While they get plenty of hype, people seem to find a lot of reasons to dismiss Wavves—the grungy California garage outfit led by Nathan Williams—portraying them as drunken louts whose rapid rise to notoriety must

On this week's music-themed episode of The Disclaimer, WMSE's near-weekly crosstalk between station promotions director Ryan Schleicher, A.V. Club Milwaukee editor Matt Wild and I, we discuss a recent OnMilwaukee.com opinion piece encouraging bands to resist playing free shows for "exposure." Do these non-paid gigs really devalue an artists' work, or are they just another part of the dues-paying p...

It was only two or three years ago that Milwaukee musicians were flocking to Austin’s SXSW music festival in droves, if not in hopes of capturing a little bit of press or industry excitement then at least for the experience of playing a few memorable shows. For a time, more than a dozen Milwaukee acts were playing the festival each year, some in an official capacity at SXSW’s showcase shows, m...

It's not entirely clear what the annual South By Southwest music festival accomplishes anymore. Once an industry shindig where buzz bands played in hopes of landing a record deal, the four-day event (10 days, counting the film and interactive...

Austin is well situated as the site for one of the world's most important music festivals. The weather is warm, the students are numerous and PBS's "Austin City Limits" called attention to its thriving outlaw country scene. But the South By Southwest festival had no assurances of success in its early years. As recounted...

The record number of Milwaukee bands that made the 1,200-mile trek to Austin, Texas, for this year’s South by Southwest Music and Media Conference & Festival (SXSW) made our city proud with their enthusiasm and compelling performances. More than a dozen Milwaukee bands played in or around the Texas-sized festival that is one of the largest and most prestigious of its kind, with 1,900 official acts from 55...

Although attendance was up at this year's South by Southwest music conference, ticket sales were down...

The worst thing about South By Southwest is seeing so many bands get eaten alive on stage. For every sleeper group that plays to a huge, adoring crowd, there�s two playing to mostly empty rooms. It�s a common trap, but one that Milwaukee�s Codebreaker easily avoided, since they brought along something to Austin that most bands don�t: fans. Seven or eight of the band�s friends followed the ...

Though booked at an unglamorous 7 p.m. SXSW slot, the Collections of Colonies of Bees sister band All Tiny Creatures nonetheless played their amorphous, digitalized instrumentals to a full room. The band is on to something good. Instumental post-rock seems to be a real growth industry right now, as the brainier, more open-minded faction of the jam scene has warmed to acts like Tortoise and Expl...

"You'll find it takes a lot of patience to be a Des Ark fan," Aimee Argote apologized as she buried her head in her guitar, tightening its strings just right. With each Des Ark song in its own peculiar tuning, Argote spent much of her band's set this way. Where most bands at SXSW aimed to dazzle, Des Ark lacked any semblance of showmanship, their casualness testifying to their preference for house...