Hipster Watch: Bigsound 2011

Hipsters love finding bands no one knows, yet are still good to listen to. Bigsound is Brisbane's answer to the South by Southwest festival. For a few days, the Valley is overrun by music everywhere you look. There's live music, there's workshops, there's speeches and it's basically everything you need to be in the music industry in one place. It sounds like the perfect place for a hipster to get the inside knowledge.

The best part for the average punters like you and me, apart from occasionally seeing a famous guest speaker, is the live music event. One ticket, for $55, gets you 80+ bands across multiple venues over 2 days. And the best part is, being a music convention, it's going to be the best of the up and coming bands in our country fighting for attention. No matter what, we, the punters, win. Check out the band list so far:

The Getaway Plan
Horrorshow
Calling All Cars
Emma Louise
Eagle & the Worm
Busby Marou
Trial Kennedy
Evil Eddie
Last Dinosaurs
Adalita
Big Scary
The Adults (feat. Shihad's Jon Toogood) (NZ)
The Sheepdogs (Canada)
Jonathan Boulet
DZ Deathrays
Bleeding Knees Club
Ball Park Music
The Medics
Avalanche City (NZ)
Stonefield
Jinja Safari
Owl Eyes
Boy In a Box
Damn Dogs (Feat. Chris & Mark from Jet)

Okay, granted, the Getaway Plan has been around as long as I've been going to gigs in Brisbane (if we forget when they broke up) but the rest is some of the best of Australia's new music. DZ Deathrays, The Medics, Calling All Cars, Jonathon Boulet, Ball Park Music and Trial Kennedy are getting me excited. I don't even know half of the bands there, but I'm sure it's going to be awesome.

If you want to find great new music before everyone else jumps on the bandwagon, head to this. Not to mention, it's great bloody value. It's happening September 7-9 at various venues around the Valley.

Hipster watch: OFWGKTA

I'm late on this hipster watch, which probably makes the band no longer a hipster band. The hipster mathematics confuses me, so we'll ignore it for now.

When you think of hipsters, you generally think of scrawny white kids listening to indie music, right? WRONG. Hipsters don't discriminate. There's plenty of hipsters of all races, including African-American. And because of this influence, hip-hop can make it into the hipster's playlist. No, none of that gangster rap crap (except for old school Dr Dre, ironically that makes the cut), they like their 'alternative' rap, which doesn't feature bitches, hoes or tricks normally.

And the hippest of the hippest hip-rap bands right now are Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All.

Look at the crowd in the picture above. They're white. And someone's wearing a Green Lantern hoodie. It's as hipster as you can get.

They're so hip, that they announced a run of shows in Sydney only. And they all sold out in seconds. Hipsters jumped on the bandwagon before the bandwagon had a chance to leave!

One thing that makes them even more appealing to hipsters is that every album is free. Yes, even you can jump on this bandwagon (legally) by going to their website and downloading their music.

Hidden away on that website we get a little nugget of gold. In their tour dates section it says

JUNE 4
THE ZOO - BRISBANE

My oh my! Looks like they're not only playing a run of Sydney dates. We can get our hipster on up here. I'll probably go, being a hipster and all, and their hip-hop is actually pretty good.

Edit: After a bit of research, this date is not confirmed. The Zoo is already booked that night. However, rumour has it it may be at the HiFi now... 18+ either way.

UPDATE: It's the HiFi. June 5.

Hipster watch: ArpLine

I've recently acknowledged the fact that yes, I am a hipster. Months of denial has seen me mock and criticise hipsters from afar, but like most bigotry, it was just hiding the fact that I identified with it.

(Thank you toothpaste for dinner. I bet you are as much of a hispter as me, the way you mock them)

So now that I've embraced the hipster in me, I'm taking off my ridiculously stupid sunglasses, replacing them with my thick-rimmed reading glasses and I've decided I'll start a new occassionally recurring segment of my blog: Hipster Watch. The idea of this segment will be to try and beat the hipster bandwagon to things. Because let's face it, it's no longer hip when more than 10 people know about it.

The first hipster band is ArpLine.

Arpline "Make It Rain" Nutroaster Studio from VVUSIC on Vimeo.

Let's go through the hipster checklist:

• Synthesizer - check
• From Brooklyn - check (for anyone who's never been there, right now it's as hip as hip gets)
• Ridiculous haircut - check (see the lead singer in the video)
• Plaid - check (lead singer, once again)
• Distorted/changed vocals - check
• Electronica/genre defying mixes - check

Before you've even properly listened to their music, you can just tell straight away they're hipsters.

So what do you need to know about them? Mainly that they're like Animal Collective (the original hipsters' hipster band) but with less weird-ass sounds and more melody. They put out an album last year, entitled Travel Book, and it seems that we're about to get some Australian distro for it. So stay tuned, there will probably be a tour soon where all of the hipsters can stand around, talking and pretending not to enjoy the show at all.

If you want to be more hip than most hipsters by listening to ArpLine, you can grab a free MP3 of their new single Fold Up Like A Piece of Paper right here. You can also go to their website to grab more free MP3s, including covers of bands that we don't know (because that's hip).