Watching Wild Flag set up for their show at MOG’s Lexus-sponsored SXSW showcase, you might think that a group of demure ladies were about to follow up Smith Westerns’ set with similarly sunny pop. You would be in for a shock. Luckily I had caught a fiery set from the all-girl supergroup earlier in the week and braced myself. Earplugs in, I pressed up in the front row, eager to see them tear it up again.
And tear it up they did. Jumping around the stage, Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony looked possessed on guitar, while Brownstein’s fellow Sleater-Kinney alumna Janet Weiss cracked the beat out from the back kit. It was the band's seventh show of the festival, but they lacked neither energy nor enthusiasm. “Glass Tambourine” was a highlight, but the real treat was seeing these ladies return to doing what they love. More than most bands at SXSW, this quartet knows how to own a stage, and they know that they know it – a confusing sentence to describe some of the festival’s most straightforward rock and roll.
