool noodles formed into circles. It was all like some late night, rock club beach party.
After Courdroi, Milezo took the stage to crank out a set of psych-pop that felt much grittier and garagier than I remember. With Miles Kelley and Blair Robbins alternating handling vocal duties and Marmalakes’ Max Colonna on bass, the five-piece rocked through a sweaty set of jams.
Hikes headlined the outdoor stage, playing to a crowd of completely engrossed and enthusiastic fans a night before they would share a bill with shred queen Marnie Stern over at Spiderhouse Ballroom. I’ve fawned all over Hikes in basically every post I’ve ever written about them, and rightfully so. Each time I see them, I’m even more convinced that they’re one of the city’s most important bands. Concertgoers seem to agree as Hikes’ shows always included moshing, crowd surfing, and plenty of choral singing. Hikes have found a way to incorporate math rock and folk while creating music that exudes absolutely joy. The band continues to be selected for notable bills and will play Utopiafest this coming weekend in Utopia, TX. If you haven’t seen them yet, do yourself a favor and change that.
Near the end of their set, the Pabst Wizard, a dude resembling Father Time but toting a staff made from stacked PBR empties, joined Hikes onstage to reveal Raw Paw’s new zine theme: Alien. The collective seems to be taking an open-minded approach to the word, and you can rest assured that while the writing in the next issue might feature a few light-hearted writings about other worldly beings, metaphorical understandings of the alien, the foreign, the other are likely to be found among the pages of the zine.
I finished my night by watching Chipper Jones, another math rock minded band, play Scoot Inn’s indoor stage. The duo’s music leans more toward pop and instrumental music than Hikes’ epic, anthemic folk approach. It’s great to see two bands thinking along the same lines, but still produce songs that feel significantly divergent from one another. The live-music-going public’s response to these two bands has proved that there’s a market for even more diversity in Austin’s music community. I’m not surprised to find Raw Paw at the center of this movement, as they continue to display their prowess for cultivating interesting art, music, and writing. For more on Raw Paw, check out their site here.
All photographs © Bryan C. Parker & Pop Press International; all rights reserved. Click any image to open in slideshow viewer.
