Music

M. Ward performs Friday (Mark C. Austin) Be on the lookout in the coming hour or two for a slideshow compiling the best of our ACL photo team’s work from the first couple days. For now, enjoy more work from festival photographer extraordinaire Mark C. Austin. Read more here…..

Rhett Miller’s pants take the band’s “train wreck” motif to a whole new level (Dawn Jones-Garcia) It just wouldn’t be a Texas music festival without these guys. Check out more shots from our photographer on the scene after the jump, then, in case you missed it, read Jesse Hughey’s take…

Jenny Lewis (Mark C. Austin) Blondes have more fun. Brunettes can read. Redheads, they sing. Friday afternoon of ACL saw two such enflamed songbirds. Sunday will feature two more, but until then… Local chanteuse Patty Griffin whipped up the fest’s first recorded breeze with opener “Heavenly Day,” from last year’s…

Sharon Jones (L.A. Reno) To be honest, I thought today was going to suck, but it’s been the exact opposite. After some ridonkulous partying last night at Heartless Bastards’ ear-splitting basement blues party – hey, it was my first time at Emo’s in six months – I set a new…

The last time I saw the Old 97’s was at The Argo in Denton sometime in the last century. A gutter-punk couple was square dancing, which felt perfectly appropriate to the twangy yet gritty music that night. As the group got poppier and poppier with each subsequent release, they gradually…

They may live around the corner. They may come from a tiny town in the Midwest. They may live out in East Dallas where he coaches Little League while she designs baby clothes. But more than likely though, they live inside an dry ice block on the planet WTF?! surrounded…

“I don’t give a fuck if you’re a Democrat or Republican, just vote,” Pharrell urged. Onstage and off, current events seem to be looming over ACL far more than any other festival I’ve been to. Bukue One, rocking a red Obama T-shirt, urged everyone to vote, Democrat or Republican. Hundreds…

Delta Spirit (Mark C. Austin) So far for me, ACL has been all about dilemmas. They’re the good kind of conflicts, though, like whether to see N.E.R.D. or David Byrne; Gnarls Barkley or Raconteurs; John Fogerty or blow my head off. But those kind of difficult decisions come with the…

(Dawn Jones-Garcia) A few more looks around the crowd at ACL, with this fall’s hottest fashion trend after the jump…

Morning. We’ll have more reports from last night’s ACL Fest shows up in a little bit, but for now here’s some quick video from Craig Hlavaty of a dude dancing during Gogol Bordello’s set. The straw hat. The fancy water pouch. The khaki shorts. It’s all kind of mesmerizing, really…

Manu Chao (L.A. Reno) A treacherous wifi failure in Austin’s Zilker Park (somewhere near bad Red Rope licorice in the pantheon of festival disasters) kept the posting slow yesterday, but here’s hoping for clear signals ahead on day 2. As Saturday morning rises over the hill country, we give you…

The crowd may be where it’s at, when it comes to giant novelty cowboy hats, hula hoop circles and Lone Star tall boys. But ACL kicked off Friday with a respectable start to its all-star lineup. Gogol Bordello (Dawn Jones-Garcia) More from Observer photographer Dawn Jones-Garcia after the jump…

As the first night of ACL rolls on, a few more sightings from the festival crowds: He was from Scotland. Oddly enough. I was totally waiting to toss off some “Duh-Duh, what a loser” caption thing, but his being Scottish humbled me. Those guys are like Texans with brass balls…

Bobby Bare Jr (Chris Gray) Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for Austin City Limits to put acoustic singer-songwriter M. Ward a few hundred yards away from boisterous gypsy-punks Gogol Bordello in the WaMu tent. (On a side not, I guess this year is the WaMu tent’s last ACL…

I think ACL has managed to squeeze all its country between noon and 3 p.m. today. Luckily Sunny Sweeney, a Longview native now based out of Austin, was part of it. Sweeney, a former improv comedienne, has a winning stage presence and a wicked way with a lyric. After the…

Of course, a humongous outdoor festival like ACL is as much about the parade of sweat-soaked, under-dressed humanity as it is about the bands. With that in mind, here’s just a brief look around Austin’s Zilker Park this afternoon. This guy wanted me to chug my Lone Star tall boy…

Paula Nelson (Chris Gray) The hordes of shirtless (or soon-to-be shirtless) camp-chair toters are streaming into Zilker Park, and the Rocks Off team is up and running. Us media types got a nice surprise this afternoon; there’s a separate entrance from the rest of the behind-the-scenes goings-on this year. The…

It’s beginning to look a lot like Austin. (Mark C. Austin) ACL has just kicked off (let me hear it, Dan Dyer fans!), and we wanted to drop yet another hint that DC9 is the place to keep your browser parked, and refreshed, all weekend. With a team of DC9…

Before we delve into this weekend’s show options, a bit of a programming note: I’ll be out of the office tomorrow, and Jesse Hughey will be en route/just starting to set up shop in Austin at this year’s ACL Fest where he, along with a couple of our photographers and…

…and the Clint Childers-directed video actually a pretty compelling watch. And deservedly so, given that it’s a pretty nice song from the Fort Worth boys. Catch The Cut*Off perform with THe BAcksliders tomorrow night at The Fairmount in Fort Worth. –Pete Freedman…